by Marianne Janack
Synaesthesia is one of those phenomena that make the scientific study of perception difficult. Its general characteristic is that, as one researcher puts it, extraordinary experiences follow from ordinary sensory in-put. Some synaesthetes hear in color; some hear something and it makes them feel like they have been touched (physically) by something or someone; some connect colors to tastes. The phenomenon of “colored hearing” had been studied by German psychologists since the early 19th century, but early psychonauts discovered that these experiences were not necessarily inaccessible to people who weren’t synaesthetes by nature. One could induce those experiences with mind-altering substances.
Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind by Mike Jay (Yale University Press, 2023) is an intellectual history of the exploration of the mind that was undertaken by people who took mind-altering substances. Baudelaire, William James, Maud Gunn, Timothy Leary, Sigmund Freud, and Thomas de Quincey all make appearances, as do a cast of less familiar names. In addition to being an intellectual history of self-experiments, though, it is a book about how theories of mind became theories of brain and neurochemistry, and about how self-experiments—and their disappearance—were part of that change. The book has 4 sections: Part I is The New Accelerator: Drugs and Mental Enhancement (the chapters are “The Elixir of Life” and “Prosthetic Gods”); Part II is Beyond the Veil: Drugs and the Limits of Consciousness (the chapters are “A World of Pure Experience”, “The Unseen Region”); Part III is Saturnalia of the Senses: Drugs and the Creative Imagination (the chapters are “Tales of the Hashish Eaters,” and “Extasi, Fantasia, and Illuminati”); Part IV is Lost and Found (the chapters are “A Sin, a Crime, a Vice, or a Disease?” and “Twice Born”). Jay’s history is about how the subjective accounts of drug experiences came to be seen as mere anecdotes rather than evidence, and how moral and political concerns came to dominate the discussion of drugs and mind-altering substances. Jay argues that the way forward for research into drugs and the mind must go back to older methods which paired laboratory data with data gathered from first person accounts.
In 1800, Humphry Davy studied the effects of nitrous oxide by combining his laboratory work with the accounts subjects gave of their experiences after inhaling the gas; in Varieties of Religious Experience, written over one hundred years later, William James said that that his own experiments with nitrous oxide convinced him that “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.” James is known as the father of psychology, but he also investigated spiritualism, ESP, psychokinesis, and mysticism to try to understand the mind and its possibilities. Poets and artists used hashish, opium, and other mind-altering substances to access creative ways of seeing and experiencing the world that were inaccessible to the sober, normal person.
But during the twentieth century that sober normality was thought to be ethically preferable to the euphoric and hallucinatory experiences induced by peyote, ayahuasca, psylocibin mushrooms, and other natural and human-made pharmaceuticals. Nitrous oxide graduated to the status of anaesthetic (and so medically useful) but other substances were outlawed and the idea of using them—even nitrous oxide– as ways of investigating the mind and our experience of the world was condemned.
Jay’s account of how mind-altering substances like opium, hashish, nitrous oxide, marijuana, peyote, and psylocibin mushrooms became part of a catch-all category called ‘drugs’ is told in a way that will be familiar to anyone who has read Michel Foucault’s accounts of how institutions become both producers of knowledge and forms of control. Jay’s history moves from the free-wheeling, recreational use of mind-altering substances to the late 20th century’s War on Drugs and in that shift he sees a shift to a more moralizing and controlling regime of knowledge. But we can also see this shift as, in Thomas Kuhn’s words, a development from the pre-paradigm stage of a science to its establishment as a legitimate science with its own set of questions, assumptions, practices, and methods of investigation. Contemporary research into drugs is either research done by pharmaceutical companies, or as part of psychological or neurochemical research, or as part of psychiatry—it is not a way to investigate theories of mind or experience. Art, literature, and maybe philosophy and religion might investigate these questions—but not with drugs, for heaven’s sake! Drugs, says the contemporary ethos, are only for stoners, hippies, and addicts—people who have opted out of the contemporary form of sober life. Or they are medicines, and should be dispensed by a licensed medical professional.
But one might also say that the institutionalization of scientific drug research is progress: no longer must people like William James experiment on themselves and trust that they can judge for themselves the right doses and the right protocols. No longer must we rely on the accounts of poets, artists, and adventurers to tell us about these experiences; we can learn about drug effects by using animal testing and learning more about the neurochemistry of the brain. No longer do researchers have to risk addiction and take chances in order to pursue the experiences that they hoped would help them understand drugs and consciousness. Progress can have drawbacks, too—so we must pick our poison (so to speak).
Jay’s history, which is a history of the ways in which policies and approaches to mind-altering substances moved from the realm of the private to the public, is also implicitly about the brain-centric model of experience. As mind-altering substances came to be understood as acting on brains, Jay argues, the social context of their use was ignored. For instance, Jay’s history of the early days of the recreational use of mind-altering substances is a history of parties and of artistic creation. Jay points out that marijuana was the substance of choice among jazz musicians in the 20th century; thrill-seeking revelers in the 19th century preferred ether. Travelers in Morocco and other exotic places could find hashish and opium easily, and often brought the practice of relaxing with them back home to the US and England. Sometimes religious rites (in non-Christian religions) involved mind-altering substances. To approach all of these from the perspective of the neurochemical processes that occurred in the brains of substance takers is, Jay implies, to miss the ways in which experiences take shape in social settings that influence how those experiences take shape. Drug experiences are not just brain experiences—they can change with context.
But brains can be studied from the third-person perspective, while subjective experience is irreducible to–and inaccessible to–the third-person objective perspective. So the freedom to experiment on oneself is a freedom rooted in thinking of oneself not as a brain, but as a searcher after enlightenment or entertainment—as an experiencer. It is a freedom that requires that there be a private and subjective realm, and a way of knowing that is not verifiable from the observer perspective. To treat the effects of mind-altering substances as brain events, and to use proxies such as rats and mice to investigate them is to ignore the creative and mystical aspects of these experiences—it reduces what for Baudelaire is illumination and for James a way of seeing what’s right about Hegelian mysticism to a catch-all brain reaction, regardless of whether it’s in the skull of a human or a rodent. Maybe this is progress. Maybe it’s not.