Re: Psilocybin as the vehicle to language and creativity

[ForTheLoveOfAll]

I'm someone who is very interested in altered states, especially through the use of psychadelic substances. You could call me an Agnostic Shaman of sorts, a Psychonaut. I recently heard a very interesting and plausible theory presented by Terence McKenna. To those of you who don't know Terence, he's absolutely brilliant. Better than Timothy Leary. Terence has a very scientific and articulate mind, further proof that someone who smokes marrijuana every day and does untold amounts of shrooms and DMT can keep his mind in tact, and exspand it indefinitely. I suggest that ALL of you YouTube his name and watch a few of his videos. I can link you to a few of his speeches too, which range from 10 minutes to 3 hours long.

He suggested that, during the course of our evolution, the one thing that sped our evolution up (Mentally, at least.) was the development of language. And he suggested that the thing that unleashed our creativity as a species was psilocybin, as found in magic mushrooms.

In some parts of the world, he claims to have observed, and to have heard reports of people who have observed monkeys roaming about, and finding in the fields of the wild large and dried cow-turds, which they will flip over to discover the mushrooms laying underneath, many of which are inevitably psychadelic. Though it's not as common now-a-days to see this, it seems logical to me that at one point we, in our search for food, could have stumbled upon them, and after much use, and much confusion, our creative side could have been moved forward with such a burst that it eventually developed into the intelligent mind we have now with it's capabilities for reasoning.

I'm not a biologist, and I wont pretend to be. This is just something I heard that makes sense (To me, at least.) as one possible explanation as to how we developed language and creativity.

A few shrooms and our ancestors felt pretty good, a few more and they started to see things, a few more and the uncontrollable urge to sing, a few more and they started to see what could have been the first vision of "god', which could very well be one of the reasons religion was developed. (Other than just a way to explain how the world came about without current scientific knowledge.) And, a few more, and they'd be on their backs, well out, and tripping to the point of maddness. Shrooms tend to be somewhat plesant to the taste, and to a hungry animal searching desperately for something to eat, they would've been better than the most exspensive truffle out there.

Anyway, thoughts on this and the possible role that psychadelics could play in our continual growth as a species?

[Stevil]

People tend to believe whatever that supports their current position, stance or lifestyle.

Whatever position you take there will always be people and publications supporting it and it is easy these days to find what you are looking for. The difficulty with all the conflicting material is to find the truth, to be objective by casting aside your preconceptions, your wants and emotions, to objectively glean the facts from the garbage.
I feel that your position is good for you as long as you are causing no harm to others. But I personally would have to have a lot of knowledge both for and against backed up by strong objective professional studies before I would be promoting such a stance to others.

[ForTheLoveOfAll]

People tend to believe whatever that supports their current position, stance or lifestyle.

Whatever position you take there will always be people and publications supporting it and it is easy these days to find what you are looking for. The difficulty with all the conflicting material is to find the truth, to be objective by casting aside your preconceptions, your wants and emotions, to objectively glean the facts from the garbage.
I feel that your position is good for you as long as you are causing no harm to others. But I personally would have to have a lot of knowledge both for and against backed up by strong objective professional studies before I would be promoting such a stance to others.

I would've been opt to believe this as being a possibility whether it fit in with my lifestyle or not. And plus, as far as psychadelic substances are concerned, I'd only ever suggest trying ones that occur naturally.

And this wasn't so much of a promotion as it was a question as to whether or not it sounded logical to some of the more intelligent members of the forum.

[Whitney]

I'm not sure how tripping on mushrooms would have helped us develop language..it would make more sense that we developed language out of a need to communicate in order to hunt in packs, relay knowledge about the location of food sources, and live together as a social species.

Creativity can also be explained in terms of survival rather than the potential intake of psychedelic mushrooms.  Those humans who were better able to come up with solutions to problems; like how to build a better arrow, were more likely to survive.  Thus, creativity was passed on to their offspring.  

