#12 — Crumbling Habits and Restructuring Your Story Through Experience with Dr Manesh Girn

<p>In Episode 12 of the Iboga Leadership Summit podcast, host Ros Stone speaks with neuroscientist and psychedelic researcher Dr Manesh Girn for a conversation about the (psychedelic) nature of creativity; how plant medicines that are the subject of research can influence its design; the kinds of considerations that relatedly come into play when it comes to approaching the medicalisation of Iboga-ine; how the Iboga-ine experience differs from psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin and the implications this has when it comes to addiction-interruption and habit formation. </p><p></p><p>Dr Manesh Girn is Co-Founder and CEO of Five Discovery, Scientific Director of <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://centerforminds.org/" target="_blank">The Center for MINDS</a>, and creator of the psychedelic educational platform <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.youtube.com/c/thepsychedelicscientist" target="_blank"><i>The Psychedelic Scientist</i></a>. He opens by making a case for greater precision in how we talk about different substances: Iboga-ine "has very low affinity” for the serotonin 2A receptor that “defines classic psychedelics”. His preferred descriptor for Iboga-ine is <i>oneirogen</i>: often reportedly experienced as a dream-generator that produces a "cinematic narrative" life review. </p><p></p><p>Where classic psychedelics may induce plasticity in regions related to "our self-model, our narrative, our conception of the world," Iboga-ine appears to act more powerfully on the reward system and basal ganglia; the circuits that govern habitual behaviour and addictive impulse.</p><p></p><p>The result, Dr Girn suggests, is that ibogaine can "rewrite that script and recalibrate the system" at a motivational level, while the self-re-narrativising process simultaneously works on "a higher level interpretive meaning-making layer,” allowing a person to change not just their inclinations, but their felt-sense of how these relate to their story. </p><p></p><p>The dexterity with which Dr Girn unpacks “tricky dance” that involves the many nuanced considerations related to the medicalisation of Iboga-ine befit the complexity of this topic. He carefully holds reflections on the unsuitability of ceremonial framing for certain treatment candidates together with considerations around how conceptualising Iboga-ine as purely an addiction treatment is “a total minimization of the full potential of it” which risks stripping away “the cosmological