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Bruce Damer has been tripping since he was child—no substances needed. But discovering psychedelics unlocked another level of vision, eventually leading him to a breakthrough insight that shook the scientific community. Now through the Center for MINDS, he's taking psychedelic research in a whole new direction.

We asked Bruce about the story behind his origin of life hypothesis, why he believes we're entering a fourth wave of psychedelic research, and what role human creativity might play in our increasingly AI-powered future.

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What led you to co-found the Center for MINDS? What personal life experiences inspired you?

Growing up in the 1960s, I was a strange, imaginative kid who lived in his own internal worlds. By age nine, I began to experience amazing color patterns and fractal washes when I closed my eyes at night—what psychologists call hypnagogia. I learned to tune these visuals by turning down the knobs of my consciousness (no thinking, only watching). I drew these landscapes and machines as I cultivated this ability to inhabit imaginal spaces. This capacity served me incredibly well writing code for early PCs. I could become the code, or surf it like a living thing. This led me to pioneer graphical user interfaces in the 80s and multi-user 'avatar' virtual worlds in the 90s, eventually working with NASA to design spacecraft and simulate missions.

Everything changed when I met Terence McKenna. He was fascinated by my work with virtual worlds since he talked about "invisible landscapes made of language." We struck up a partnership: I'd introduce him to cyberspace, and he'd introduce me to hyperspace. That's how a substantial sack of psilocybin mushrooms ended up on my doorstep in early '99. This launched me from what I call "endotripping" (internally generated visionary states) into "exotripping" with psychedelics. Over the next decade, I explored extensively but maintained a mental firewall to protect my endotripping machinery. That firewall came down one night in the Peruvian Amazon in 2013 when endotripping finally intertwined with exotripping.

The catalyst for MINDS came in 2022 when I finally "came out" as a psychedelic scientist in a talk called "It's High Time for Science" at Dennis McKenna's ESPD conference. I shared how ayahuasca had helped me develop major insights into the origin of life—work that led to multiple published papers and a paradigm shift in the field. At a party in Austin, my wife Kathryn and I met Ford Smith and Sylvia Rzepniewski from Ultranative, a psychedelic venture firm. When I shared the backstory of my discovery, Ford lit up. He'd just heard from Tim Ferriss about another person who'd had a breakthrough physics insight on 5-MeO-DMT. After a year of conversation, they decided to incubate their first nonprofit, and MINDS, or Multidisciplinary Investigation into Novel Discoveries and Solutions, was born.

Can you tell us more about your origin of life hypothesis? How did the pivotal insight come to you, and how did you land it into something the scientific community would accept and invest in?

In October 2013 in the Peruvian Amazon on a low dose of ayahuasca, I went from healing personal trauma to receiving profound scientific insights. After realizing the impact of my being adopted at birth, I was able to pose a question about the birth of us all—the origin of life itself. Together with what I call the "magisterium of Madre ayahuasca," we took this metaphorical rocket ride back four billion years to volcanic hot springs on the early Earth where my colleague David Deamer and I believed life might have begun—not in the deep ocean as was the predominant view.

Through what David Luke calls "psychedelic perspectivism," I became the first protocell—a self-assembled lipid sac containing polymers. My visionary journey deposited me into a volcanic hot spring pool filled with these protocells. I watched as one particularly well-endowed protocell filled with glowing primitive polymers attempted to divide. In a moment announced by a scream, I witnessed the splitting off of a sac with a black and dead interior, while the originating protocell (me) seemed suddenly more alive. For months I worked on decrypting this scene until it hit me: death wrote the code of life. Only through attempting division and producing stillborn offspring could the code be written that would allow successful cellular reproduction.

The insight fully landed during an endotrip in late 2013 as what we call the "coupled phases cycle"—protocells budding off, going into solution, surviving or not based on their encapsulated polymers, then drying back down and fusing again. Life would emerge in populations of aggregated protocells, each nurtured in a sharing network. So attempts at division would not lead to fatal dissolution as it would for isolated protocells. Life began as a communal unit, a network boot.