As a whole, a lot more people come up with creative ideas while sober than they do while high or drunk...we just think we have great ideas when we are in an altered state.  Imo, creativity requires deep thinking and you need to have your whole brain able to engage in the creative process.  At most being in an altered state may get the unnecessary parts of the brian to calm down long enough for the brain to finish processing an idea you've been working on...but relaxation techniques could have achieved the same effect.

[McQ]

People tend to believe whatever that supports their current position, stance or lifestyle.

Whatever position you take there will always be people and publications supporting it and it is easy these days to find what you are looking for. The difficulty with all the conflicting material is to find the truth, to be objective by casting aside your preconceptions, your wants and emotions, to objectively glean the facts from the garbage.
I feel that your position is good for you as long as you are causing no harm to others. But I personally would have to have a lot of knowledge both for and against backed up by strong objective professional studies before I would be promoting such a stance to others.

I would've been opt to believe this as being a possibility whether it fit in with my lifestyle or not. And plus, as far as psychadelic substances are concerned, I'd only ever suggest trying ones that occur naturally.

And this wasn't so much of a promotion as it was a question as to whether or not it sounded logical to some of the more intelligent members of the forum.

Why only the ones that occur naturally?

And why only the more intelligent members of the forum? Should we ask the stupid people to sit this one out? Which ones are the more intelligent ones anyway?

If you create a post like this one, you should expect replies like Stevil's, which was quite appropriate.

[ForTheLoveOfAll]

People tend to believe whatever that supports their current position, stance or lifestyle.

Whatever position you take there will always be people and publications supporting it and it is easy these days to find what you are looking for. The difficulty with all the conflicting material is to find the truth, to be objective by casting aside your preconceptions, your wants and emotions, to objectively glean the facts from the garbage.
I feel that your position is good for you as long as you are causing no harm to others. But I personally would have to have a lot of knowledge both for and against backed up by strong objective professional studies before I would be promoting such a stance to others.

I would've been opt to believe this as being a possibility whether it fit in with my lifestyle or not. And plus, as far as psychadelic substances are concerned, I'd only ever suggest trying ones that occur naturally.

And this wasn't so much of a promotion as it was a question as to whether or not it sounded logical to some of the more intelligent members of the forum.

Why only the ones that occur naturally?

And why only the more intelligent members of the forum? Should we ask the stupid people to sit this one out? Which ones are the more intelligent ones anyway?

If you create a post like this one, you should expect replies like Stevil's, which was quite appropriate.

Naturally occuring ones because, in my personal experience, they're the safest.

And by intelligent members of the forum I meant ones more intelligent than myself. He did make a good point in his post, and I appreciate it.

[Ultima22689]

Now here is an interesting thread. While the theory IMHO is a plausible one i'm inclined to agree with Stevil's statement HOWEVER it seems the tone from others is suggesting an assumption that someone on psilocybin, DMT, LSD and various other psychedelics have somehow stunted their mental capacity for the duration of intoxication. Although anecdotes only get you so far, from my experience with psilocybin, LSA and DMT is that my capacity for creativity is increased exponentially. There is little research done on psilocybin because it's schedule 1 however i've done an "experiment" myself. Super Smash Brothers Melee is a video game that requires quick reflexes, great dexterity and for one to think very quickly in order to beat his opponent. During the time I played at a professional level with my friends who also played as well (CURSE YOU GEEK SCHOOL!). My friends Josh and Melvin were superior players to myself and usually I would lose to them. We all actively smoked together and they had got their hands on some shrooms which we had been hearing alot about and after a bit of research were enthused to try. They tripped at a different time from myself. When I finally did, during the peak I wanted to play Smash. So we did and to both of my friend's surprise, I beat them effortlessly, repeatedly. This lasted the the duration of the trip. As I came down, my mysterious jump in skill began to dissipate and things were back to normal although I was playing slightly better.

