Can Psychedelics Help Unlock Solutions to Global Crises?

The Jack Hills in Western Australia are home to the oldest known terrestrial material on Earth: tiny, practically indestructible zircon crystals that formed around 4.4 billion years ago. Embedded in fragments of ancient continental crust, these minerals have survived countless cycles of sedimentary rock formation and erosion. Scientists use them to trace the origin of life, and it turns out the right conditions may have been present 500 million years earlier than previously thought: on land, not in hydrothermal vents under the ocean, as previously believed. These little crystals — like living memories of the past — are the singular record scientists have of Earth’s first 500 million years. Earth’s first steps. Imagine holding these little crystals in your hand. Imagine standing on the edge of a scarlet canyon, feeling 4 billion years in your bones. Imagine your body dissolving into the space around you. 

For astrobiologist Bruce Damer, the easiest way to understand the past — and to process the unthinkably long history of the Earth — isn’t to imagine it, but to become it. Over the past fifteen years working with his colleague David Deamer at UC Santa Cruz, he has grappled with the question of the origin of life. Something about the ocean floor theory didn’t quite sit right. Then, during an ayahuasca ceremony in Peru in 2013, he plunged straight into a hydrothermal pool at the beginning of time and became a protocell — as one does. It was out of this journey that Damer had a sudden insight: perhaps it all began in the bed of a hot spring, where the chemical conditions for life were just right. 

“Getting into that pool,” he said, “you become fully embodied; you are what is happening.” After his trip, he quickly sketched up a solution to the problem he had seen in the visionary pool, converted it into a scientific hypothesis with Deamer, and the duo put it to the test by attempting to grow protocells in the wild in bubbling volcanic hot springs in New Zealand. They published their findings, which gained widespread attention after being featured in a 2017 Scientific American cover story. The earlier discovery of zircon crystals and new Australian finds of rocks with evidence of life thriving in hot springs 3.5 billion years ago, all added up to a radically rethought picture of where and how life began on Earth and perhaps where it might be found elsewhere in the universe.

Perhaps even more remarkable than his insight about the origins of life was the insight that he was one of many experts over the past few decades who had solved seemingly unsolvable problems in this way — either through psychedelics or thought experiments in which they “became the problem.” For instance, when Einstein was a young man, he would sometimes arrive at solutions by imagining riding alongside a beam of light or being a man in a falling elevator. “It’s through that embodiment, or perspectivism, that he came up with a lot of his great insights,” Damer says. In 1983, the Nobel Prize-winning biochemist Kary Mullis invented polymerase chain reaction (PCR), a now-indispensable technique for rapidly producing millions of copies of DNA, by dancing with molecules on a long drive from Berkeley to Anderson Valley: “DNA chains coiled and floated. Lurid blue and pink images of electric molecules injected themselves somewhere between the mountain road and my eyes.” The insights emerged during an acid-laced phase of his life. “What if I had not taken LSD ever?” he later mused. “Would I have still invented PCR? I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.” In the 90s, Steve Jobs would drop acid in a wheatfield in Sunnyvale, California, and famously quip, after many subsequent journeys and inspired product designs, “LSD shows you that there’s another side to the coin, and you can’t remember it when it wears off, but you know it.” 

For a while, in the ‘60s, people studied these so-called “solutioneers” who had insights on psychedelics and suddenly understood the problems they were trying to solve. In a seminal paper on the topic by Willis Harman and Jim Fadiman, one subject reported an “ability to grasp the problem in its entirety, to 'dive' into it without reservations, almost like becoming the problem” and “awareness of the problem itself rather than the 'I' that is trying to solve it.” Another participant “spent a productive period… climbing down [their] retina, walking around and thinking about certain problems relating to the mechanism of vision.” Other descriptions related to the creative process itself: “I got the feeling that creativity is an active process in which you limit yourself and have an objective, so there is a focus about which ideas can cluster and relate” and “the sense of the problem as a living thing that is growing toward its inherent solution.”

But, in the late ‘60s, just as psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond was hoping to fund further studies on the topic through the Ford Foundation, Harman, Fadiman, and colleagues received a cease and desist letter in mid-1966, just as they were publishing the compelling findings from their pilot study. This shut down all research for decades. Solutioneer studies were largely abandoned for half a century, even as a few modern studies on psychedelics and creativity cropped up here and there as the psychedelic renaissance kicked in. In 2025, however, it finally appears to be the right time to revive it. 

Damer, along with entrepreneur Ford Smith and non-profit veteran Sylvia Rzepniewski, has teamed up to form the Center for Multidisciplinary Investigation into Novel Discoveries and Solutions (MINDS), a nonprofit organization “advancing research into tools and practices that catalyze breakthrough insights and innovation to help humanity solve its most pressing challenges.” In January, they announced their first grant support for a groundbreaking research project on psychedelics and creativity at the Charmaine & Gordon McGill Center for Psychedelic Research & Therapy (MCRPT) at Dell Medical School at The University of Texas at Austin.

“When [the FDA ruling] came,” Damer says, referring to MAPS’ application to legalize MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD last August, “we felt in a sense the burden and the duty to present other useful applications for psychedelic practice, beyond therapeutics, to push the lever a bit. Wellness is very important, but there are other benefits [it can bring] to society. That’s a major driver behind MINDS.” 

Could it be that psychedelics will help us find solutions to the problems we face surrounding climate change, poverty, inequality, healthcare, infectious disease, war, and artificial intelligence? If so, under what conditions? Psychedelics don’t always lead to useful insights, so what is happening in the brain, body, and environment when they do?   

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