Sad Progress in a Bubble

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/science/12psychedelics.html

This is a fascinating field of inquiry that I believe is valid and holds significant promise. My only problem with it is that I believe that the knowledge of what is being taken will affect the success rate. Hopefully, I am incorrect. Regardless, I think there are simply too many societal barriers for this to become accepted any time soon. And, I resent that - I wish it were acceptable - but what can be done? This just goes to show the overreaching arm of the government in controlling what we do to our own bodies. Whose bright idea was it to control substances that are neither dangerous to others, nor physiologically addictive?

Psychedelic drugs (and psilocybin, in particular) have a profound effect that can best be understood by examining their effect in the context of the behavioral model of the human mind. There is a certain statistical situation that sometimes arises where the best predictor of a future value is the previous value; in other words, there is a tendency towards consistency, or mean-reversion. This tendency can be applied to human behavior. In other words, when held up to the wide variety of decisions that myriad humans will make, the best predictor of some individual's future behavior is their own past behavior. While this is commonsensical to us as observers of human nature, what we may not understand is the underlying neurological reason for this. In essence, behaviors, consisting of behavioral firing patterns, are learned in our actions because the firing patterns are learned in our minds. What we may not appreciate is the intricacy of these firing patterns. When we teach ourselves out of a behavior (which we have all experienced as being a difficult process at one time or another - whether it is an addiction such as smoking or something as simple as biting our fingernails), we are not re-writing the firing patterns from the ground up. Rather, we are interceding at one level - among many levels - to divert the learned sequence. Indeed, this level is very "high" on the continuum between deeply-learned, subconscious firings and high-level, conscious decision-making. In essence, there is a very real, "gestalt" behavioral pattern that gets built (at a high level) behind a conscious decision-making sequence when we perform it.

The role of psilocybin and other psychedelic compounds is to change firing patterns at a very low level. This has both immediate and long-term effects. The immediate effects are known as the "psychedelic experience"; a state, notoriously, where the "true nature of the universe is revealed". (Of course, this is not true, except in the perspective of the philosophical assertion that all reality is subjective) Instead, perception is altered because consciousness - as an emanation of the brain's memory mechanism - is altered. The fact that it is altered in such a perceptually unusual way is not an effect of a change in firing patterns per se - after all, a change occurs when we intercede on one of our habits, as well, and that doesn't seem perceptually unusual - it is altered in a perceptually unusual way because our firing patterns are altered at a very low level, and this is one of very few situations that can arise where such a change takes place. (as the above article alludes to, it would seem there is some sort of drug release that precipitates moments of "enlightenment"; would I be the first to speculate that the evolutionary mechanism of predispository selection would encourage this because of the positive effects of divine perception on morality in early cooperative societies? That is not only a mouthful, but it is spectacularly speculative, to the point of uselessness. Perhaps I should read "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" first...)

The long-term effects of psilocybin are to assist our "un-learning" of behavioral repetition that I mentioned before. In other words, someone who has been depressed for some period of time, and who escapes depression by means of a psychedelic experience does so not because they rationalize a greater mystery to the world, but because to some degree, they unlock the negative behavioral pattern that pushed them into depression in the first place. Having impliedly discounted the direct visceral effects of the experience, it is only fair to admit that the inspiration and excitement produced by a positive psychedelic experience are very capable of predisposing them to a replacement of the negative behavioral cycle with a positive one, capable of putting them in a position to fix their issues rather than let them compound.