We repeated this twice more with myself and got the same results. We then tested with Josh and Melvin playing against some of the more elite of the school who were paying for college through gaming. To their shock they were on average losing to two stoners tripping balls. Excited, we began trying to see what else was enhanced by psilocybin. We found several activities ranging from writing, mathematics, debate, foot ball and other things saw better performance while under the influence. So all i'm saying is, don't dismiss this as someone who enjoys altering their perception as justifying it by crediting it with the advent of mans' creativity. Especially if you've never experienced it yourself. Self medicating is riddled across nearly every culture and stretches back thousands of years. To make an assumption about something like this because it involves illegal drugs is bad science IMHO. LSD, Cannabis, Psilocybin, etc need far more research so we can learn how they truly affect the mind because it's silly to assume they are bad for us because the government said so. Not implying that this is the attitude of anyone on the board but it seems to be the common perception of the common man, something that needs to be fixed.

[karadan]

I take psilocybin every year during the mushroom season and have done for the last ten-or-so years. I'm fortunate that my family live in an area where liberty caps grow in abundance and during the season (late September to mid November - weather permitting). It has become a bit of a tradition for my friends and I to go picking during this time.

For me, it is the most amazing experience I've ever had and somehow, every time I trip, I gain a deeper insight into my sense of self and my intellectual, social and empathic relations with other people. It also seems to be highly dependent on the surroundings and the company I'm with as to what I get from the trip. I've never even come close to having a 'bad one'. There's no hangover and it seems to be impossible to OD.

My friends and I have tried many activities whilst high. I'm not very good at art but the stuff I've drawn whilst high may not be technically great, they sure are highly intricate and quite dazzling. I would never be able to emulate this whilst straight. There seems to be pathways in my brain which can only open up when on a psychedelic such as psilocybin. There also seems to be something which opens up to emotional stimulation as well. Something which might ordinarily seem mundane will become the most intriguing and amazing spectacle when high. Anything remotely funny becomes amplified to levels of hilarity not normally attainable any other way. My analytical and debating skills become honed and my empathic responses go off the charts. My writing also becomes different. Sometimes my vocabulary seems to expand and i find other ways to explain stuff - things which wouldn't usually be in my literary repertoire.

The notion that older cultures may have had a creative boost simply through experimentation with psychedelics is certainly valid, regardless of whether it actually happened or not. I know for a fact that the ancient pagan druids of England took psilocybin and many of their social tenets were based solely on the things your mind does when high. It certainly goes a long way to explain their spirituality and connectedness with nature. Something about psilocybin enables you to really feel and appreciate the natural world in indescribable ways. I think this is why I may have been known to hug a tree from time to time. Trees are awesome.

Oh, and TV is AWESOME when on mushrooms. Everything, no matter how banal becomes the most intriguing and mesmerizingly brilliant form of entertainment ever.

Roll on September.

[ForTheLoveOfAll]

There seems to be pathways in my brain which can only open up when on a psychedelic such as psilocybin.

That reminds me of something I read that was published by a University who had studied people that smoked marijuana on a regular basis. Apparently, they discovered that it activated different regions of their brain that remained dormant in people who didn't smoke it. Perhaps the same thing happens when someone takes psilocybin? I certainly know that the use of psychadelics increases creativity, as they did for you, as well.

I like to use Bill Hick's example of music.

"See I think drugs have done some good things for us. If you don't think drugs have done good things for us then do me a favor. Go home tonight and take all of your records,tapes and all your CD's and burn them. Because, you know all those musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years? Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreal fucking high on drugs, man. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes."

Annnd just because I like this next one so much...

"I loved when Bush came out and said, "We are losing the war against drugs." You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it. "

- Bill Hicks

We repeated this twice more with myself and got the same results. We then tested with Josh and Melvin playing against some of the more elite of the school who were paying for college through gaming. To their shock they were on average losing to two stoners tripping balls. Excited, we began trying to see what else was enhanced by psilocybin. We found several activities ranging from writing, mathematics, debate, foot ball and other things saw better performance while under the influence.

