Simon Powell - The Psilocybin Solution

This explanation is still not the full story, however, as pharmacology expert professor David Nichols attests.

5-HT2A receptor sites are located in a number of other key areas of the brain. Importantly, they are located on neurons in the frontal cortex called pyramidal cells. The frontal cortex is often referred to as the area where executive decisions are made. It is there that we make sense of all the information that is arriving. It is a sort of conscious integrating center where the brain makes decisions about what to do about all the information that it is receiving. Laugh? Cry? Get up and go to the bathroom? Experiments… suggest that stimulation of 5-HT2A receptors makes these pyramidal cells fire more easily, thus enabling them to process more information. {28} 28 2. Nichols, personal e-mail communication.

Professor Nichols also points out yet another area of the brain that might be involved in entheogenesis.

There is an area in the middle of the brain called the thalamus. The thalamus is a relay station through which all of the sensory information we receive (except for smell) is sent to the cortex. This part of the brain is sometimes called the “searchlight” of attention. It is wrapped in yet another layer of neurons called the reticular nucleus of the thalamus, and it is this layer that helps to control which sensory information actually gets through the thalamus and is sent on to the cortex. The 5-HT2A receptor is located on neurons in both of these two areas, so its activation has a direct effect on the control and flow of information that ultimately reaches the cortex. It is thought that psilocybin and LSD decrease the efficiency of this thalamic filter or gating mechanism, and allow much more information to be sent to the cortex. {29} 29 3. Nichols, personal e-mail communication.

Despite introducing yet more areas of the brain, Professor Nichols appears to concur that the chief effect of psilocybin is an increase in informational activity in those areas of the brain involved with consciousness . As far as I can see, given all the scientific data at hand, a basic conclusion along these lines seems inevitable.

We are now in a position to summarize the above findings in fairly straightforward terms: the net result of psilocybin’s combined effects upon the locus coeruleus, the raphe system, the thalamus, and cortical cells is an increase in neuronal firing in the cortex, a concurrent increase in consciousness (an expansion of perceived reality), and the emergence of often spectacular visions behind closed eyes.

Only the second of those claims is in any way contentious, for I suggest an increase in consciousness. Others might argue that the increase in neuronal firing in the brain is more of an unwelcome dysfunction than a constructive effect. However, a negative judgment like this misses the implications of the entheogenic state of mind. After all, Huxley claimed that psychedelics could, through an act of “gratuitous grace,” permit one access to perceptual information that was “out there,” but not normally needed because from an evolutionary standpoint we need only information regarding things like food and safety. Or at least those are the sorts of thing it has been essential to know in our evolutionary past. Of course for Huxley and other champions of the psychedelic experience, the knowledge made available through visionary plant and fungal alkaloids was suddenly very important in the light of contemporary Western culture. A transcendental reality appeared to be awaiting us, ready to erupt amid the mundane and oft-profane trudge of human history.

Armed with modern data on serotonin receptors, we can see that Huxley was correct in his pioneering conjectures. Once entheogenic compounds have entered the brain, an increase in neuronal activity (that is, an increase in neuronal excitation and electrochemical information processing) takes place—hence more information does indeed become accessible to the mind. In particular, the parts of the brain that become more activated are involved with novelty detection, arousal, emotions, the relaying of sensory information, and making sense of it all.

But what exactly does it mean that there is an increase in neuronal informational activity? Just how valid and “real” are the novel patterns of neuronal firing galvanized by psilocybin? Indeed, how can novel patterns of neuronal firing actually be conscious thoughts ? From here on, the ground gets more uncertain, mainly because the brain is such an astonishingly complicated organ. However, before we go on to speculate and deal further with what has been said thus far, there is one more piece of information we should consider, namely the role of serotonergic neurons in the process of dreaming.

REM sleep, or rapid eye movement sleep, is that part of the sleep cycle in which we dream the most vividly. Sleep, let alone dreaming, is a peculiar thing, especially since we spend about a third of our lives succumbing to it. Despite such a dramatic nightly encumbrance, science has yet to reach a universal consensus regarding why we sleep, for one can come up with plenty of arguments that counter explanations that view sleep as a purely restorative process. Proneness to attack comes to mind, for when else are we so passively oblivious to our surroundings? As for our need to dream, there are again numerous theories, from odd theories that we dream to forget, to theories that we dream to consolidate information.

Although we might not remember our dreams, it is vital that we engage in REM sleep each night. Sleep researchers have found that if periods of REM sleep are selectively disrupted, it results in a rebound effect whereby the next night, barring any more selective interference from researchers, there will be an extra amount of REM, or dreaming. We absolutely must dream, and therefore dreaming has to be related to some very important informational process of the brain.

Neuroscientist B. L. Jacobs has carried out experiments that show that a suppression of serotonergic neuronal activity elicits dreaming. If cats (unfortunately these most loveable creatures are often used for questionable brain-meddling sleep experiments) are injected with a chemical called PCPA, which is known to deplete serotonin supplies in all parts of the brain, the cats exhibit brain-wave patterns consistent with the onset of dreaming, despite the fact that they are fully awake. In other words, argues Jacobs, the cats are experiencing waking dreams. Therefore, waking dreams are somehow associated with low levels of serotonin. Indeed, during dream sleep, serotonergic cells in the raphe system turn off completely so that they cease having a depressant effect on other parts of the brain, a process that echoes the effects of psilocybin upon the raphe system.

The conclusion reached is that dreaming is associated with a form of neuronal firing normally kept at bay by inhibitory serotonergic neurons until the onset of sleep. More important, the visions produced by psychedelic agents like psilocybin might be the result of waking dreams, or at least they might emerge from self-organizing neuronal processes that are similar to those processes occurring while we dream. The essential principle appears to be the coalescing of information into meaningful patterns. This idea is not only compelling, it also seems intuitively correct; the psilocybin mushroom allows one to experience dreamlike consciousness while awake, which takes the form of intensely moving visions behind closed eyes.

According to the various documented cases of the shamanic visionary state, psychedelic visions are indeed dreamlike, the only difference being that one is immeasurably more conscious during visions than in dreams (even lucid ones) and one is able to remember them vividly, unlike dreams, which often fade quickly. Whereas most people cannot, offhand, recall most of the thousands of dreams that they all must have had, psilocybin visions remain fairly emblazoned upon the memory like favorite movie clips.