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

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. 

Dr Manesh Girn is Co-Founder and CEO of Five Discovery, Scientific Director of The Center for MINDS, and creator of the psychedelic educational platform The Psychedelic Scientist. 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 oneirogen: often reportedly experienced as a dream-generator that produces a "cinematic narrative" life review. 

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.

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. 

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 significance, the spiritual, the metaphysical” dimensions that Bwiti traditions have held for generations.

The conversation closes with Dr Girn’s conviction that the psychedelic field will need to “get more granular” in its approach to different compounds as it matures; an appropriate intention with which to approach the upcoming Iboga Leadership Summit where the known neurobiological and psychological properties of Iboga will be explored in relationship to their interplay with its original Bwiti context. 

The Iboga Leadership Summit is hosted by Moughenda and the Bwiti community in Gabon, for physicians, pharmacists and providers, neuroscience researchers, farmers and agricultural technicians, students and community leaders, lawyers, policymakers and environmentalists. And everybody called to Bwiti, Ibogaine and Iboga.

On 22-28 June, in Libreville, Gabon

Details and tickets: 

www.ibogaleadershipsummit.com