Aldous Huxley was one of the first in Los Angeles to take LSD and was soon joined by others, including the writer Anais Nin. The screenwriter Charles Brackett discovered "infinitely more pleasure" from music on LSD than he had ever before, and the director Sidney Lumet tried it under the supervision of a former chief of psychiatry for the U.S. Navy. Lumet says his three sessions were "wonderful," especially the one where he relived his birth...Another early experimenter was Clare Boothe Luce, the playwright and former American ambassador to Italy, who in turn encouraged her husband, Time publisher Henry Luce, to try LSD. He was impressed and several very positive articles about the drug's potential ran in his magazine.
There is no question that, at least for a period of time, LSD truly transformed Cary Grant...Much to his friends' surprise, Cary Grant began talking about his therapy in public, lamenting, "Oh those wasted years, why didn't I do this sooner?"
"The Curious Story Behind the New Cary Grant," headlined the September 1, 1959 issue of Look magazine, and inside was a glowing account of how, because of LSD therapy, "at last I am close to happiness." He later explained that "I wanted to rid myself of all my hypocrises. I wanted to work through the events of my childhood, my relationship with my parents and my former wives." More articles followed, and LSD even received a variation of the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.
Of course, celebrities no longer brag about their hallucinogenic experiments. (Instead, we're stuck with the slow motion tragedy of Lindsay Lohan.) Furthermore, the government now treats hallucinogens (such as LSD and mushrooms) as legally equivalent to heroin, crack and opium. Because LSD is a Schedule 1 drug, if you're arrested with more than a single dose (roughly .5 grams), and it's your first offense, the federal sentencing guidelines are as follows: "Not less than 5 years, and not more than 40 years". State penalties are similar, with possession typically leading to 1-3 years in jail. (This despite the fact that study after study shows that prescription drugs kill more people by overdose than illicit drugs.) If it were up to me, our classification of drugs would depend largely on their addictive potential, so that drugs with limited addiction potential (such as LSD) were far less regulated than highly addictive substances, such as crack, oxycontin, heroin, etc. But don't get me started on our endless war on drugs, which is an incoherent disaster.
Back to LSD. Because the drug is so tightly regulated, there has been minimal research on how the drug works in the brain. Just look at these search results: The most cited papers are more than thirty years old. (One scientist I talked to last year said the two main disincentives to use LSD in the lab were the lack of grants - the big funding institutions are only interested in addictive drugs - and the paperwork.) The end result is that we really don't know how LSD alters our sensory experience, except that it binds to a vast array of G-protein coupled receptors, including every dopamine receptor subtype and various serotonin receptor subtypes. All this excess neural activity leads to excitation in the upper echelons of the cortex, such as layers IV and V. And, somehow, those squirts of chemical lead people to conclude that they've found the secret of the universe.
What's unfortunate is that LSD could be a powerful experimental tool. And not in the Timothy Leary sense: I'm talking about rigorous investigations into the neural substrate of consciousness. After all, one of the challenges of investigating human consciousness is that it's a continuous stream. As William James noted in 1890, "Consciousness does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described." The paradox, of course, is that the brain is composed of a trillion different joints, a seeming infinitude of binary neurons switching on and off. So how does that create this? How does three pounds of wet stuff give rise to the ceaseless cinema of subjective experience?
To begin to answer this profound mystery - and it is the mystery of modern neuroscience - researchers have come up with a clever set of experimental paradigms. My favorite isChristof Koch's version of binocular rivalry. In theory, binocular rivalry is a simple phenomenon. We have two eyeballs; as a result, we are constantly being confronted with two slightly separate views of the world. The brain, using a little unconscious trigonometry, slyly erases this discrepancy, fusing our multiple visions into a single image.
But Koch throws a wrench into this visual process. "What happens," he wondered, "if corresponding parts of your left and right eyes see two quite distinct images, something that can easily be arranged using mirrors and a partition in front of your nose?" Under ordinary circumstances, we superimpose the two separate images from our two separate eyes on top of each other. For example, if the left eye is shown horizontal stripes and the right eye is shown vertical stripes, we will consciously perceive a plaid pattern. Sometimes, however, the brain gets a little confused, and decides to pay attention to only one of our eyes. After a few seconds, we realize our mistake, and begin to pay attention to our other eye. As Koch notes, "The two percepts can alternate in this manner indefinitely."
The end result of all this experimentally induced confusion is that the subject becomes aware - if only for a moment - of the artifice underlying perception. We realize that we have two separate eyes, which see two separate things. Koch wants to know where in the brain the struggle for ocular dominance occurs. Which neurons decide which eye to pay attention to? What cells impose a unity onto our sensory disarray?
This is an elegant experimental paradigm. But it's also profoundly limited. Even if we can locate the cells that govern binocular rivalry, that's only a single "neural correlate of consciousness". It remains entirely unclear if those to-be-determined cells in the visual cortex govern all visual experience, or just the contradictions between our eyeballs.
And this leads me back to LSD. Here's a compound that can consistently alter our entire sensory experience, so that the brain is made aware of its own machinery. We see ourselves seeing the world. (I wish Kant had tried LSD - he would have loved it.*) From the perspective of neuroscience, the hallucinogen is like a systematic version of binocular rivalry. If we knew how LSD worked, we might also gain insight into how ordinary experience works, and how that chemical soup creates the feeling of this, here, now. In other words, the molecular "joints" tweaked by the illegal compound can tell us something very interesting about the source of our unjointed stream of consciousness. Cary Grant was on to something.
*Kant: "The imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself."
