The Secret Life of the Mind

by Mariano Sigman

  The consciousness of Mr X

  Carl Sagan, the author of Cosmos and one of the most extraordinary popular science writers ever, smoked marijuana for the first time when he was already an acclaimed scientist.* As usually happens, his first experience was a fiasco, and Sagan, a battle-hardened sceptic, came up with all sorts of hypotheses about the drug’s placebo effects. However, according to Mr X–his cannabic alter ego–after a few more attempts, the drug took effect:

  I viewed a candle flame and discovered in the heart of the flame, standing with magnificent indifference, the black-hatted and -cloaked Spanish gentleman […]. Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.

  In Mr X’s account, he didn’t confuse this manipulation of his perception with reality, exactly like in a lucid dream:

  I want to explain that at no time did I think these things ‘really’ were out there. I knew there was no Volkswagen on the ceiling and there was no Sandeman salamander man in the flame. I don’t feel any contradiction in these experiences. There’s a part of me making, creating the perceptions which in everyday life would be bizarre; there’s another part of me which is a kind of observer. About half of the pleasure comes from the observer-part appreciating the work of the creator-part.

  His change in perception from cannabis was not exclusive to the realm of images. In fact, the most substantial modification was probably to his auditory perception.

  For the first time I have been able to hear the separate parts of a three-part harmony and the richness of the counterpoint. I have since discovered that professional musicians can quite easily keep many separate parts going simultaneously in their heads, but this was the first time for me.

  Mr X was also convinced that the ideas which seemed brilliant under the effects of cannabis were truly brilliant. Sagan tells of how, in fact, part of the more laborious and methodical work he did in his life was ordering those ideas, recording them on tape or in writing–at the cost of losing many other ideas–and that the next day, when the effects of the marijuana had passed, the ideas had not only not lost their appeal but cemented a large part of his career.

  A neuroscientist colleague and friend of mine–let’s call him Mr Y–carried out an informal and personal project inspired by Carl Sagan’s account. The experiment consisted in observing, while high on marijuana, an image that vanished very quickly. Then he had to indicate what was in different fragments of the image and the vividness with which he remembered it.

  Without smoking he was able to recall a small fraction of the image, due to the narrowness of consciousness. But high, Mr Y believed he remembered it all with great clarity and had the sensation that he was discovering something extraordinary and singular. He felt like he was in Huxley’s head, opening the doors of perception.

  When the experiment was over, he anxiously but carefully analysed the data to discover that actually he had seen exactly the same thing after smoking as he had before. Exactly the same thing. It was the subjective landscape, how he felt the details of the image, that changed. Like Sagan, he felt a certain brilliance in his perception during the cannabic state, the same feeling that makes us overestimate the funniness of a joke or the originality of an idea.

  This experiment and Sagan’s coincide in the subjective richness of the cannabic state but differ in whether it is genuine or a figment of the imagination. Settling between these two alternatives turns out to be impossible because, unlike the rest of the experiments described in this book, these ones lack the necessary scientific rigour to be able to draw firm conclusions. This is mostly because of how hard it is to experiment with cannabis in a rigorous way.

  One of the most informative studies on how the brain reorganizes as a consequence of extended cannabis use was published in Brain, one of neuroscience’s most prestigious magazines. The attention and concentration abilities of frequent chronic smokers–on average, they’d smoked more than 2,000 joints–were studied and compared to people who had never smoked marijuana. In this case, attention was measured by seeing how many points they were able to follow at the same time, without mixing them in their minds and without losing track of which was which. In other words, a mental juggling exercise. The result of the study was that smokers and non-smokers have a very similar attention capacity and resolve the problem with more or less the same skill. Therefore, the first conclusion was that cannabis users, on average, do not lose or gain in their ability to pay attention and concentrate.

  The most interesting finding was that, despite this similarity in their performance, the cerebral activity of each of the two groups is very different. Cannabis users activate less their frontal cortex–which regulates mental effort–and their parietal, while activating more their occipital cortex–the territory of the visual system that functions like the brain’s blackboard. The change in cerebral activity between those who smoke and those who don’t–more occipital activity, less frontal–is similar to what’s observed when comparing the cerebral activity of great chess masters and novices while they play. The chess masters activate the occipital cortex more and the frontal less, as if they were seeing the moves instead of calculating them.

  This result has two possible interpretations. One is that those who smoke marijuana activate the frontal cortex less because they don’t need to use so much effort to resolve the problem, like the chess master playing someone easy to beat. The other possibility is that their attention system is compromised and they use their visual cortex more to remedy and compensate for this lack. The difference is subtle but opportune. Studying it carefully could allow us to separate the risks from the benefits and understand how they balance each other out in a mental state that is not necessarily better or worse than the normal, just different.

