THE IDEAS EXPRESSED SO FAR, particularly those in
the last two chapters, were not the starting point for the
present theory of psychedelic experience. They were, on the
contrary, only recently developed along with my also recent
interest in cognitive neuroscience and the organization of the
human brain. But rather than present the components of my theory
in the chronological order of their development, for the purposes
of this book it was desirable to construct a theoretical
framework within which my principle hypothesis would, when
revealed, already have a persuasive foundation. The actual
starting point of the theory began with an idea which occurred to
me several years ago during my tenure at an institution of
"enforced languishing". I had plenty of time to
consider at length my experiences, and to re-read the many
volumes I had collected along the way (volumes which, somewhat
unbelievably, due to their titles and subject matter, I was
nevertheless permitted to possess). A part-time library
engagement (and a friendly library "director") also
allowed me to order in on loan any book I might desire. The
entire situation, despite the shabby surroundings and lack of
intellectual companionship, was not unlike a very productive
sabbatical from my former routines.
Thus I began early on in my study to think again
about things that I had experienced in Mexico, to consider
mankind's early and ubiquitous use of psychedelic medicines
especially with regard to the aboriginal practices of shamanism,
early religion, the curing arts. And given the universal
importance of psychedelic plants and preparations for early man
it was not a great extrapolation (but a surprising one
nonetheless) to begin to suspect that the use of these sacred
drugs must go right back to the very origins of man; they must
have played a role in his evolution from proto-humans, from
whatever species it was that was definitely advanced animal, but
definitely not-yet-mankind.
Whatever the characteristics of this proto-human
species were, (1) it
is generally agreed that they were hunter-gatherers who explored
widely for food from many diverse sources. Evidence also
indicates that climatic changes and other factors had provided a
strong impetus for proto-man to migrate from his African home to
the most distant regions of the earth, thus bringing him into
contact with the diverse psychedelic flora of many new habitats.
The period of this migration, the middle to late Paleolithic,
coincides precisely with evidence of the birth of human culture
illustrated by the recovery of artifacts such as complex tools,
body adornments, artwork, evidence of music, etc. McKenna (2) has presented
several persuasive arguments indicating that such generally
agreed characteristics which typified the proto-human species
would have ensured that its members frequently came into contact
with a range of psychedelic plants. But to hypothesize a role for
psychedelic plants in the evolution of man was easy, to discover
what kind of psychological and cognitive leap was entailed in
that miracle of evolution, and what function psychedelic plants
played therein, especially whether their influence was a
necessary, merely facilitating, or just coincidental factor, that
would require some diligent study and inventive thought.
Although I had studied chemistry and physics in a
top university, my knowledge of the biological sciences was quite
limited. In trying to get some ideas about what might have been
the psychological condition of proto-man, and how psychedelics
might have affected that condition to bring about major change, I
naturally started with only the most elementary of conceptual
tools, the first of which being that somewhat discredited concept
called instinct. To the psychologists of the last century the
existence of instinct was self-evident. William James,
introducing an extensive chapter on the subject in his famous
opus The Principles of Psychology wrote,
Instinct is usually defined as the faculty of acting in
such a way as to produce certain ends, without foresight of
the ends, and without previous education in the performance.
That instincts, as thus defined, exist on an enormous scale
in the animal kingdom needs no proof. (3)
Yet soon the Behaviorists, in a half-century
crusade to objectify the science of psychology, would first
dispense with the terms, and later with the very concepts of many
such self-evident entities for lack of simple experimental
techniques capable of isolating, measuring, and controlling them.
The difficulty or inability to accurately measure the predictions
of a model is, of course, a serious flaw, for the purpose of a
model is precisely to suggest experiments that will yield
meaningful measurement. The Behaviorist stratagem is thus
understandable, and would probably have been better justified had
the science of psychology already attained a level of perfection
comparable to that of early 20th Century physics or chemistry. In
retrospect, and in consideration of the still very rudimentary
state of the discipline, the strategy must now be judged as one
of desperation, for despite the Behaviorists' long and powerful
onslaught, concepts such as instinct and consciousness remain far
too vital to justify the elimination of the terms from the
lexicon of psychology. As I have already pointed out, the study
of consciousness is now enjoying a major and fruitful revival,
and I think that I can show how at least one aspect of what has
been called instinct is now describable, and perhaps even
measurable, in physiological terms.
