“Psychedelics are technology, and they can show us what we really are. Are we really that evolution? Or there’s more? It’s a reflexion, the most pure one, a portal that opens a door to a garden full of everything. New species of animal and trees, the sun baths the strange and beautiful flowers with exquisite smell and shape. That’s what we are, and if that’s our evolution then it’s ok to think that psychedelics are important because they show you the path, they put it in front of your eyes and makes you look without caring the consequences and perhaps that’s what evolution is about.”
“The human being suffers and has always suffered at the hands of the human mind. The sense of imprisonment, confusion and estrangement experienced regularly by most humans daily naturally takes a toll. We seek to escape the clutches of the mind, even if just temporarily. We find such refuge through many means – from excessive eating, exercise, watching TV and using our phones, to consuming alcohol and drugs. All of these examples are similar in that they are all mind-altering. They take us out of a certain state of mind and place us into another – almost immediately. Venturing into the realm of psychedelics, we see a perhaps different type of mind-altering substance. An intention less of distraction and escapism, and more geared towards exploration and expansion. Humans have been experimenting all types of mind-altering substances for as long as we have been around, and continue to do so today. Such a trend is an indelible quality of human nature and human evolution.”
“Among scientists, there are tentative signs of a psychedelics renaissance. After decades of stigma, impressive research is showing the power of these substances to help sufferers of depression and addiction, or to comfort patients with a terminal cancer diagnosis, struggling to face their own end. This is the fascinating territory that the journalist Michael Pollan explores with his new book, “How to Change Your Mind.” Pollan dives into brain science, the history of psychedelics (and our tortured attitudes towards them) but his larger subject is the nature of human consciousness. Eventually Pollan decides to try psychedelics himself — and documents, beautifully, a number meaningful experiences and the way his own mind has changed. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
How did you get interested in writing about this topic, after all of your work on food?
It’s true I’m best known for my books about food and agriculture, but that work grew out of a deeper fascination with the human engagement with the natural world, and the species we co-evolved with, a fascination I explored in earlier books like The Botany of Desire and Second Nature. Food and beauty are two of the human desires other species have evolved to gratify, but there are other, more mysterious desires, and the human drive to change consciousness, whether mildly and routinely with plant drugs such as caffeine, or more dramatically with psychoactive mushrooms, has always fascinated me. Why do we want to do this potentially risky thing, and why did plants and fungi evolve these remarkable chemicals that affect us in this way? What do these experiences do for us, as individuals or as a society? Psychedelics are the most extreme case of this curious phenomenon, and they have been a central part of human societies for thousands of years. I wanted to find out why.ADVERTISEMENT
And then I began hearing about a renaissance of research into psychedelics by scientists hoping to treat cancer patients suffering from “existential distress,” addicts, people struggling with depression and so-called “healthy normals.” These researchers had found that psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in magic mushrooms, could reliably occasion a “mystical experience” in people that they deemed one of the two or three most significant experiences in their lives—comparable to the birth of a child or death of a parent. The experience had changed them in lasting ways. This was something I needed to explore. I wasn’t sure I had ever had a spiritual experience. Would one happen to me? Was there some dimension of existence or consciousness I was missing out on? Was it really possibly to change one’s mind as an adult? My journalistic curiosity soon morphed into a personal quest to explore some of the uncharted territory of both the mind and my mind.
Can you explain what the “default mode network” is, and how it figures in your story?
One of the most interesting early findings of recent psychedelic research is that activity in the “default mode network” falls off sharply during the psychedelic experience. This network is a critical hub in the brain that links parts of the cerebral cortex to deeper and older structures involved in memory and emotion. The DMN appears to be involved in a range of “metacognitive” functions such as a self-reflection; mental time travel; theory of mind (the ability to imagine the mental states of other people) and the creation of the so-called “autobiographical self”—the process of weaving what happens to us into the narrative of who we are, thereby giving us a sense of a self that endures over time. (Curiously, fMRI’s of the brains of experienced meditators shows a pattern of activity, or quieting of activity, very similar to that of people who have been given psilocybin.) When the default mode network is taken offline by a psychedelic, not only do we experience a loss of the sense of having a self, but myriad new connections among other brain regions and networks spring up, connections that may manifest in mental experience as hallucination (when, say, your emotion centers talk directly to your visual cortex), synesthesia (as when you can see sound or hear flavors) or, possibly, fresh perspectives and metaphors. Disturbing a complex system is a great way to force it to reveal its secrets—think of a particle accelerator—and psychedelics allows us to do that to normal ego-centered consciousness.