  The lysergic repertoire

  Ayahuasca is the most celebrated potion in the Amazonic world. It is served as a tea prepared with a mix of two plants, the Psychotria viridis bush and the Banisteriopsis caapi vine. Actually there are different formulas, but they all include these two plants with neuropharmacologically complementary roles. The bush is rich in N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, better known as DMT. The vine has a monoamine oxidase inhibitor (MAOI), one of the most commonly used antidepressants.

  There is a synergy between these two drugs that make up ayahuasca. The DMT modifies the neurotransmitter balance. In normal situations, monoamine oxidase, like the brain’s chemical police, would resolve this imbalance. But here it interacts with the MAOI of the vine, which inhibits the brain’s ability to regulate its neurotransmitter balance. So, in the dosage used in ayahuasca, the psychedelic effect of the DMT is low, but its combination with the vine makes it stronger. Ayahuasca radically changes perception and induces severe transformations in the pleasure and motivation systems. Of course, it also alters the flow, organization and anchor of consciousness.

  Of all the perceptive changes ayahuasca produces, the most extraordinary are very vivid hallucinations called mirações (visions). They are highly visual constructions built by the imagination. Under the effects of ayahuasca, the imagination has the same resolution as vision. How does this materialize in the brain?

  Draulio Araujo, a Brazilian physicist accustomed to trekking through jungles and wetlands, did a unique experiment that syncretized ancestral traditions of the Amazon region and the most sophisticated technological development. Draulio brought shamans, experts in using the potion, to the modern, aseptic rooms of the hospitals in Riberão Preto so they could take the drug and then enter into the resonator to give their visions full rein.

  There, in the intimacy of the resonator, the expert shamans hallucinated and then reported on the intensity and vibrancy of their hallucinations. They later repeated the experiment without the effects of the drug, when the imagination is expressed in a much more subdued way.

  When we see an image, information travels from the eyes to the thalamus, then to the v
isual cortex and from there to the formation of memories and the frontal cortex. With ayahuasca, the visual cortex is fed not by the eyes but by the inner world. It is this reversal of the flow of information that underlies the hallucinations. During a psychedelic hallucination, the circuit begins in the prefrontal cortex and from there feeds off the memory to flow backwards to the visual cortex. The chemical transformation of the brain results–through mechanisms we have yet to discover–in a projection of the memory on the visual cortex, as if reconstructing the sensory experience that gave rise to those memories. In effect, on ayahuasca, the visual cortex activates with practically the same intensity when seeing something as when imagining it, and that gives the imagination more realism. Without the drug, the visual cortex activates much more when seeing than when imagining.

  Ayahuasca also activates the Brodmann Area 10, which forms a bridge between the external world–that of perception–and the inner world–that of the imagination. This explains an idiosyncratic aspect of the effects it produces. Commonly, those who take ayahuasca feel that their bodies are transforming; they literally feel that they are outside their own bodies. The border between the outer world and the inner world becomes more fuzzy and faint.

  Hoffman’s dream

  In 1956, Roger Heim, director of the National Museum of Natural History in Paris, made an expedition to Huautla de Jiménez, Mexico, with Robert Wasson to identify and collect mushrooms used in the healing and religious rites of the Mazatecs. When he returned to Paris, Heim contacted the Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman to help him identify the chemistry of the sacred mushrooms. Hoffman was the ideal candidate for this task. Ten years earlier, after accidentally ingesting 250 micrograms of a lysergic acid he had just synthesized in his lab, he had the first acid trip in human history while riding home on his bike.

  While Hoffman was figuring out that the magic molecule in the mushrooms was psilocybin, Wasson published an article in Life magazine entitled ‘Seeking the Magic Mushroom’, in which he gave an account of his trips to the Mexican desert with Heim. The article was a hit, and psilocybin ceased to just be a Mazatec object of worship and became a massive icon of Western culture in the sixties.

  Lysergic culture would have a great impact on the Beat Generation of intellectuals such as Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, who founded a movement that sought to radically change aspects of culture and human thought. Timothy Leary, with his Harvard Psilocybin Project, accompanied the lysergic generation by heading a scientific exploration of the transformative effects of psilocybin.

  The three men who were at the origins of the science of psilocybin had central roles in science, economics, politics and culture. Wasson was vice-president of JP Morgan; Heim was decorated with the title of High Official of the Legion of Honour among other important French titles, and Hoffman was a senior executive at Sandoz, one of the top pharmaceutical companies, and a member of the Nobel Prize committee. However, in a certain sense, at least from the perspective of their extremely ambitious founding objective, the lysergic generation was a failure.

  The spike of enthusiasm of a decade of research was followed by almost half a century of lethargy, in which psilocybin almost completely disappeared from scientific exploration, or at least was very marginalized. In the last few decades, curiosities of the mind were considered acceptable if they stemmed from dreams or peculiar brains, but the pharmacological exploration of the fauna and diversity of the mind came almost to a complete halt. However, this is changing. And this is to a great extent the consequence of a heated debate about drugs, politics, psychiatry and science that has taken place in Britain over the last ten years.