At the start of my quest therefore, before I had
worked out some of the cognitive and neurological mechanisms for
the Habit Routine Model, I necessarily found myself toying with
the concept of instinct. Believing that the influence of
psychedelic drugs on proto-humans might have been a necessary catalyst
for the rapid (4)
transformation to culturally modern Homo sapiens, there
seemed two possibilities to explore. Either the psychedelics
might have added something to the psychological abilities
of proto-man (which turned out to be the conclusion of McKenna's
views), or conversely, perhaps the repeated and cumulative
effects of psychedelic drugs had eliminated an impediment to
further psychological evolution, an impediment which, up until
that point in evolution, had been not an impediment but a
characteristic favorable or essential for the reproduction and
survival of the species. And that characteristic, it seemed,
should be something very much like an instinct, an innate
psychological tendency governing the normal behavior of the
species. I am assuming that, in the ultimate stages, the change
from proto-man to humankind was preponderantly if not entirely a psychological
change, the facilitating physiological changes such as
greatly enlarged brain capacity having already been present.
The latter hypothesis seemed the more powerful, for
if it had been necessary to add to the abilities of
proto-man, the normal processes of evolution are always willing
and able to provide such addition. This is the whole idea of
evolution. Additions to the abilities and design features of a
species follow necessarily from the essentials of the process.
Thus the hypothesis that psychedelic drugs might have added to
the abilities of proto-man would have carried with it the
probability that such addition would not, in the long run, have
been necessary. The mere passage of time, and further selection
pressures, would have surely led to the same result. Under this
hypothesis, the psychedelics would only have provided a
facilitation to an ongoing process, or perhaps been merely
incidental to it. It didn't seem that the ubiquitous use of
psychedelics by early man would have resulted from a merely
coincidental influence; the great importance of these sacred
plants for early man in every corner of the earth indicated to me
that they had been essential and necessary for the evolution of
humankind. If this were the case, their prevalence of use and
central importance for early man would naturally follow.
But if evolution relentlessly provides any required
new feature, we also see the strange result that occurs sometimes
when a feature becomes obsolete, the case of the vestigial
vermiform appendix on the large intestine being the example known
to all. Evolution is remarkably efficient at slowly bringing
about any design feature that is required for the production of
new abilities and new species, but does not pay much attention to
the intentional removal of design features that have become
obsolete, even if they become mildly unfavorable as in the case
of the appendix. Design features may persist through sheer
conservatism or "force of habit", as for example the
persistence of a full range of digital bones in the fins of
whales and other once-terrestrial species; and if the feature has
been an important one at some stage of development, it will be
very difficult to eliminate. One would suspect that such a
feature would have to become a significant disadvantage before
selection pressures and the normal course of evolution would
bring about its gradual removal.
Now if evolution could produce physiological
"skeuomorphs" (design features which have persisted
despite becoming disused or non-functioning (5)), then it seemed that the same process
might have occurred in the realm of psychology. Perhaps
instincts, once valuable to a species or range of species
(perhaps even the entire animal kingdom), might have become not
only skeuomorphic, but a factor which would impede further
psychological development in a given species. Although such a
skeuomorphic instinct would present no disadvantage to the
species in its given form, it might well tend to prevent a
radical evolutionary jump such as that between animal and
humankind. The existence of evolutionary dead-ends in the
physiological sense (6)
might illustrate the parallel concept of the case of the advanced
ape who had every physiological capacity necessary to be a
philosopher, a mathematician, yet...
My hypothesis began to take shape: an instinctual
or innate psychological drive or tendency that had been an
essential and defining feature of advanced animal life had
become the barrier which prevented proto-man from achieving the
most important of all evolutionary quantum leaps. And it was this
barrier, this very powerful and efficient psychological trait or
instinct which had been eroded and then (at least temporarily)
suspended by proto-man's exposure to psychedelic drugs.
It would be valuable at this point to provide a
definition and examples of the concept of instinct as it applies
to my theory. As I hinted above, I intend to show how the
instinct in question is actually something describable in
physiological terms, but a clearer understanding results, I
think, from treading the same conceptual path from instinct to
brain systems that I myself took in constructing the theory. A
few general suggestions concerning the various possible
mechanisms of instinct, and what kind of information constitutes
an instinct might help to alleviate some objections to the
concept by the more demanding adherents of hard science. Perhaps
we might also find that what was once piled together under the
label "instinct" is actually a range of quite different
and independently organized processes.