That's something I've noticed, too. Most seem to think that ones mental ability while tripping is decreased, but more often than not, I notice it increases. On psilocybin it even seems to increase ones reflexes.

[ForTheLoveOfAll]

There seems to be pathways in my brain which can only open up when on a psychedelic such as psilocybin.

That reminds me of something I read that was published by a University who had studied people that smoked marijuana on a regular basis. Apparently, they discovered that it activated different regions of their brain that remained dormant in people who didn't smoke it. Perhaps the same thing happens when someone takes psilocybin? I certainly know that the use of psychadelics increases creativity, as they did for you, as well.

I like to use Bill Hick's example of music.

"See I think drugs have done some good things for us. If you don't think drugs have done good things for us then do me a favor. Go home tonight and take all of your records,tapes and all your CD's and burn them. Because, you know all those musicians who made all that great music that's enhanced your lives throughout the years? Rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrreal fucking high on drugs, man. The Beatles were so fucking high they let Ringo sing a few tunes."

Annnd just because I like this next one so much...

"I loved when Bush came out and said, "We are losing the war against drugs." You know what that implies? There's a war being fought, and the people on drugs are winning it. "

- Bill Hicks

We repeated this twice more with myself and got the same results. We then tested with Josh and Melvin playing against some of the more elite of the school who were paying for college through gaming. To their shock they were on average losing to two stoners tripping balls. Excited, we began trying to see what else was enhanced by psilocybin. We found several activities ranging from writing, mathematics, debate, foot ball and other things saw better performance while under the influence.

That's something I've noticed, too. Most seem to think that ones mental ability while tripping is decreased, but more often than not, I notice it increases. On psilocybin it even seems to increase ones reflexes.

[terranus]

[youtube:3oy26pxu]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z9kXXfm0C_A[/youtube:3oy26pxu]


While I am skeptical that psilocybin or other "magical" substances played a major role in the development of human creativity, to say that they and other psychadelic substances had little to no influence on human development throughout the ages is simply naive.

[penfold]

I'm someone who is very interested in altered states, especially through the use of psychedelic substances. You could call me an Agnostic Shaman of sorts, a Psychonaut. I recently heard a very interesting and plausible theory presented by Terence McKenna. To those of you who don't know Terence, he's absolutely brilliant. [...]

He suggested that, during the course of our evolution, the one thing that sped our evolution up (Mentally, at least.) was the development of language. And he suggested that the thing that unleashed our creativity as a species was psilocybin, as found in magic mushrooms.

I first read McKenna's Food of the Gods in my late teens, around the same time I also read Huxley's Heaven and Hell and The Doors of Perception. It was not till a few years later at university I started trying various drugs. At the time fresh psilocybin mushrooms were legally available in the UK thanks to a loophole regarding legislation for "fresh produce" (a loophole now closed). My friends and I had an extraordinary summer. Until you've tried a hallucinogen you have no idea just how plastic our minds are. That plugging a chemical into my brain had such a profound effect on me is one of the most genuinely philosophical discoveries of my life; it stays with me to this day.

As that summer turned into winter the drug changed for me. Instead of drifting outward and losing myself, I would turn in and get tangled up in myself. The last of these experiences was genuinely horrible. I took me about six months to emotionally recover. I have not touched true hallucinogens since, I find MDMA a much kinder drug.

A quick word on McKenna. My problem with him* is that evolution takes time, constant forces have to be at play over long periods for noticeable genetic change to take place. It seems to me that psilocybin use is too ephemeral and short-lived to produce evolutionary change. A couple of other thoughts. First is that we increasingly find language behaviour in other animals, not just mammals either, we even see forms of vocalised communication in birds. Second is that there is another very compelling candidate for explaining the evolution of a "speaking ape". That's the profound effect of cooking (cf Catching Fire, how cooking made us human by Richard Wrangham - a book I cannot recommend enough), and the consequent increased efficiency of nourishment, allowing our guts to shrink and our brains to grow.

