Take, for example, one of the most common ailments of the modern world—mild to moderate depression. Instead of moping around, hoping for things to get better on their own, we can scan our UI and choose an alternate program to run. We could get on a treadmill25 (studies show exercise is effective for depression in all but severe cases), or get some natural sunshine26 (70 percent of Americans are deficient in vitamin D, which has a direct impact on mood), or practice meditation for fifteen minutes27 (a paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association found it as effective as SSRI’s and without the side effects). None of these approaches require thinking about our thinking, but each of them can significantly shift our mood.
Choices like these are available not just in our personal lives, but in our professional lives, too. Instead of nervously waiting for a job interview and obsessing about all the things that could go wrong, we can take a page out of Amy Cuddy’s book and stand up, breathe deeply, and power-pose our way to lower cortisol, higher testosterone, and more confidence. Instead of using trendy leadership books and a new mission statement to fire up employees, we can follow ESADE’s lead and use neurofeedback to heighten group coherence and prompt more productive strategy sessions.
But most of us, when challenged, will do none of these things. We’ll think more, talk more, and stress more. We’ll wait until after we feel better to go for that walk in the sun, rather than going for that walk in order to feel better. We’ll wait until after we get that job offer to pump our fists and stand tall, instead of the other way around.
That’s because, at first, reorienting from OS to UI can be downright disorienting. If I can change the “wallpaper of my mind” by deliberately shifting my neurophysiology—my breathing, my posture, my brainwaves, or any number of other interventions—what good are all those stories I’ve been telling myself? If I am not my thoughts, then who am I, really?
This idea, that our ego isn’t the be-all and end-all, flourished in Asia for centuries before landing in California in the 1960’s. Thoughts were illusions, the swamis and lamas maintained, and nirvana lay on the other side of ego death. But, for modern Americans, all those earnest (and sometimes addled) attempts to transcend the self didn’t turn out to be that practical. To make sense of today’s fast-paced world, we need our egos to navigate our relationships and responsibilities. We just don’t need to use them like Maslow’s hammer, turning everything around us into a psychological problem to beat on.
Instead, we can stay above our storytelling mind and simply monitor the knobs and levers of our neurobiology. And while this may seem far-fetched, top performers are already there. Tibetan monks can shut off their default mode network28 (or inner mind chatter) almost at will, SEAL snipers tune their brainwaves to the alpha frequency29 before locking on to targets, extreme athletes smooth out their heart rhythms30 right before dropping into a mountain or wave. They’re deliberately doing an end run around their conscious minds. They’re accessing more efficient and effective ways of being, and they’re doing this exactly backward from how most of us have been taught.
Which brings us back to ecstasis. When we step beyond our conventional egos and experience the richness of altered states, it’s essential to upgrade our software. Those monkey-suit personas we thought were us (until we suddenly realize they aren’t) don’t need to confine us or define us. “To diagnose . . . yourself while in the midst of action31 requires the ability to achieve some distance from those on-the-ground events,” Harvard Business School professor Ron Heifetz maintains. “‘Getting on the balcony’ . . . [provides] the distanced perspective you need to see what is really happening.”
And this is what moving from OS to UI delivers: a better view from the balcony. When we consistently see more of “what is really happening,” we can liberate ourselves from the limitations of our psychology. We can put our egos to better use, using them to modulate our neurobiology and with it, our experience. We can train our brains to find our minds.
Chapter Six
Pharmacology
Everybody Must Get Stoned
In 2012, in the waters off the southeastern coast of Africa, Emmy Award–winning wildlife photographer John Downer set up a series of hidden cameras in an attempt to nab footage of bottlenose dolphins in their natural habitat. He deployed underwater cameras disguised as squid, others hidden inside fish costumes, even some dressed up like sea turtles. All of this was done in the hope of capturing more relaxed behavior from the animals than would be possible with traditional filming techniques. And it worked. The dolphins in Downer’s footage did appear more relaxed than normal—way, way more relaxed.
That’s because the dolphins were high as kites on puffer fish. Caught on film for the very first time, a dolphin grabbed a puffer fish off the ocean floor, chewed on it for a little while, then passed it along to another dolphin in the pod. For a moment, it looked like the animals were playing a game of underwater catch, but it didn’t take long for the terrorized puffer fish to release its primary defense mechanism, a yellowish cloud of deadly nerve toxin—which, in light of what happened next, seemed to be exactly the dolphins’ plan.
While fatal in large doses, in small amounts puffer nerve toxin is intoxicating, inducing a potent shift of consciousness that produces a trancelike state in dolphins. After ingesting a hit, the animals in Downer’s footage huddled in a tight pod, smiles on their faces, tails pointed toward the seafloor, snouts tickling the water’s surface. “They were hanging around with their noses1 at the surface as if they were fascinated by their own reflection,” Downer told the International Business Times. “It reminded us of that craze a few years ago when people started licking toads to get a buzz.”
When the footage was released, it caused a bit of an uproar. Headlines like “Do Stoned Dolphins2 Give ‘Puff Pass’ a Whole New Meaning?” became popular, and YouTube viewings rose into the millions. But, really, stoned dolphins should have surprised no one.