It is quite true, for example, that we have not the
foggiest notion of how fledgling cuckoos, at the end of their
fall migration, find their way to the same trees in Africa where
their parents are nesting, despite the fact that the parents
leave Europe a week or more in advance of their progeny. Saying
that the young cuckoos have an instinct to do so tells us very
little, and it is far-fetched to suppose that the parent birds
"teach" their progeny how to make the voyage before
their early depart. Equally improbable, despite
"nothing-but" arguments of
"what-else-could-it-be?", is the proposal that cuckoo
genes or nervous systems come equipped with maps of Africa. The
use of "instinct" as a mere label that only pretends to
impart an understanding of how such a phenomenon might arise has
justifiably drawn criticism. Thus the distinguished
anthropologist Gregory Bateson has commented, (in a
"Metalogue", between Father and Daughter),
Daughter: Daddy, what is an instinct?
Father: An instinct, my dear, is a explanatory principle.
D: But what does it explain?
F: Anything—almost anything at all. Anything you want it
to explain.
D: Don't be silly. It doesn't explain gravity.
F: No. But that is because nobody wants "instinct"
to explain gravity. If they did, it would explain it. We
could simply say that the moon has an instinct whose strength
varies inversely as the square of the distance…
D: But that's nonsense, Daddy.
F: Yes, surely. But it was you who mentioned
"instinct," not I.
D: All right-but then what does explain gravity?
F: Nothing, my dear, because gravity is an explanatory
principle.
D: Oh... (7)
Such an instinct as cuckoos have still evades
description in terms of brain systems or genetic codes, and thus
to call it an instinct is about as far as we can go. In the last
century, due to a very primitive understanding of the nervous
system, practically all habitual behavior of animals had to be
labeled instinct. "Early psychologists sought to identify a
drive for every aspect of behavior: a hunger drive responsible
for feeding, a thirst drive, a sex drive, etc. It proved
impossible to classify animal behavior in this way without
resorting to a reductio ad absurdum involving drives for
thumb-sucking, nail-biting, and other minutiae of behavior."
(8) The examples of
proposed instincts for thirst and hunger illustrate how an
inability to explain a trait of behavior and the resulting
retreat into mere labeling, can later be resolved with further
knowledge. Science has today discovered a great deal about the
physiological systems which control and produce hunger, thirst,
and more. With more advanced knowledge of the brain, some
phenomena which were once called instincts, and which were
indistinguishable from other phenomena like the cuckoo's
navigational abilities, can be shown to result from elementary
brain-systems operation. Such will be the case with the
"instinct" I have in mind as a candidate for
proto-man's impediment. (9)
The perceptive reader will certainly, remembering
my cognitive and neurological models of earlier on, see where
this argument is going. But the pathway that was followed, I
believe, is not only an interesting view of how one model leads
to the next in theory building, but also of how the pieces of
this large puzzle were manipulated to form an overall and
convincing picture.
At first, and very crudely, it seemed to me that
proto-man might have had some kind of instinct that could be
viewed as a "narrow-mindedness", a strong repression
of, or inability to use the obvious and recently expanded
theoretical capacity of his brain. I soon coined a nice term for
the effect, the sophiolytic instinct, a behavioral drive
that prevented the ape from becoming wise, that actually
"cured" him of any tendency to become wise, for an ape
who suddenly decided to ape not an ape, but a Socrates, would not
be very popular with his mates! He would be excluded from the
group, become solitary with no chance of reproducing either his
weird psychological abilities (through teaching perhaps) nor any
physiological "adaptions" that had suddenly enabled him
to use his tremendous brain capacity more fully than his
contemporaries.
The model began to improve as I realized that such
a sophiolytic instinct should be part of a pair of
characteristics which would be precisely what all advanced animal
life would profit greatly from. An animal should have a
much greater mental and psychological capacity than it needs in
normal everyday life, for that capacity would be of enormous
value in crisis situations, or other infrequently encountered
situations where the animal is called upon to be creative in some
sense. Obtaining food from a new source, coping with unusual
threats to life or habitat, and many other imaginable situations
would demand a level of "creativity" in an animal. If
extra brain capacity could provide for overcoming merely habitual
and stereotyped behavior in times of need, this should obviously
be a favorable evolutionary development in the animal kingdom.
But likewise, it seemed that there would have to be
a strong tendency for an animal not to use his creative
abilities on a daily basis. Any creative potentials of an animal
would have to be dormant or actively inhibited in the normal
routines of existence, and this would also favor survival and
reproduction because it would lend great stability and coherence
of behavior between the members of a group, and within species as
well; individuality would be suppressed during routine existence
in favor of group and species stability. Indeed many species have
mechanisms for isolating and expelling members of a reproductive
group who exhibit unusual or disruptive behaviors. Such behavior
would often have indicated that a given individual might be
diseased, or afflicted with some genetic defect, so a species'
ability to isolate such individuals would be a favorable
characteristic for maintaining species integrity. These
mechanisms and the sophiolytic instinct would therefore ensure
that members of a group all "toe the line" and do not
become too much the individual, in spite of the possession of
cognitive capacities going sometimes far beyond those required
for routine existence.
