Evolution of Emotional Medicine
I was measuring antibodies in chimpanzee saliva in 1996, and here I am thirty years later still asking the same question.
My career started with chimpanzees. In 1996, I studied how humour affects immune function in primates, measuring salivary IgA responses to mirthful stimuli. In 2001, I extended this to human breast milk, showing that emotional states alter passive immunity. These were early experiments in a question I have never stopped asking: how do subjective experiences change physiology?
Psychedelic medicine is the most direct clinical application of this question. Ketamine and psilocybin create profound shifts in consciousness that correlate with lasting changes in mood, behaviour, and neural connectivity. In 2020, Bjorn Grinde and I proposed a global workspace model for how psychedelics affect consciousness, connecting evolutionary psychology to clinical pharmacology.
This talk traces the thread from primate neuroscience through emergency medicine to psychedelic therapy, arguing that the field's future depends on taking subjective experience as seriously as we take receptor pharmacology.