Psychopharmacologists have spent the past few decades3 cataloguing the consciousness-altering techniques of animals in the wild and they have found plenty to document. Dogs lick toads for the buzz, horses go crazy for locoweed, goats gobble magic mushrooms, birds chew marijuana seeds, cats enjoy catnip, wallabies ravage poppy fields, reindeer indulge fly agaric mushrooms, baboons prefer iboga, sheep delight in hallucinogenic lichen, and elephants get drunk on fermented fruit (though they’ve also been known to raid breweries).
So commonplace is this behavior in animals that researchers have come to believe that, as UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel pointed out in his book Intoxication, “drug seeking and drug taking4 are biologically normal behaviors. . . . In a sense, pursuit of intoxicating drugs [in animals] is the rule rather than the exception.” This has led Siegel to a controversial conclusion: “The pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in organisms.”
So potent is the urge to get out of our heads that it functions as a “fourth drive,” a behavior-shaping force as powerful as our first three drives—the desire for food, water, and sex. The bigger question is why. Intoxication, in animals as in humans, is not always the best strategy for survival. “The carcasses of drunken birds5 litter the highways,” acknowledges Siegel. “Cats pay for their addiction to pleasure plants with brain damage. Cows poisoned with range weed may eventually die. . . . Disoriented monkeys ignore their young and wander from the safety of the troop. Human beings are no different.”
But if mind-altering substances are so dangerous, why would any species take the risk? If the goal of evolution is survival and propagation, behaviors that threaten this mandate tend to get edited out over time. But the fact that drug use is as common in the jungles of the Amazon as it is on the streets of Los Angeles suggests that it serves a useful evolutionary purpose. Researchers have been pondering this for a while now, and have concluded that intoxication does play a powerful evolutionary role—“depatterning.”
In nature, animals often get stuck in ruts, repeating
the same actions over and over with diminishing returns. But interrupting this behavior is not easy. “The principle of conservation6 tends to rigidly preserve established schemes and patterns,” writes Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini in his book Animals and Psychedelics, “but modification (the search for new pathways) requires a depatterning instrument . . . capable of opposing—at least at certain determined moments—the principle of conservation. It is my impression that drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior, on the part of both humans and animals, enjoys an intimate connection with . . . depatterning.”
In more contemporary terms, both Siegel and Samorini have argued that animals consume psychoactive plants because they promote “lateral thinking,” or problem solving through indirect and creative approaches. Lateral thinking involves big intuitive leaps between ideas. These are outside-the-box insights far more than iterative improvements, and much more difficult to achieve during normal waking consciousness. With our self forever standing guard over our ideas, crazy schemes and hare-brained notions tend to get filtered out long before they can become useful. But intoxication lessens those constraints.
And the evolutionary advantages of intoxication benefit all involved. In his book The Botany of Desire, Michael Pollan argues that coevolution—when two different species come together, often without knowing it, to advance each other’s self-interest—also extends to humans and intoxicating plants. In return for helping mind-altering plants propagate and outcompete other species, these same plants have evolved even greater psychoactive properties for us to enjoy. “Plants,” Pollan explained in a recent essay, “evolved to gratify our desires. . . . [In return], we give them more habitat and we carry their genes around the world. This is what I mean by the ‘botany of desire.’ Our desire . . . for intoxication, for changes in consciousness, [is] a powerful force in natural history.”7
But there are a couple of limitations that have long kept this co-evolutionary force in check. The first is location. Elephants are drunkards and not crackheads because coca grows in the Andes and not in Africa. Baboons never sample the mushrooms of the arctic tundra and have to rely on iboga for their kicks instead. Dolphins flirt with lethal poisoning because they can’t score any hooch. Humans too have remained largely bound by geography. Until the arrival of global trade and travel, the substances we could use were the ones that grew around us.
The second limitation is culture. Anthropologists have discovered that as soon as a local intoxicant becomes enshrined in tradition, people grow suspicious of imports. “Most cultures,” explains Pollan, “curiously, promote one plant8 for this purpose, or two, and condemn others. They fetishize one and they have taboos on others.”
This explains why, when Franciscan priests arrived in Mexico9 and found the peyote cactus at the center of the local religion, they outlawed the plant, and enforced their own preference for sacramental wine (despite catastrophic consequences for the native populations, who were missing a key enzyme to metabolize ethanol). Conversely, in 1920’s Prohibition America,10 growing apples—which could be fermented into hard cider—was against the law, but tinctures of opium and marijuana were readily available at the local pharmacy.
These are the constraints of the botany of desire: geography and culture. Together, they have prevented us from fully expressing that “fourth evolutionary drive,” the irrepressible desire to seek nonordinary states of consciousness. And, since different chemical compounds unlock different states (and with them, unique and novel information streams), these restrictions have limited our access to the “repatterning” benefits of different types of cognition.
But pharmacology—and specifically, the branch of pharmacology that deals with psychoactive compounds—changes the rules of the game. It gives us access to more substances than ever before, and this provides us with more diverse data to consider. And perhaps no one played a bigger role in rewriting those rules than renegade chemist Alexander Shulgin.