The evolution of animal life is not at all a matter
of one exceptional individual providing genetic material for the
future, but of the slow selection of many slightly better
adapted individuals providing for future inheritance. The
hypothesis of excess cognitive capability coupled with a
mechanism for the normal suppression of this capability seemed to
fit these requirements quite well. (10) And what was more, the dual
characteristic should become more and more important with the
complexity of the species considered: the most advanced animals
in terms of social situation, reproductive requirements,
nourishment-obtaining abilities, protection strategies, etc.,
should be the very animals which would profit most from excess
and reserve cognitive abilities, and it would be in these very
species that the most efficient, powerful and precisely applied
suppression of these abilities in everyday routine would be
required. The maximums here would have attained their summit in
the proto-human species, the recent and sudden increase in
cranial capacity indicating a vastly increased cognitive reserve,
and my speculations indicating that the restraining mechanism,
the proposed sophiolytic instinct, must also have attained a
corresponding power and efficiency.
This scenario seemed to provide a paradox for
evolution. On the one hand, in order for evolution to produce
modern man, it would have had to proceed through stages in which
animals gained more and more neurological and cognitive ability,
and especially a reserve of such ability, yet an essential
requirement of this gain would be that it needed to be
increasingly suppressed for normal routines of daily existence.
It would therefore become impossible for an advanced animal to
use this cognitive power at will, to enter a mode of
life, by conscious choice, in which the creative ability
might be used routinely rather than only in extremis. To
break through this evolutionary barrier between proto-human and Homo
sapiens would require an extraordinary and external
influence capable of dissolving this barrier. All the
neurological equipment would be in place, thanks to the normal
evolutionary processes, but the final breakthrough would have to
be something that the normal processes of evolution could not
provide. And the drugs which enabled that cognitive breakthrough
were conveniently scattered about the planet in plenitude...
If these hypotheses are at all valuable, it should
be possible to see evidence in animal behavior of the processes
they describe. The idea that animals, even lowly insects, have
quite amazing abilities available for use in case of novel
challenges has been experimentally demonstrated for many
different species. Greater cognitive abilities are likewise
reflected by correspondingly larger nervous system capacity
compared with similar species exhibiting less versatile behavior.
A lengthy review of recent work on "intelligence" in
animals is not necessary here, a few examples will suffice to
show convincingly that not only our recent evolutionary
neighbors, apes and chimpanzees, have significant cognitive
reserves, but that the hypothesis of excess cognitive capacity
describes a universal trait of animal life.
Although recent presentations by Gould & Gould (11), Griffin (12), Byrne (13), and others show
many examples of rudimentary insight, context-switching
intelligence, and conceptual thinking in animals as diverse as
beavers, honeyguides, and even insects such as wasps and bees,
certain hard-science advocates have done their best to raise
objections against such evidence. Donald Griffin has reviewed
such argument and presented an admirable rebuttal to what he
considers to be a taboo against considering that non-human
animals might have subjective mental experiences or an ability to
"think", albeit in very primitive ways.
The taboo...has become a serious impediment to scientific
investigation. Effective indoctrination—often
accomplished by nonverbal signals of
disapproval—inhibits students and young scientists from
venturing into this forbidden territory, and those that do so
encounter criticism and ridicule. One result is that students
of animal behavior are inhibited from reporting versatile
behavior that suggests conscious thinking; and scientific
journals sometimes refuse to publish data or interpretations
that support the inference of animal consciousness. (14)
I will mention only examples of intelligence in
apes and chimpanzees, because here the weight of evidence is
exceptional. In suggesting some ideas about the importance of
young animals' play for cognitive development, Richard Byrne (15) mentions a
seeming paradox: Gorillas in captivity regularly show extensive
skills in the use of tools, yet in the wild, tool use in gorillas
is practically non-existent. He notes that only young chimpanzees
and humans "invest much time in play with detached objects.
But under the artificial conditions of captivity, young gorillas
also play with objects". Byrne's proposal that infant play
with objects might be a causal explanation of the paradox may
have some validity for gorillas, but apparently ignores that many
other tool-using species also do not exhibit play with detached
objects in juveniles. But he also notes that "gorillas
evidently have the latent potential to play with objects
in childhood, and to use tools to solve problems in adulthood,
yet they do neither in the wild-why?" [my emphasis].
