Opinion – Psychedelic Turn: Psychedelic, Psychedelic, Psychedelic or Hallucinogenic?

“Memory is a form of hallucination of the past, just as imagination is a form of hallucination of the future.” This sentence by Henrique Carneiro in an article for the special issue on psychedelics of the magazine Platô – Drogas e Politics has the simplicity of flashing ideas, which illuminate fundamental things.

The researcher at the Laboratory for the Historical Studies of Drugs and Food (Lehda-USP) manages, with 27 words, to bring into focus a neglected characteristic of consciousness, which we tend to conceive in association with abstract rationality: its visionary aspect, so to speak , or the faculty of reviewing past experiences –literally, using images– and, with their help, simulating future actions.

The choice of guest editors Sandra Lucia Goulart and Luís Fernando Tófoli to open with Carneiro’s scholarly text the special issue of the publication of the Plataforma Brasileira de Política de.
It lays the broader foundations of the role of visions and drugs in collective human enterprise, as in religions and their hallucinatory components.

The author takes up the origin of the term “psychedelic” (“psychedelic”, a neologism coined in English with Greek roots, something like “mind revealer”), which appeared in 1957 in the correspondence between the physician Humphry Osmond and the writer Aldous Huxley, to point out that they just sought to avoid the element “psycho” in favor of “psyche”. It would be a way to get around the undesirable echo of psychoses propagated by the first term and emphasize the constructive, creative aspect of psychic life.

For Carneiro, the Portuguese would have been more faithful to the original, translating it as “psychedelic”. In this way, the word “psychedelic” would have been even better, but this trip has no turning back, better to move forward and define a trajectory that leads back to the primary objective, if not in etymology, at least in spirit.

The author does this by rescuing the positive aspect of the term “hallucinogenic”, rejected by many (including this blog) due to the pejorative character acquired in the drug war of the 1970s. Associating LSD, mescaline, psilocybin and even marijuana with delusions and psychotic episodes, prohibitionism stigmatized these substances to the point of eradicating them from biomedical research, forcing a drought that lasted decades and was only ended in the 2000s with a torrent of studies.

Carneiro goes back to the typology of psychoactive substances created by the German pharmacologist Louis Lewin in 1924 to highlight the fifth category, which he called “fantastic”: “The use of the fantastic is closely associated with religious conceptions. This association is explained by the fact that illusions sensory effects caused by the toxic are taken as truly existing things by the inebriated subject, and he conceives them as real impressions”.

“It is a psychic state that pulls the individual out of the everyday reality that makes him know new, unattainable, pleasant things and that for all these reasons became and will remain indispensable for him”.

The historian starts from Lewin to highlight the intimate relationship between drugs, hallucination and religion. Hallucinations are not necessarily pathological, but deliberately pursued by chemical or ritual means (trances, mystical intoxication, meditation, music and dance), a hallucinatory component of religions that has motivated the preference of some for the term “entheogen” (that which generates god inside) to replace “hallucinogen”.

It is important to retain the creative and, so to speak, emancipatory aspect of visions, even when psychedelics are dissociated from the mystical element, as I prefer. Without the cult of the imagination would there be art, utopias, literature, science?

Carneiro looks to physician and writer Oliver Sacks to measure the centrality of hallucinatory experiences: “Many hallucinations seem to have the creativity of imagination, dreams or fantasy — or the vivid details and externality of perception. of these things, although it may have some neurophysiological mechanisms in common with each of them. Hallucination is a unique and special category of consciousness and mental life.”

The special edition of Platô magazine has several other essays on historical and cultural issues of the use of psychedelics, but it is worth noting the article by Fernanda Palhano-Fontes, from the Instituto do Cérebro, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (ICe-UFRN), which focuses on the neurophysiological mechanisms that Sacks talks about. One of the coordinators of a pioneering study at UFRN on ayahuasca for depression, the engineer turned neuroscientist reviews what is known about the therapeutic effect of psychedelics and the theories proposed to explain it.

Subjective accounts of psychedelic experiences are full of visions, from the common colored geometric patterns glimpsed with closed eyes to complex hallucinations and oneiric manifestations in which there is no lack of mystical or supernatural components, such as extracorporeal experiences, interaction with deities, spirits and dead people. Peculiar to the psychedelic effect, still, is some sense of the unreality of the imagined content, which distinguishes it from the psychotic break and would contain therapeutic potential.

Palhano-Fontes shows how psychopharmacology and neuroimaging take the first but decisive steps in understanding the effect of psychedelics on cognition, perception, the construction of the self and emotions. After listing perceptual changes, in which visual and affective components predominate, generally characterized by the intensification of positive emotions (euphoria, empathy) and rarely negative (fear, paranoia), the author reports the action of these substances in brain areas such as the visual cortex and the amygdala, in this case reducing the response to negative stimuli.

The article reviews studies that focus on the analysis of connectivity between brain areas, that is, the activity that takes place involving simultaneous activation of structures. One of these networks plays a prominent role in the psychedelic effect, the so-called default mode network (or DMN, in English “default mode network”), associated with introspection, reconsideration of previous experiences and projections for future life, for example. DMN suffers a decrease in activity that would be at the origin of the rupture of rumination of negative ideas peculiar to depression and other disorders, allowing the emergence of new thoughts and alternative interpretations for what causes suffering.

A more global model to explain the therapeutic component of the psychedelic effect relies on the notion that the brain has the means to filter out excess unconscious content from the senses, thus allowing the ordinary state of consciousness necessary for the performance of everyday functions to coalesce. . Psychedelics, for their part, would relax these selection mechanisms, facilitating contact with repressed material, as it were, and more chaotic access to sensory stimuli.

It’s called the entropic brain model, developed by Robin Carhart-Harris of Imperial College, recently transferred to the University of California, San Francisco. The transient increase in entropy provided by psychedelics would favor more lasting effects, in what Carhart-Harris called the Rebus model, from the English “relaxed beliefs under psychedelics” (relaxed beliefs under the effect of psychedelics).

At its foundation would be the constant updating of mental models to explain the external environment and predict what comes next. Such a mechanism, however, can become rigid and fixed in more abstract constructions — and psychedelics would help in reopening to perceptual contents and updating beliefs.

It seems significant, in light of Carneiro’s essay, the choice of the word “belief” to designate these predictive models. What are religions, if not hallucinating systems (eschatalogical, divinatory, prophetic) about the world and its becoming? But just as perceptual data serve to continually correct predictive models, contemporary science takes on the collective role of discarding explanations that prove incompatible with what can be observed and measured of external reality.

That, of course, if what is called external reality is not replaced by cybernetic rumination of made images, anchored in the past, devoid of visionary value – memes. “Today, what happens is a systematic production of images that, so to speak, chase us through all the multimedia windows that we carry in our pockets or that are in front of our office or in any cafeteria room, such as televisions, cell phones and computer screens”, diagnoses Carneiro.

“This type of imagery production also consists of a hallucinatory form, but a hallucinatory form that tends to manifest itself as a banalization and as a differentiated regime of attention, because attention is perhaps the most important mechanism for directing consciousness. excessive production of images in a hallucinatory way would be a fragmenting element of attention.”

There are hallucinations and hallucinations, therefore. Some, like those that seem to predominate today in Jair Bolsonaro’s Brazil, converge towards the pole of psychosis, individually and collectively, which attributes the value of reality to delusions. Psychedelics lean towards the opposite pole, where visions are oriented towards a better future.

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To learn more about the history and new developments in science in this area, including in Brazil, look for my book “Psiconautas – Viagens com a Ciência Psicodélica Brasileira”.