PSYCHEDELIC SCIENCE: HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND BY MICHAEL POLLAN

'MIDWAY THROUGH the twentieth century, two unusual new molecules, organic compounds with a striking family resemblance, exploded upon the West. In time, they would change the course of social, political, and cultural history, as well as the personal histories of the millions of people who would eventually introduce them to their brains.

'As it happened, the arrival of these disruptive chemistries coincided with another world historical explosion—that of the atomic bomb. There were people who compared the two events and made much of the cosmic synchronicity. Extraordinary new energies had been loosed upon the world; things would never be quite the same.' 

Thus begins 'A New Door'. the Prologue to this substantial work 'How To Change Your Mind' by American writer Michael Pollan. The two molecules he refers to are LSD and Psilocybin.

Over the last twenty years, Pollan has become best known for a string of books that connect the human and natural worlds: the ethics and ecology of eating, food and agriculture, gardens and architecture. See list here).

His 2002 book 'The Botany of Desire' contains material on psychoactive plants. Through this research, he was surprised to discover 'a universal human desire to change consciousness'. Pollan admits to have taken some magic mushrooms in his youth  which was more of an aesthetic experience that a full blown trip. So, as he outlines in the book's prologue, he had reached 60 without having had a full-blown psychedelic experience himself or a mystical one for that matter. 

The real trigger for writing the book was a 2006 paper from scientists at John Hopkins University entitled 'Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meanign and Spiritual Significance'. Pollan was intrigued by this new frontier between science and spirituality and began to investigate.

His book is essential reading and provides an up-to-date survey of psychedic research and its applications. Firstly he delves into the history. His account of the huge amount of work with psychedelics carried out in the 1950s not only by scientists but also by the CIA contains much information that will be new and surprising to many readers. For instance, in one Canadian state large hospital was devoted entirely to treating alcoholism with LSD. Much of this early research was either lost, ignored or supressed.

Timothy Leary, the most well-known figure in the field, brought LSD into the mainstream but his efforts to turn the world on also created a moral panic about its effects that led to a complete ban on psychedelic science for more than 30 years.

Now even his critics recognise that Silicon Valley in particular was inspired and developed to a significant extent through LSD use and that Leary played an important role in a much more complicated historical story than has previously been recognised.

There is also a lengthy and detailed chapter on the rediscovery of psychedelic mushrooms, particularly psilocybin and other fascinating fungi.

The new work at John Hopkins and at other US universities signals a renaissance of investigations into the use of psychedelics - particularly psilocybin - for the treatment of depression, addiction and for helping patients with terminal illnesses prepare themselves for their demise. Most seems to lose their fear of death, the drug giving them the realisation that we are part of a connected universe.

Pollan uses psychedelic guides - an undeground network of trained people who can sit with you while you are tripping and help you understand the experience after you land back in the real world. He takes LSD, psilocybin and DMT which comes from a Mexican toad. The last trip is the most dramatic and the briefest - a roller coaster ride. He describes his trips in great detail and the reader can share vicariously his experience.

The book then looks at the latest neurological experiements whereby patients are put in an MRI scanner and given a dose of psilocybin. This allows scientists to see what is happening in the brain when these experiences are taking place.There is now huge confidence that psychedelic experiences can help with many of the world's most important mental problems which we urgently need to address.

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There is an excellent 2018 radio interview with Michael Pollan on NPR 'Reluctant Psychonaut' Michael Pollan Embraces The 'New Science' Of Psychedelics' and another interview on KQED entitled What We Can Learn From Psychedelics.

There's a valuable review in the Evening Standard  entitled 'How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan - review: a man who believes you’re never too old to take a trip' by Richard Godwin.

Michael Pollan's own website

PREVIOUS POSTS ON THE GENERALIST

Inside Dope: LSD In Britain

FATHER OF LSD ALBERT HOFMANN DIES AGE 102 

LSD and THE BROTHERHOOD 

INSIDE DOPE: OPERATION JULIE REVISITED 

What the Dormouse Said: Counter-Culture and Computing 

Read more about Timothy Leary here with a review of 'I Have America Surrounded',

a biography by John Higgs.