  It begun when David Nutt, then in Bristol and now a Neuropsycho-pharmacology professor at Imperial College, London, was appointed in 2008 chairman of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs. From this position of great prestige and responsibility, Nutt begun a quite ferocious discussion with government officers about the criteria used to assess harm and dictate policies of drug use and abuse.

  He championed the views that (1) drug legislation has to be set based on the best evidence we have available to determine the harm they cause, and (2) avoiding all-or-none arguments of harm in drugs and shifting instead to a more quantitative argumentation of the extent, scale and type of harm. To this end he conceived a taxonomy of several parameters which measure different dimensions of the negative consequences of a drug: physical harm, dependence, social harm … On the basis of this classification, he and his colleagues came to the conclusion that some legal drugs, like alcohol or tobacco, are more harmful than some illegal drugs like LSD, ecstasy or cannabis. The specific case of cannabis led to a big public and political confrontation when the government, ignoring these recommendations, changed its status from Class C to Class B (which implies that it is classified as a drug with greater risks that needs to be controlled more severely). On the public media and in the scientific and medical journals, Nutt argued that this decision was only politically motivated and was against scientific and evidence-based argumentations.

  In a very celebrated and controversial article Nutt made his point of comparing the real danger of drugs to other domains of life in which we accept taking some degree of informed risk to seek pleasure. Nutt quantified the risk (in terms of physical harm, its addiction, how it distracts from work and can put a family in economic danger …) of equasy. After showing that the risks of this new drug were comparable to those of ecstasy, Nutt revealed the secret of the overlooked addiction of equasy: it was simply horse riding.

  After all these heated discussions, in a very controversial decision, Nutt was dismissed from his position in the council by the Home Secretary. Since then Nutt has continued his effort to establish an evidence-based and rational discussion on drug harm and use. But he also came back with full force to the laboratory where some years later he met my friend and colleague Robin Carhart-Harris. And together they took up the baton that had been relinquished a few decades ago by Wasson, Heim and Hoffman and began a full new programme to understand how cerebral activity is organized during a psilocybin trip.

  Now, in David Nutt’s laboratory, there are all sorts of experiments on how cerebral activity is organized during a psilocybin trip. The Mazatec and Amazonic ritual traditions differ in which plants are used (mushrooms instead of vines and bushes), in their drug content (psilocybin instead of DMT and MAOI), in the type of psychological transformation, and also in the cerebral reorganization after the drug is ingested.

  Psilocybin changes the way cerebral activity is organized in space and time. The brain spontaneously forms a sequence of states. In each one a certain group of neurons activate and later deactivate to give way to a new state, like moving clouds which make a figure and then dissipate to give rise to new shapes. In this metaphor, each group of clouds in a defined shape corresponds to a cerebral state. The succession of cerebral states represents the flow of consciousness. Under the effects of psilocybin, the brain travels through a greater number of states, as if the wind were making the clouds mutate more quickly in a much more varied repertoire of shapes.

  The number of states is also a footprint of consciousness. During unconsciousness–deep sleep or anaesthesia, for example–the brain collapses into a very simple mode, with few states. When consciousness is switched on, the number of states increases, and with the induction of psilocybin that number grows even more. This could explain, from the brain, why many people who consume LSD and psychedelic mushrooms perceive a form of expanded consciousness.

  In a lysergic state, many also mention something known as trailing, in which reality is perceived as a series of fixed images that drag a trail along behind them. So, with psychedelic mushrooms, the doors of perception, in addition to opening, become fragmented. The curtain is lifted, showing that the reality we perceive as a continuum is a mere succession of images–that property which Freud conjectured Ω neurons have in order to be able to both persist and change, the way consciousness does.
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  During normal perception, reality appears to be continuous, not discrete. But this is an illusion. As mentioned earlier, the discrete character of normal perception is subtly revealed in a car race. There we can frequently see a curious illusion in which the car wheels seem to turn backwards. The explanation of this phenomenon is well known in the world of film and television and has to do with the frequency of photographic stills that are being used to tell the story of reality. Imagine that the wheel takes seventeen milliseconds to go around once and that the camera captures a frame every sixteen milliseconds. Between one frame and the next the wheel has almost made a complete turn, so in each successive still the wheel appears to have gone slightly backwards. What’s extraordinary is that this illusion is not an effect of the television screen but rather it is in our brain. This indicates that, as in film, we generate discrete frames that we later interpolate with an illusion of continuity. Perception is always fragmented, but only under the effects of a drug like psilocybin does this fragmentation become evident. As if we were seeing reality as it is behind the curtain, in the background of the matrix.