I rushed upstairs, drew it all out, and sent it to Dave Deamer. He wrote back saying "You found it! You found the kinetic trap," which in chemistry is where something gets more complex faster than it breaks down. We published our first paper about a year later. Scientific American featured the work on its cover in August 2017, and in 2020 we published our magnum opus on the hot spring hypothesis for the origin of life. When Australian colleagues discovered 3.5-billion-year-old hot spring deposits containing clear signs of microbial communities, it provided additional validation and fossil evidence for our hypothesis. NASA has even started to factor our work into where to land rovers on Mars in the search for life there. This wasn't just a psychedelic fantasy; it was a genuine scientific breakthrough that helped shift a scientific paradigm.

You talk about catalyzing a 'fourth wave' of psychedelic research focused on creativity and problem-solving. How is this different from previous waves?

The first wave was really about spirituality and communitas. With indigenous practices and even into the 60s, it was all about cultural and community healing. The second wave focused on self-discovery and personal exploration, like Jerry Garcia figuring out how to play guitar on acid and creating an entirely new genre. The third wave, which has made huge strides since the early 2000s, is focused on therapeutic applications especially in healing individual trauma.

This fourth wave we're entering is about insight beyond healing, or what Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley called "outsight" back in the 50s. After Huxley's first mescaline trip in 1953, they recorded in letters that psychedelics could provide insight into the self, but also outsight into new ways of thinking about the world. What's fascinating is that even in the healing context, it's often an insight that catalyzes transformation. There's a beautiful connection where energy released from internal work can be channeled into constructive action, powering our futures.

But studying creativity and insight requires completely new scientific approaches. As Robin Carhart-Harris told us, you can't just reduce creativity to variables and alternate-use questions while somebody's in a scanner. Creativity only arises in its native ecosystem. That's why we're bringing together thinkers from across fields to design entirely new ways of investigating these phenomena.

Your first study with MINDS is examining how psilocybin affects creative problem-solving. Why start there, and what are you hoping to learn?

We started with this study because we met Manoj Doss, who was working on a fascinating model around episodic memory. The basic idea is that when we're always going back to the same memories, we get stuck in a convergent mode of thinking. But if there's an impairment of that constant return to the same thought patterns, other ideas can come in. You get increased fluency around things that are usually in your peripheral vision.

This connects beautifully with Robin Carhart-Harris's work on the anarchic brain and that famous diagram showing all the neural nodes lighting up and connecting. Manoj's FLUX model looks specifically at how this fluency might work, going from convergent access to episodic memory toward a more divergent, fluid way of accessing and associating ideas.

The fact that Greg Fonzo and the leadership at UT Austin were willing to propose this project was perfect for our nascent Center for MINDS. They're a hometown team with all the DEA licenses and infrastructure already set up. Our co-founder Ford had played an instrumental role in getting their Center for Psychedelic Research and Therapy started, so it just felt like the right place to launch this landmark study, which we hope will be the most targeted exploration of psychedelics and creativity to date.

Given the rapid advancement of AI, have the stakes increased or decreased? What role do you see human creativity playing in a future enabled by such powerful technology?

I see AI as a psychedelic ramification of computing space. It's this divergent thinking machine that fits our expanded mindstate almost perfectly. Just like when humans invented the hand axe and our tribal world was reshaped by it, our minds will be recrafted by AI. When I use these tools, I experience them as very psychedelic and "endotrippy" in nature. I can feel my consciousness stretched into new possibilities.

What's also really exciting is how AI can accelerate the validation of psychedelically-catalyzed insights. When I have a visionary download about something like the origin of life, I can throw it at AI which then tests it against all existing literature, getting me to the front edge of knowledge faster. Sometimes AI even comes back and asks, "Have you thought of this?". AI will never manifest a novel discovery itself even if chance unique associations appear in its replies because discovery demands recognition and nurturing, which only humans can provide.

Just like with psychedelics though, we have to use our discernment. We can't follow everything that comes to us in a psychedelic trip, and we can't trust everything AI suggests. But I think this partnership between human creativity and AI will actually lead to wiser humans. Yes, some people will get lost in conspiracy theories and nonsense, but AI also allows us to quickly fact-check and develop mastery in areas much more rapidly than ever before. It's human evolution at play. We invent a tool, and it reinvents us.

Want more from Bruce?

Explore the Center for MINDS' insights database, subscribe to their newsletter for updates, and take their survey to help guide current and future research.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.