The question is answered with the hypothesis of a
sophiolytic instinct being the factor which all but guarantees
that much advanced behavior capability in animals will remain as
"latent potentials" under normal conditions, especially
if we understand that the sophiolytic instinct must be a powerful
and primary one, surpassed only perhaps by instincts for sexual
behavior without which, of course, there would be no animals
around to study. Without the sophiolytic instinct, the force
ensuring group stability, survival, and reproduction, individuals
would have constantly been far more subject to the vicissitudes
of the environment, to dispersal and separation from potential
mates, to dangers resulting from their constant
"inventiveness" and individuality in dealing with
everyday situations better handled with habit than innovation.
The latent potential which Byrne concedes is evident for apes, is
a simple and elegant illustration for the concept of the dual
characteristic of excess cognitive capacity and the sophiolytic
instinct. Byrne asks practically the same question later on,
(p158):
Ape mentality: why not more? ...But we are still
confronted with a paradox: if cognitive abilities are so
useful in social and other spheres, as we like to imagine
they are, why aren't these demonstrations much, much more
common and obvious in these animals which apparently can show
the cognitive skills occasionally?
Nicholas Humphrey, in his paper "The Social
Function of the Intellect" asks the same question:
We are thus faced with a conundrum. It has been repeatedly
demonstrated in the artificial situations of the
psychological laboratory that anthropoid apes possess
impressive powers of creative reasoning, yet these feats of
intelligence seem simply to not have any parallels in the
behaviour of the same animals in their natural environment. I
have yet to hear of any example from the field of a
chimpanzee (or for that matter a Bushman) using his full
capacity for inferential reasoning in the solution of a
biologically relevant practical problem. Someone may retort
that if an ethologist had kept watch on Einstein through a
pair of field glasses he might well have come to the
conclusion that Einstein too had a hum-drum mind. However,
that is just the point: Einstein, like the chimpanzees,
displayed his genius at rare times in 'artificial'
situations—he did not use it, for he did not need to use
it, in the common world of practical affairs. (16)
For apes especially, the answer is that the
sophiolytic instinct, in these advanced animals, has attained the
height of its development and effectiveness, for it needs to
restrain a nervous system with tremendous inherent capability.
And in light of Humphrey's comments I might add something
obvious, perhaps painfully so, to which I shall return later: the
sophiolytic instinct is certainly not something that miraculously
disappeared once humankind was on the scene, and its power (like
the power of other important instincts) is negligibly reduced by
awareness of its effect, or of its skeuomorphic nature for man.
Let us consider another example of excess cognitive
capacity, in the chimpanzee. No-one would disagree with the
proposal that the use of language is one of the most advanced
cognitive abilities that has developed. Thus, in the exploration
of potential cognitive abilities of our closest evolutionary
neighbors, the attempt to teach some form of language to
chimpanzees has been going on for a long time. As usual, any
apparent success in this project has been immediately met with
objections, mostly from the lingering remnants of the Behaviorist
School of Thought (at least they readily admit that they
themselves think!). A difficulty has been that chimpanzees
simply do not have the physiology for speech (as opposed to neurophysiology),
hence spoken language of any complexity is physically, but
not necessarily cognitively impossible for them. Thus attempts
have been made to teach chimps various types of sign language as
used by the deaf, and quite good results have been obtained.
The work of B.T. and R.A. Gardner with a chimp
named Washoe constituted a breakthrough, in which the animal was
taught to use correctly about 130 words of the American Sign
Language over a period of four years. Of particular note was: the
achievement of this and other chimpanzees to invent novel word
combinations for new objects and concepts; the fact that chimps
in some of these projects began to communicate between
themselves using the language; and evidence that there began
a cultural transmission of the newly acquired ability. For
example, Washoe's adopted son, even though the experimenters
never used the sign language in his presence, nevertheless
learned over fifty signs directly from Washoe. (17)
Perhaps the most striking example of language
ability in chimpanzees has come from the work of David Premack
and of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane Rumbaugh. These workers
succeeded in teaching chimpanzees a symbol-based language,
using either colored plastic shapes to denote words
("lexigrams"), or in another approach the use of a
keyboard-based language in which keys are marked with arbitrary,
not iconic or representational symbols:
The most ambitious project to teach language to
chimpanzees was initiated by Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Duane
Rumbaugh. With their colleagues they developed a
keyboard-based language. Each key is marked with an arbitrary
symbol. When pressed, a key lights up and its symbol appears
in sequence on a screen, so the chimpanzees can keep track of
their lexigram sequences. The researchers used a word-order
grammar with a generic interrogative symbol to initiate
question sentences. The chimpanzees in these experiments are
typically taught a vocabulary of 75 to 90 words.