INSIDE DOPE: FIRST IMAGES OF LSD EFFECTS ON HUMAN BRAIN

VIRTUAL REALITY / JARON LANIER

Published by Bodley Head, who have wittily adapted their
company logo for this one book

 Back in the February before last THE GENERALIST published a detailed post entitled:

 VIRTUAL REALITY IS GOING BIG IN 2016
It began:

'This story of 'virtual reality' (VR) should perhaps start with the man who is credited with coining the term - Jaron Lanier. In the 80s/90s, he became the spokesman/ philosopher/ poster boy of the VR movement,

  It featured this pic of Jaron Lanier, published by Mondo 2000 in 1992.

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Now aged 57, comes the publication of his book 'Dawn of the New Everything', an autobiographical trip through his life, work and thought streams. It's a multi-dimensional package, containing the story of his extraordinary early years, the early hacker/entrepeneur scene in Silicon Valley, his own development of VR and the technology and thinking behind it. From the current day perspective he looks back on the process whereby the utopian visions of the digital world were taken over by corporate interests. There are numerous levels of text and fonts, footnotes, appendices, essays and critiques.

He believes strongly in the value of VR and emphasises the fact that the technology is still in its teens if not its infancy but has already found several valuable real-life applications. He told Tim Adams, in a phone interview for The Observer: 'With virtual reality, I think there are cases where  it has already demonstrated its value, in treating post-traumatic stress, for example, or helping people overcome addictions. I think it will  eventually become a proper medium of art and culture but you can't put a schedule on that.'

These days Lanier has an innovation lab at Microsoft and and has become a prominent critic of the way social media and digital technology has shaped our society. 'The priority was always clear to me. Virtual worlds can be a part of real life, but this notion that they could be on an equal footing is abhorrent.'

The full humanity of Jaron Lanier's personality shines through in this fascinating book which will inspire new generations of innovators and create a valuable debate about the future direction of the digital world.

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GROWING UP

Jaron Lanier grew up in the westernmost corner of Texas, outside El Paso at the juncture of New Mexico and Mexico proper (where he went to school). His mother Lilly was born to a Jewish family in Vienna. She was very light skinned and blond and talked her way out of a 'pop-up concentration camp' and rescued her father from captivity. Most of her family were murdered by the Nazis. His father Ellery's family were mostly wiped out in Ukranian pogroms. They were both in the car the day it flipped out of control on their journey home after his mum had just passed her driving test. Lilly died and his father was severely injured. He recovered but Jaron was traumatised, contracted a number of near fatal infectious diseases, and spent a year immobile in the same hospital. 

His mother had been the breadwinner of the family - trading stocks on the New York Exchange. When she died, Ellery managed to get certified as an elementary school teacher. 

 Ellery's father was an architect and his son studied architecture and joined his business building skyscrapers. He also had a job designing window displays at Macy's.  Both parents were painters. Ellery also had a mystical bent, having lived with both the mystic spiritual teacher Gurdjieff in Paris and Aldous Huxley in California as well as studying with Hindu and Buddhist teachers. In the 1950s, he wrote columns for some of the leading science fiction pulp magazines and hung out in the SF social circle in New York

His parents had bought a house, which was under construction but, while Jaron was in hospital, it was completed but then burned down the following day. They were unable to retrieve the money his mother invested in the project. Ellery managed to buy an acre of 'throwaway land' in New Mexico and, for the next two years or more, they lived in tents.

Amongst their neighbours were scientists and engineers who worked at the White Sands Missile Range. Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered the planet Pluto taught Janier how to grind lenses and mirrors and let him use his mazing backyard telescopes.

The border region was  crawling with spiritualists. Lanier writes they were 'living next to the largest missile test-range in the world so peculiar debris fell from the sky all the time'. Kids at his school at 'show and tell' time would bring in what they claimed were bits of alien spacecraft.

In his early teens his father came up with a big plan. He told Jaron he would let him design their new house which they would build together. It consisted of one large and one medium sized geodesic domes connected by a passageway and augmented with two nine-sided pyramids and two 20-sided icosahedrons. When Jaron moved out, his father stayed there for a further 30 years.