You tried psychedelic drugs as a part of your work on this book, and I wonder which of those experiences most changed you?
After interviewing dozens of volunteers who had had guided psychedelic trips I became so curious that I decided to have one (actually several) myself. I think the most transformative of these was a guided trip on psilocybin, during which I experienced the complete dissolution of my ego—I could see the entity formerly understood as me “out there” spread over the landscape like a coat of paint. Yet there was still some recording “I” taking in the scene, a sort of disembodied, dispassionate awareness. Though temporary, that perspective was transformative. It suggested to me that I wasn’t necessarily identical to my ego, that there was potentially another ground on which to plant my feet. In subtle ways this has changed my relationship to my ego, which I no longer regard as identical to me, odd as that sounds, but as a kind of useful though sometimes neurotic and annoying character who occasionally needs to be put in his place. Sometimes when I’m reacting to an event or comment I can catch myself before the usual defenses leap into action, because I can see what he’s up to and why. This is the sort of perspective you can occasionally develop with years of meditation or psychoanalysis; psilocybin gave it to me in an afternoon.ADVERTISEMENT
What do you wish the general public understood about psychedelic drugs and their potential?
The image of psychedelics in the public mind has been substantially shaped by the Sixties counterculture and Timothy Leary, but that is just one brief chapter in a much longer and more interesting history reaching back thousands of years, one in which these drugs were the subject of serious research and, long before that, carefully regulated use, usually in a ritual context. These remarkable molecules have the potential—and I stress “potential,” because much more research needs to be done—to relieve the suffering of millions of people struggling with depression, anxiety, obsession, addiction and the fear of death. Many of the researchers involved believe we could be on the verge of a revolution in mental health care, which is a segment of medicine that right now has very little to offer and is dire need of some new thinking and new tools. The drugs can be used carelessly, as they often were in the sixties, but in the proper hands, they can heal and illuminate the mind.”
“It’s easy to explain the appeal of drugs like heroin and cocaine, which directly stimulate the brain’s reward centres. What’s less easy to explain is the appeal of psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin that produce altered states of consciousness. After all, there’s no obvious reason why unusual patterns of thought and perception – typically, the symptoms of poisoning or illness – should be attractive. And yet, people not only pay money for these experiences, they even run the risk of being imprisoned or worse for doing so. Why is this?
One answer is that these drugs provide short cuts to religious and transcendental experiences that played an important role in human evolution. The logic behind this idea becomes clearer when we look at how human culture was shaped by religious ideas.
For some time, anthropologists have argued that religious people are more cooperative than nonreligious ones. For small groups, the effect of religion is negligible or even negative. However, as group size increases, it seems that religion plays an increasingly important role in creating bonds between strangers. In fact, some scholarship suggests that the emergence of the first city states in the Middle East nearly 12,000 years ago was made possible by belief in “Big Gods”, who supposedly oversaw all human action and guided human affairs.
Why does religion make people more cooperative? On the one hand, the belief that a morally concerned, invisible agent is always watching you makes you less likely to break rules for personal gain. This effect is quite powerful. Research shows that even something as trivial as a picture of a pair of eyes on an honesty box is enough to make people pay three times as muchfor their drinks.
On the other hand, religion connects people with a reality larger than themselves. This might be the social group that they belong to, it might be life after death, or it might even be the cosmos as a whole. The connection is important because it makes people more willing to cooperate when the results of doing so are not immediately beneficial. If I believe myself to be at one with my tribe, my church or the universe itself, it’s easier to accept others getting the benefits of my hard work.
It is probably this second aspect to religious cooperation than explains the appeal of psychedelic drugs. By simulating the effects of religious transcendence, they mimic states of mind that played an evolutionarily valuable role in making human cooperation possible – and with it, greater numbers of surviving descendants. This does not mean that humans evolved to take psychedelic drugs. But it does mean that psychedelic drug usecan be explained in evolutionary terms as a “hack” that enables transcendent states to be reached quickly.