The computer-mediated keyboard approach allows
unprecedented accuracy in recording the linguistic progress
of chimpanzees. Analysis of the painful transition from the
one-word stage of using a lexigram to identify an object to a
two-word level that permits interrogation (by both humans and
the chimps) shows that in these experiments the symbols
initially are learned as operants for obtaining things
(usually food). But once the two-word concept is mastered
for, say, asking the name of a particular food, the chimp
realizes how it applies to all other objects. This kind of
mental breakthrough opens new horizons for the chimp and at
the same time demonstrates that they understand concepts like
"food" and "tool."
In a further extension of language use, the
keyboard-based approach has allowed two chimpanzees to
communicate with each other. The chimps had to learn that the
keyboard and screen could be used for two-way exchanges; just
mastering the techniques for answering researchers' questions
or making requests was not enough. But once the chimpanzees
grasped the idea of exchanging information, they were able to
cooperate to solve problems. To take a typical example, one
chimp would figure out what sort of tool it needed to get at
food left by a researcher, and then use the keyboard to ask
the other animal (in an adjoining room) for that implement;
the second chimp, who was unaware of the particular problem,
would pass the requested tool through a small opening. Again,
there was every evidence of a conceptual threshold having
suddenly been reached: training accelerated and error rates
plummeted. Moreover, the chimps began to engage in what seems
to be interactive play via the keyboard link. (18)
The idea of "a conceptual threshold having
been reached," is precisely what would be expected from my
hypotheses: the excess inherent cognitive capacity of the chimps
is sufficient for significant language abilities, but chimps in
the wild have never achieved these abilities because there is a
powerful, if not almost unbreachable barrier which needs to be
overcome to allow a specific manifestation of excess cognitive
capacity to be used routinely. Thus it requires great and careful
effort to teach chimps the rudiments of language in experiments
like these, but once a certain stage is reached, once the
significance of the new situation and ability has temporarily
nullified the sophiolytic instinct, the new abilities themselves
become part of the normal routine of the chimps, and are even
taught to youngsters independent from further human training.
I should mention one further example in which even
greater abstract reasoning ability in chimpanzees has been
demonstrated. This is a particularly valuable body of evidence
for my hypotheses since it illustrates that a particular
cognitive ability, once liberated from control by the sophiolytic
instinct, may then facilitate the liberation of further cognitive
abilities which would not have been possible for the animal to
learn or employ without having achieved the first ability. I will
use another extended quote from Gould & Gould to describe the
work, the title of this section is "Chimpanzee Logic":
Though the reasoning abilities of keyboard-trained
chimpanzees have not yet been explored in any systematic way,
Premack has tried teaching a variety of logical operations to
both language-trained and untrained chimpanzees. In the
simplest tests, the chimps were faced with the task of'
labeling pairs of objects as either "same" or
"different." This problem is unlike the
same-different concept tests described earlier. In the usual
form of the task the experimenter shows an example and then a
pair of objects, one of which is the same as the example and
the other different; the animal is rewarded for choosing the
member of the pair that is different. In the Premack study,
however, the two objects to be categorized were presented
simultaneously. Language-trained chimps learned this
discrimination, whereas untrained chimps did not.
Premack also attempted to teach the concept of
analogies: A is to B as C is to D-lock is to key as can is to
can opener, to choose one of the most abstract examples he
used. The usual format of the test was to present an
incomplete analogy and offer a choice of three different
objects to finish the verbal equation. Language-trained
chimpanzees eventually handled these tasks with nearly an 80
percent accuracy rate; chimps without language training, on
the other hand, never mastered even the simplest analogy:
"apple is to apple as banana is to...."
Another task familiar to students of child
development is proportionality. Language- trained chimps
could choose an object—a half circle rather than a full
or three-quarter circle—that corresponded to the
proportion visible in the test object (a half-filled glass of
water, for instance). Chimps without language training could
master this task only so long as the choice objects they had
to select from were similar to the test object.
