Tripping Again

(Image from Live Science)

One Sixties trend that petered out quickly was the use of psychedelic drugs. While LSD use could be mind blowing, there were many credible reports of "bad trips that sent people to the psych ward". (Whether or not it influenced their behavior, LSD became associated with the Manson Family serial killers.)

New research into psychedelics, however, has shown that they could have powerful positive effects: [bold added]

a single guided psychedelic session can alleviate depression when drugs like Prozac have failed; can help alcoholics and smokers to break the grip of a lifelong habit; and can help cancer patients deal with their “existential distress” at the prospect of dying. At the same time, studies imaging the brains of people on psychedelics have opened a new window onto the study of consciousness, as well as the nature of the self and spiritual experience. The hoary ‘60s platitude that psychedelics would help unlock the secrets of consciousness may turn out not to be so preposterous after all.

Brain imaging and other techniques not available to Timothy Leary show how psychedelics may work:

When scientists at Imperial College began imaging the brains of people on psilocybin, they were surprised to find that the chemical, which they assumed would boost brain activity, actually reduced it, but in a specific area: the default mode network...

Our ego defenses relax, allowing unconscious material and emotions to enter our awareness and also for us to feel less separate and more connected—to other people, to nature or to the universe. And in fact a renewed sense of connection is precisely what volunteers in the various trials for addiction, depression and cancer anxiety trials have all reported.

This points to what may be the most exciting reason to pursue the new science of psychedelics: the possibility that it may yield a grand unified theory of mental illnesses, or at least of those common disorders that psychedelics show promise in alleviating: depression, addiction, anxiety and obsession. All these disorders involve uncontrollable and endlessly repeating loops of rumination that gradually shade out reality and fray our connections to other people and the natural world. The ego becomes hyperactive, even tyrannical, enforcing rigid habits of thought and behavior—habits that the psychedelic experience, by loosening the ego’s grip, could help us to break.

As is often true in science, something that we thought we knew about can turn out to have surprising, new, beneficial applications.

Peripherally related: writer Tom Wolfe, 88, died today.

Mr Wolfe was also on the cutting edge of the so-called New Journalism that exploded onto the scene in the 1960s along with sex, drugs and rock and roll. Mr Wolfe travelled with Ken Kesey, one of the apostles of psychedelic drugs, and captured the experience in “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test” (1968).

TEKAAT is an acclaimed depiction of Sixties phenomena that according to admirers helps us to understand what is going on today.