Legal systems can’t change human nature
If this story is true, what are its implications? One is that psychedelic drug use is no different, in principle, to practices like chanting, fasting, praying and meditating that religions typically use to bring about altered states of consciousness. Purists may object to drug taking because it lacks the spiritual discipline involved in such procedures. This is true, but one could just as easily argue that buying a car lacks the practical discipline of building an internal combustion engine from scratch. And in any event, there are many religions that use psychoactive substances in their ceremonies.
A second implication is that psychedelic drugs may play a positive role in improving mental outlook. Already, there are promising results concerning the effects of psychedelics on the depressed and the terminally ill. Though this is no guarantee that such results will hold good for everyone, it gives grounds for thinking that there is a portion of the population for whom psychedelic drugs can produce valuable effects.
Banning psychedelic drugs is likely to be counterproductive. Just as banning sexual activity does not stop sexual desire, outlawing psychedelic drugs does nothing to change the innate need for transcendent experiences. A sensible legal approach would create a framework that allows people to use psychedelic drugs while minimising the harms. The fact is, no legal system yet has succeeded in changing human nature, and there is no reason to think that that prohibiting psychedelic drugs will be any different.”
“IMAGINE HOMO ERECTUS, A NOW-EXTINCT SPECIES OF HOMINIDS THAT STOOD UPRIGHT AND BECAME THE FIRST OF OUR ANCESTORS TO MOVE BEYOND A SINGLE CONTINENT. AROUND TWO MILLION YEARS AGO, THESE HOMINIDS, SOME OF WHOM EVENTUALLY EVOLVED INTO HOMO SAPIENS, BEGAN TO EXPAND THEIR RANGE BEYOND AFRICA, MOVING INTO ASIA AND EUROPE. ALONG THE WAY, THEY TRACKED ANIMALS, ENCOUNTERED DUNG, AND DISCOVERED NEW PLANTS. But that’s just the version of our origin story that happens to be widely accepted by scientists.
A more radical interpretation of these events involves the same animals, dung, and plants but also includes psychedelic drugs. In 1992, ethnobotanist and psychedelics advocate Terence McKenna argued in the book Food of the Gods that what enabled Homo erectus to evolve into Homo sapiens was its encounter with magic mushrooms and psilocybin, the psychedelic compound within them, on that evolutionary journey. He called this the Stoned Ape Hypothesis.
McKenna posited that psilocybin caused the primitive brain’s information-processing capabilities to rapidly reorganize, which in turn kick-started the rapid evolution of cognitionthat led to the early art, language, and technology written in Homo sapiens’ archeological record. As early humans, he said we “ate our way to higher consciousness” by consuming these mushrooms, which, he hypothesized, grew out of animal manure. Psilocybin, he said, brought us “out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.”
As human cultural evolution led to the domestication of wild cattle, humans began to spend a lot more time around cattle dung, McKenna explained. And, because psilocybin mushrooms commonly grow in cow droppings, “the human-mushroom interspecies codependency was enhanced and deepened. It was at this time that religious ritual, calendar making, and natural magic came into their own.”
McKenna, who died in 2000, passionately believed in his hypothesis, but it was never seriously considered by the scientific community during his lifetime. Dismissed as excessively speculative, McKenna’s hypothesis now only pops up occasionally in online message boards and Reddit pages dedicated to psychedelics.
However, a talk in April at Psychedelic Science 2017, a scientific conference on psychedelics attended by researchers, therapists, and artists who believe in the therapeutic potential of these drugs, renewed interest in the theory. There, Paul Stamets, D.Sc., a noted psilocybin mycologist, advocated for the Stoned Ape Hypothesis in his talk, “Psilocybin Mushrooms and the Mycology of Consciousness.”
“I present this to you because I want to bring back the concept of the Stoned Ape Hypothesis,” Stamets said to the crowd. “What is really important for you to understand is that there was a sudden doubling of the human brain 200,000 years ago. From an evolutionary point of view, that’s an extraordinary expansion. And there is no explanation for this sudden increase in the human brain.”