Interestingly, Premack found that his language-trained chimp
had no difficulty with a related concept that proves very
difficult for children: conservation of volume. Young
children judge the amount of liquid in a glass or the mass of
clay in a lump by its height or length; thus they behave as
though there is more water in a tall, thin glass than in a
short, squat tumbler, even if they have seen each filled from
identical containers of liquid. The language-trained chimp
tested on this task required no instruction: from the outset
she recognized the two amounts as being the same. To be fair,
though, this chimp was nearly 20 years old at the time, and
she had had plenty of opportunity to learn the basic facts of
fluid physics before testing ever began.
Finally, Premack has taught language-trained
chimps to complete cause-and-effect sentences of the form
"whole apple plus X produces cut apple," offering
three objects (a bowl of water, a knife, and a pencil, for
instance) as possibilities for X; in other tests, the goal
was to supply the final item, as in "dry sponge plus
bowl of water produces Y." The language-trained chimp
mastered these tasks with a minimum of training; untrained
chimps failed. (19)
Clearly, advanced apes have extensive latent
language capabilities, and even what would have to be called a
capability for logical reasoning, and one wonders what might be
developed by these animals by the training of a hundred
generations of chimps, first by human instructors but later by
cultural transmission. Unfortunately such experiments are
difficult to carry out without access to a time machine, and
physicists seem loathe to provide us with either a theory or the
technique for constructing one. But extensive experimentation
attempting to use psychedelic drugs as facilitators for this
process are called for, and might well reveal a facilitation,
perhaps cumulative, for the animals' rapid overcoming of
sophiolysis and resultant achievement of quantum leaps in their
cognitive development. Again unfortunately, government
restrictions on psychedelic research, and especially a strong
reluctance for scientists to engage in research with such
"discredited drugs of abuse" make it certain that such
work will not soon be attempted. Perhaps the absurdity of my
comment on time machines will call attention to the even greater
absurdity of the impossibility of undertaking, in the present
social, political, and scientific climate, even the most
elementary of psychedelic research projects.
Gould and Gould continue with a few careful
comments about what the chimpanzee research might indicate, and
certainly caution is necessary when research has barely begun in
a field. But the evidence outlined above, if not yet sufficient
for other conclusions, clearly demonstrates the validity of the
concept of excess cognitive capacity and the sophiolytic
instinct. Yet leaving the model at the stage of postulation of
yet another mysterious instinct without physiological basis would
not have amounted to much more than another instance of New-Age
technobabble if the facilitating neurocognitive mechanisms for
its operation could not be found or hypothesized.
The next stage of my model-building toward the
psychedelic theory therefore involved an attempt to see how the
sophiolytic instinct might actually operate on a physiological
level. The fact that it seemed to be such an important instinct
hinted that a fundamental operation of the nervous system might
produce what at first would be seen as an instinct, much as the
discovery of fundamental neurological operations had elaborated
the nature of such former "instincts" as those for
hunger, thirst, or breathing. The idea that instincts were
essentially habits, or exhibited themselves as such, and the
realization that the implementation of a habit could only be
using the contents of long-term memory in an unconscious way, led
to the models described in chapters three and four. These models
were then seen to have a wide explanatory power across a range of
phenomena, as my examples in these chapters showed. Thus the
sophiolytic instinct became the primary cognitive operation of
the nervous system of all advanced animal life, the habit routine
search function. Now it was no longer necessary to posit a
skeuomorphic instinct, of mysterious origin and operation, to see
how the result that such an entity would produce was instead
brought about by a normal brain operation utilizing brain areas
common to all mammals right back to the most primitive.
The sophiolytic instinct thus turned out to be
merely a descriptive artifact resulting from the way animal
nervous systems have evolved to operate, the HRS system as the
primary cognitive operation, and the requirement of activation of
the SD (significance detection) system, dependent on unusual ENV
(environmental) events, for overruling of the HRS patterns as
templates for thinking2 and behavior. As to the question of why
evolution produced a nervous system that detected, not reality
directly, but a representation of current reality drawn from
memory data through the process of HRS, I think that it can be
seen that at each stage of animal evolution, the former type of
nervous system would always lend a greater survival value than
the latter. With the very first organisms that became capable of
"taking a decision", it seems to me that such decision
taking should be a far more efficient and dependable process if
it were based on habit rather than fresh analysis of the entire
environmental input which, at a minimum, would require far more
time and "brain power". Thus we can see the normal and
necessary parameters of evolution as the factor which has
produced the "sophiolytic instinct" which is the
"suppresser of creativity", the characteristic that we
humans are still very much slaves to in lieu of active, strenuous
and constant striving to free ourselves from our in-built
"narrow-mindedness". Needless to say, it is my opinion
that the judicious use of psychedelic drugs to aid in this effort
is precisely the Rx that is called for, just as it has been for
the ancient Greeks at Eleusis, for the Native Americans, for so
many other tribes down through history.