As for Tim Leary, I think Phlip K. Dick said it best: "those who claim God slumbers in pot are charlatans".

Interesting thread. Kudos.


edit
---------------------
* I should make clear, my problem with McKenna's idea of drugs as evolutionarily significant. There is much else of what he says that rings true with me; especially what he has to say of the Shaman archetype and its absence in the monotheistic cultures.

ps:
[youtube:2dos7pvx]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=baeT3g7udho[/youtube:2dos7pvx]

[Wilson]

I have  no personal experience with hallucinogens.  But I suspect that the kind of creativity that would result would be different from what you can do in an unaltered state - and sometimes exciting to those not under the influence - but not very useful in terms of advancing the species.  The kind of creativity that brings about new inventions that make life better requires focus and attention to detail.  Certainly the invention of language was necessary to allow us to think complex thoughts, but to suggest that hallucinogens were important in advancing creativity sounds highly unlikely.  It is true that brain-altering chemicals are frequently the substances of addiction in creative people - especially in jazz musicians, who have abused alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and other chemicals, including (rarely) hallucinogens - so that spontaneous creativity may be enhanced by being in an altered state.  So it might help in artists of various kinds - but probably not scientists, engineers, inventors, and others who help to make life better for humankind.

[karadan]

I have  no personal experience with hallucinogens.  But I suspect that the kind of creativity that would result would be different from what you can do in an unaltered state - and sometimes exciting to those not under the influence - but not very useful in terms of advancing the species.  The kind of creativity that brings about new inventions that make life better requires focus and attention to detail.  Certainly the invention of language was necessary to allow us to think complex thoughts, but to suggest that hallucinogens were important in advancing creativity sounds highly unlikely.  It is true that brain-altering chemicals are frequently the substances of addiction in creative people - especially in jazz musicians, who have abused alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and other chemicals, including (rarely) hallucinogens - so that spontaneous creativity may be enhanced by being in an altered state.  So it might help in artists of various kinds - but probably not scientists, engineers, inventors, and others who help to make life better for humankind.

How do you know that if you've never had experience with hallucinogens? If anything, i've been able to concentrate harder for longer (when i've wanted to - i only usually do them for fun) when working on a specific task.

Whether it ever happened or not, i still think the original premise of this thread is totally viable. I don't think it is something which is provable though.

[ForTheLoveOfAll]

I have  no personal experience with hallucinogens.  But I suspect that the kind of creativity that would result would be different from what you can do in an unaltered state - and sometimes exciting to those not under the influence - but not very useful in terms of advancing the species.  The kind of creativity that brings about new inventions that make life better requires focus and attention to detail.  Certainly the invention of language was necessary to allow us to think complex thoughts, but to suggest that hallucinogens were important in advancing creativity sounds highly unlikely.  It is true that brain-altering chemicals are frequently the substances of addiction in creative people - especially in jazz musicians, who have abused alcohol, marijuana, heroin, and other chemicals, including (rarely) hallucinogens - so that spontaneous creativity may be enhanced by being in an altered state.  So it might help in artists of various kinds - but probably not scientists, engineers, inventors, and others who help to make life better for humankind.

How do you know that if you've never had experience with hallucinogens? If anything, i've been able to concentrate harder for longer (when i've wanted to - i only usually do them for fun) when working on a specific task.

Whether it ever happened or not, i still think the original premise of this thread is totally viable. I don't think it is something which is provable though.

As someone who has experienced altered states, I can say as a fact that, when used correctly, psychadelic substances do enhance creativity. And unless you're in a terrible emotional state at the time of the trip, if you do it right, you wont have a negative experience. There are certain pathways in the brain that are opened up from the taking of pot and shrooms that were discovered by scientists studying people who were tripping. If I can find the article to back this up I'll post it on here, I don't recall where I saw it right now.

I don't think it is something whic is provable though.

Which is why I put this thread in Philosophy and not in Science.