The “doubling” he talked about refers to the sudden growth in the size of the human brain, and he’s right: The details are still up for debate. Some anthropologists believe that the brain size of Homo erectus doubled between 2 million and 700,000 years ago. Meanwhile, it’s estimated that the brain volume in Homo sapiens grew three times larger between 500,000 and 100,000 years ago.
Laying out the tenets of the Stoned Ape hypothesis that McKenna and his brother Dennis shaped, Stamets painted a portrait of primates descending from African canopies, traveling across the savannahs, and coming across “the largest psilocybin mushroom in the world growing bodaciously out of dung of the animals.”
“I suggest to you that Dennis and Terence were right on,” Stamets announced while acknowledging that the hypothesis was perhaps still unprovable. “I want you or anyone listening, or seeing this, to suspend your disbelief … I think this is a very, very plausible hypothesis for the sudden evolution of Homo sapiens from our primate relatives.”
The crowd broke out into wild applause.
Terence McKenna advocated for the Stoned Ape hypothesis.Wikimedia Commons
Is it finally time to take the Stoned Ape hypothesis seriously? Doing so requires integrating our advancements in scientific research on psilocybin, recent archeological discoveries, and our murky understanding of human consciousness and fitting these into our current understanding of human evolution. We can start with the common threads between McKenna’s view of the development of consciousness and other, more mainstream, theories, including the commonly accepted view that it emerged over thousands of years and that language played a central part in its evolution.
“I think that, like anything, there’s possibly some truth in what he [McKenna] says,” paleontologist Martin Lockley, Ph.D., tells Inverse. Lockley, the author of a book called How Humanity Came Into Being, has one major issue with McKenna’s reasoning: Believing in the Stoned Ape hypothesis, which posits that our ancestors got high and consequently became conscious, also means agreeing that there was a singular cause for the emergence of consciousness. Most scientists, Lockley included, think it was much less straightforward than that.
Consciousness, after all, is a very complex thing that we are only beginning to understand. Anthropologists generally accept that it’s a function of the human mind involved with receiving and processing information that evolved over millennia of natural selection. A state of consciousness comprises an awareness of multiple qualitative experiences: sensations and feelings, the nuances of sensory qualities, and cognitive processes, like evaluative thinking and memory. In 2016, scientists pinpointed where all of this lives in the brain, discovering a physical link between the brain regions associated with arousal and awareness.
McKenna’s theory chalks up the entirety of this complicated phenomenon to a single spark; to him, psilocybin mushrooms were the “evolutionary catalyst” that sparked consciousness by prompting early humans to engage in experiences like sex, community bonding, and spirituality. Most scientists would argue that McKenna’s explanation is excessively, and perhaps naively, simplistic.
And yet, they’re equally stumped when asked to answer the question at the root of the debate over the Stoned Ape hypothesis and consciousness research in general: How did consciousness evolve? If it wasn’t psychedelic mushrooms that started the process, then what did? Michael Graziano, Ph.D., a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Princeton University who studies consciousness, had not heard of the Stoned Ape theory but concurs that the evolution of human consciousness is somehow linked to the formation of communities. In his own theory, he argues that brains had to develop the ability to understand subjective experiences to serve social needs. Since it was evolutionarily beneficial to be socially intelligent, he says, it’s reasonable to believe that consciousness evolved as a survival tactic.
“It is possible that consciousness emerged partly to monitor, understand, and predict other creatures, and then we turned the same skill inward, monitoring and modeling ourselves,” Graziano tells Inverse. “Or it could be that consciousness emerged much earlier, when basic attentional focus first emerged, and that it is related to the ability to focus the brain’s resources on a limited number of signals. That would put it very early in evolution, perhaps half a billion years ago.”
Psilocybin mushrooms, or “magic mushrooms,” in MexicoWikimedia Commons
Likewise, the theories of anthropologist Ian Tattersall, Ph.D., have nothing to do with psychedelic drugs but share the Stoned Ape’s emphasis on socialization. In his 2004 paper“What happened in the origin of human consciousness?” Tattersall, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History, argued that self-awareness — and thus consciousness — was born as early man learned to consider itself apart from nature and grew capable of evaluating and expressing the thoughts within its mind. Language developed shortly after, followed by modern human cognition.