The Johnny Appleseed of Psychedelics
Alexander Shulgin was called many names over the course of his career. Wired dubbed him “Professor X,”11 while the New York Times preferred “Dr. Ecstasy.”12 As he was a tall man with a shock of white hair and a thick beard, “Gandalf” was not uncommon13 More formally, Shulgin has been described as “a genius biochemist,” a “pioneering psychopharmacologist,” and, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), a “dangerous criminal.” And his friends? His friends knew him as Sasha.
Sasha Shulgin was born in Berkeley,14 California, in 1925. Something of a boy wonder, he got a full scholarship to Harvard to study chemistry at age fifteen, but dropped out after a few semesters to join the Navy. After the end of World War II, he picked that interest back up, getting a Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley before taking a job as a senior researcher with Dow Chemical Company. It was there he made two discoveries that would shape the course of his life.
The first was Zectran, a biodegradable pesticide that turned into a highly profitable product for the company. The second was mescaline, a drug he tried for the first time while working for Dow. He was amazed that a tiny bit of white powder could produce such a big reaction. “I learned there were worlds inside of me,”15 he said. And understanding those worlds became the central quest of his life.
“Sasha’s interest,” explains Johns Hopkins16 psychopharmacologist Roland Griffiths, was “exploring the nature and limits of the human condition through tweaking some of these [psychedelic] molecules to produce different and interesting kinds of effects. That’s really, at its heart, what clinical pharmacology is about. We’re studying the nature of the human organism.”
After his blockbuster pesticide, Dow gave Shulgin the freedom to pursue his own interests. Not surprisingly, he chose to focus on psychedelics, starting with mescaline, modifying the drug one atom at a time, and testing the results on himself. As unorthodox as this may sound today, self-testing was the standard in psychopharmacology for most of the past century, and Shulgin took up this practice with vigor. He tried out every variation of mescaline he could create, then moved on to other compounds.
This all took place during the turbulence of the 1960s and Dow grew increasingly uncomfortable with holding patents on drugs the government was fighting to stamp out. When Shulgin’s recipe for the potent amphetamine DOM was duplicated by underground chemists and sold to unsuspecting hippies—triggering a nationwide spike in emergency room visits—the company hit the breaking point. They decided it was time to part ways.
So Shulgin went into private practice, becoming an extremely independent contractor. After converting an old garden shed into his lab, he picked back up where he had left off: formulating and testing new psychedelics. Between 1966, when he first set up his backyard workshop, and his death in 2014, Shulgin became one of the more prolific psychonauts (an explorer of inner space) in history. He developed and tested, first on himself, next on his wife, Ann, then on the small circle of friends who served as his “research group,” more than two hundred compounds. To put this accomplishment into perspective, in the 1950s there were about twenty known psychedelics, including LSD, psilocybin, and DMT. By the 1980’s, Shulgin had expanded that list to more than two hundred.
Out of all these experiments, Shulgin is best known for resynthesizing MDMA, a compound first developed by German pharmaceutical company Merk in 1912, noticing it powerfully boosted empathy, and telling a few psychiatrist friends that it might have therapeutic potential. Those friends tried it out for themselves and were impressed with the results. They started using it with patients and those patients told their friends and pretty soon word hit the street of a love bomb in pill form and the Ecstasy craze was born.
Shulgin also cooked up stimulants, depressants, aphrodisiacs, and a bunch of stranger chemicals: drugs that slowed time, drugs that sped it up; drugs that produced powerful emotional reactions, others that deadened feeling completely. In addition, he developed the Shulgin Rating Scale,17 a six-level system going from
Minus for “no result” to Plus 4 for “a rare and precious transcendental state,” and took copious notes. “At 22 milligrams,”18 he writes about the psychedelic 2C-T2, “a slow onset. It took an hour for a plus one, and almost another hour to get a +++. Very vivid fantasy images . . . some grey-yellow patterns a la psilocybin. Acute diarrhea at about the fourth hour but no other obvious physical problems. Erotic lovely (Shulgin’s term for the quality of sex). Good material for unknown number of possible uses . . . Better try 20 mg next time.”
Remarkably, Shulgin did all of this in plain sight of the law. In order to test these substances legally, he obtained a Schedule I license from the DEA (which gave him access to the most restricted class of drugs). Along the way, he developed a friendship with Bob Sager, head of the DEA’s Western Laboratories, and began holding seminars for agents, supplying them with samples, and occasionally testifying in court. In 1988, he authored what became the field’s definitive reference book, Controlled Substances: Chemical and Legal Guide to Federal Drug Laws, which won him several law enforcement awards.
But it was a pair of different books that came to define Shulgin’s legacy. The first was PiHKAL, short for “Phenethylamines I Have Known and Loved,” a reference to the class of psychedelics containing mescaline and 2C-B. Cowritten with his wife and published in 1991, PiHKAL was divided into two parts. Part One contained a fictionalized autobiography of the couple. Part Two was a detailed description of 179 psychedelics and included step-by-step instructions for synthesis, bioassays, dosages, duration, legal status, and commentary—that is, everything a would-be psychonaut needed for takeoff.
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