References
(1) The term
"proto-human" is intended to denote anatomically modern
Homo sapiens, before any significant cultural attributes
had yet appeared. Anatomically modern hominids probably go back
150,000 years or more, yet the initial stages of development of
culturally modern man occupied a very brief period, between ca.
50,000 to 30,000 years ago, the Upper Paleolithic. (back)
(2) At roughly the same
time of my own musings about early man, and unbeknown to me,
Terence McKenna was writing about his own evolutionary
hypothesis. It was first outlined in a paper Mushrooms and
Evolution (personal communication 1988), and later developed
in his popular books including Food of the Gods (Bantam
1992). (back)
(3) William James, The
Principles of Psychology Vol. 2, authorized Dover edition of
1950 p383. (back)
(4) "Rapid" on an
evolutionary scale, i.e., perhaps on the order of ten to fifty
thousand years, whereas normal evolutionary changes, especially
important ones, are in general thought to take far longer. (back)
(5) Nicholas Humphrey, in A
History of the Mind (p196) introduces the use of the term in
the present context, and adds that such features are "no
longer subject to selection on utilitarian grounds". (back)
(6) Such as the case of the
Koala Bear and other examples described by Arthur Koestler in The
Ghost in the Machine, Chapter XII. (back)
(7) Gregory Bateson, Steps
to an Ecology of Mind, Random House, 1972, Part I,
"Metalogues". (back)
(8) The Oxford Companion
to the Mind, ibid., "Instinct" p374. (back)
(9) From the foregoing,
instinct thus seems a mere label for phenomena which have not yet
been explained on a more reductionist level. But perhaps there is
a more hopeful future for the term, and phenomena of behavior and
variations thereof which can profit from a new conception of the
term. Recent advances in the science of chaos and complexity
might suggest that at least some instincts, those not explainable
in simple physiological terms for instance, might be something
like state attractors for behavior patterns, analogous to the
attractors seen in other complex adaptive systems. See for
example Complexity, Life at the Edge of Chaos, Roger
Lewin, MacMillan 1992, especially the example on page 176, and
also The Origins of Order, Stuart Kauffman, Oxford
University Press 1993. An instinct seen as a biological state
attractor for behavior would be more like a mathematical function
than some undefined "innate drive" supposedly hidden
away in an organism's "genes", and this behavioral
attractor would guide the formation of habit routines in an
individual animal. Under the influence of such a function, habit
routines in different animals of the same group or species would
be very similar, but yet show the small variations commonly seen
in instinctual behavior. The idea of instinct as a probabilistic
state attractor for the formation of habit routine is perhaps
only a more modern description of William James' idea that
"most instincts are implanted for the sake of giving rise to
habits, and that, this purpose accomplished, the instincts
themselves...consequently fade away." (The Principles of
Psychology, ibid., vol. 2, p402). Since my conception of the
sophiolytic instinct is reducible to the operation of brain
systems however, these speculations would not be of use to the
present work, and I will leave their development for some future
project. (back)
(10) The "dual
characteristic" might at first seem to be tautological: a
"reserve" capacity would necessarily imply the
selective or only occasional use of that capacity, otherwise it
would not be "in reserve". But if we concentrate first
on the aspect of suppression, and then see that this is only an
introductory and oblique way of understanding what an important
cognitive system of the brain is naturally producing, and
further, that other brain mechanisms allow the over-ruling of the
first system, then we see that the tautology is merely the result
of a rudimentary description of the overall phenomena. Here again
is illustrated how an introductory model, primitive and not very
useful in itself, can lead nevertheless to more advanced models
overcoming the original limitations. (back)
(11) James L. & Carol
Grant Gould, The Animal Mind, Scientific American Library
1994. (back)
(12) Donald R. Griffin, Animal
Minds, The University of Chicago Press 1992. (back)
(13) Richard Byrne, The
Thinking Ape, Evolutionary Origins of Intelligence, Oxford
University Press 1995. (back)
(14) Griffin, ibid., p6-7
(back)
(15) Byrne, ibid.,
p86-87 (back)
(16) from: Growing
Points in Ethology, (1976), P.P.G. Bateson and R.A. Hinde,
eds., p307, Cambridge University Press. (back)
(17) See the account in
Gould & Gould, ibid., pp183ff. (back)
(18) Gould & Gould ibid.,
pp186-187. (back)
(19) Gould & Gould ibid.,
pp189-190. (back)