Where Tattersall remains stumped — and where McKenna’s theory offers some explanation — is in trying to figure out when that crucial transition took place.
“Where did modern human cognition emerge?” Tattersall writes. “Almost certainly in Africa, like modern human anatomy. For it is in this continent that we find the first glimmerings of ‘modern behaviors’ … But the moment of transformation still eludes us and may well do so almost indefinitely.”
McKenna might have argued that psilocybin-containing mushrooms caused this “moment of transformation.” But even experts on ancient drug users think it’s unlikely that a single factor caused such a radical change, despite it being entirely reasonable to think that early hominids munched on magic mushrooms as they made their way through Africa.
“Human evolution is a tremendously intricate process in which several factors have played their part,” archeologist Elisa Guerra-Doce, Ph.D., tells Inverse. Guerra-Doce’s research on the use of drug plants in prehistoric times has detailed how early humans used mind-altering drugs for ritual and spiritual purposes. But despite the fact that she’s encountered remnants of opium poppy in the teeth of Neolithic specimens, ancient charred cannabis seeds, and even abstract drawings of the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on cave walls in the Italian Alps, she is not on board with the Stoned Ape hypothesis.
“From my point of view, McKenna’s hypothesis is too simplistic and lacks direct evidence to support it — that is, any evidence of consumption of hallucinogenic mushrooms by the earliest Homo sapiens,” she says, pointing out that he got some of his basic facts wrong. “He points to the Algerian paintings of Tassili-n-Ajjer, which include some depictions of mushrooms, but we must bear in mind that these paintings date back to the Neolithic.”
If the science behind McKenna’s hypothesis is unstable, what worth does it have in the search for the origin of human consciousness?
A scan of a brain on psilocybin, which decreases activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.Imperial College
At its best, the Stoned Ape hypothesis is, as Stamets described it, an “unprovable hypothesis” that fits some – but not nearly all – of the knowledge we have about the evolution of consciousness. At its worst, it’s a gross oversimplification of the multitude of factors that may have jump-started modern human cognition and consciousness. However, McKenna deserves credit for sparking an idea in the 1990s that scientists have only recently been able to prove: Psilocybin does alter consciousness and can trigger physical changes in the brain.
In recent years, drug researchers have determined that psilocybin induces a state of “unconstrained cognition,” triggering a pronounced surge in activity in the primitive brain network, the region associated with emotional reactions. On psilocybin, the parts of the brain linked to emotions and memory become more coordinated, creating brain activity patterns resembling those of people who are asleep and dreaming. At the same time, the region that controls higher-level thinking and is linked to a sense of self becomes disorganized, which is why some people who take psilocybin feel a loss of “ego,” leading them to feel more a part of the world than they do their own bodies.
Regardless of the holes that have been pointed out in McKenna’s scientific logic, Amanda Feilding, founder and director of the Beckley Foundation, a leading psychedelic research think tank, tells Inverse that we must see past McKenna’s errors and consider his greatest insight: that the story of humankind is inseparable from our fascination with psychedelic drugs. Even if early man encountered psychoactive substances closer to the Neolithic period, she says, the experience of entering an altered state of consciousness likely changed human society for the better.
“The imagery that comes with the psychedelic experience is a theme that runs through ancient art, so I’m sure that psychedelic experience and other techniques, like dancing and music, were used by our early ancestors to enhance consciousness, which then facilitated spirituality, art, and medicine,” she says.
The Stoned Ape hypothesis may now be lost to the annals of fringe science, but some remnant of its legacy remains. Now that scientists better understand the way psilocybin physically affects the brain, they can seriously investigate its potential to treat disorders like substance abuse, anxiety, and depression. If that happens — and it looks like it will — psilocybin will become a part of mainstream culture as an agent of positive change. And isn’t that ultimately what McKenna was advocating for?
Maybe we’ll never know how magic mushrooms helped early humans. But there’s no doubt they’ll be contributing to the wellness of modern humans as we continue down our strange evolutionary path.”
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