DRUGS

The question he says he was asked more than any other in the early 1980s was how VR and LSD are related. He writes: 'VR is sometime compared to LSD, but VR users can share a world objectively, even if its fantastical,  while LSD users cannot.' This is the opening sentence of the book's 23rd VR definition. He tells us that 'LSD was common in tech circles. Steve Jobs would go on and on about it'.

Is this man on drugs? Lanier writes: 'I used to come under tremendous social pressure to use drugs, LSD especially, and pot at the very least. As it happens I have never tried them, not even marijuana. It was burdensome to constantly have to constantly explain myself. My choice was taken as an affront. My intuition is that drugs weren't for me. Simple. Am not judging anyone else. The recent pressures one feels to  join social networks feel similar. My answer is the same'

Timothy Leary was keen on VR and his nickname for Lanier was "the control group". Lanier says Leary became a great friend 'with whom I disagreed'. 

'Once I found myself speaking at a conference in Spain where Albert Hoffman, LSD's invetor, also spoke. He came up to me and said: "You have inherited Tim." A sly glance. I was speechless.'

Lanier was also fond of Sasha Shulgin, the astonishing chemist who invented and tried  hundreds of new psychedelics.

[For more on this topic see Previous Post: What The Dormouse Said: Counter-Culture and Computing August 28th 2005]

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FILM

'The Lawonmower Man'  was a science fiction film that used real VPL gear as props. It was about a VR company being taklen over by a shadowy conspiracy. Pierec Brosnan played, approximately, me.

'The movie started out as an adaptation of a Stephen King novel but ended up as a tale of intrigue that was inspired by what might have been the truth about VPL [according to director Bret Leonard.] I don't really know how true it was, to this day.'

MUSIC

Lanier describes 'a personal eccentricity that blossomed in me once I had my own house in Silicon Valley, I call it "organomania", a need to always be learning to play a new musical instrument.' He started with just a  shakuhachi, clarinet and zither and rented a little upright piano.

'Organomania is apparently incurable. Today there are well over a thousand instrumnent in our home, maybe two thousand, and I have learned to play each one  at least well enough to enjoy.' He says that
in order to play these instruments you have to adopt the same body postures as the original musicians who played them many centuries before thus creating a connection through time.

'As a musician, Lanier has been active in the world of new classical music since the late 1970s. He is a pianist and a specialist in many non-western musical instruments, especially the wind and string instruments of Asia. He maintains one of the largest and most varied collections of actively played rare instruments in the world. Lanier has performed with artists as diverse as Philip Glass, Ornette Coleman, George Clinton, Vernon Reid, Terry Riley, Duncan Sheik, Pauline Oliveros, and Stanley Jordan. Recording projects include his acoustic techno duet with Sean Lennon and an album of duets with flautist Robert Dick. Lanier also writes chamber and orchestral music.' 

Extract from Wikipedia Profile of Jaron Lanier

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VIRTUAL REALITY

Lanier writes that 'VR was actually birthed by a long parade of scientists and entrepeneurs. One of he most important was Ivan Sutherland who started up the whole field of computer graphics. In 1965 he proposed a head mounted display and in 1969 built one.

VPL's data glove on the cover of
Scientific American. The gloves
became one of the icons of
computing in the 1980s
[Generalist Archive]

'There is not one single detail of the story of VR that doesn't involve a priority dispute'.

'It is often said that I coined the term "virtual reality"...There's a wonderful argument that I did not. Before World War  II, the radical dramatist Antonin Artuad used the French phrase réalité virtuelle. 
Lanier also references Susanne Langer who came up with the phrase "virtual world" in the 1950s.

'I wish I could remember the precise moment when I started using the term "virtual reality".  It was in the 1970s before I came to Silicon Valley and it served as both my North Star and my fledgling calling card.'

Lanier and friends established the first VR start-up, VPL Research Inc. in 1984. He left it in 1992.

In one memorable afternoon he gave demos with his first VR headsets to Terry Gilliam, the Dalai Lama and Leonard Bernstein.

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Source: publishingperspectives.com