Sebastian Marincolo's Blog: High Perspectives, page 6

Marijuana and The Slowdown of Time Perception

“Oh! Do not attack me with your watch. A watch is always too fast or too slow. I cannot be dictated to by a watch.”

            Jane Austen, Mansfield Park, English novelist (1775 – 1817)

 

Charles Baudelaire, Hurled Away by a Stream of Ideas

The phenomenon of a slowed down perception of time during a high is one of the most well known effects of marijuana – infamous to some, highly valued by others. Of course, those “distortions of time perception” can be seen solely as a risk for users – and it is certainly true that those perceptual distortions during a high can become dangerous, for example, while driving a car. On the other hand, many users appreciate this change of perception in safe situations as one of the most valuable experiences during a marijuana high. We have detailed reports about the slowdown of time already coming from members of the “Club des Hashischins” (“Club of the Hasheesh Eaters). The members of this cannabis club ingested large doses of hash marmalade, so it comes as no surprise that many of them became familiar with this phenomenon that shows especially under stronger doses. Charles Baudelaire, one the founding members of the club, wrote:

“… a new stream of ideas carries you away: it will hurl you along in its living vortex for a further minute; and this minute, too, will be an eternity, for the normal relation between time and the individual has been completely upset by the multitude and intensity of sensations and ideas. You seem to live several men’s lives in the space of an hour.”

Hashish User Charles Baudelaire, 1821-1867

 

Baudelaire’s statement already hints at two effects of marijuana that I believe to be relevant of the subjective effect of a slowdown of time perception. He describes something a friend of mine once called “mind-racing” during a high: “a stream of ideas … will hurl you along … and the individual has been completely upset by the multitude (…) of sensations and ideas”. Baudelaire further notes the “intensity” of sensations and ideas that “hurl you along”. In my view, this intensity of experience could also come from what I have called “hyperfocussing” during a high. When high, we hyperfocus on sensations, thoughts or our imaginations and often forget about what is going on around us. Whatever comes into focus becomes more intense. We know a similar but more subtle effect from our everyday experience: When you close your eyes and take time to focus on the taste of ice-cream melting in your mouth, your taste experience gets more intense; you also perceive more details. A forced focus of attention always brings more intensity to whatever we attend to.

 

Fitz Hugh Ludlow in Eternity

In his famous book “The Hasheesh Eater” (1857), the American author Fitz Hugh Ludlow gave us an even more detailed description of the effect of the perceptual slowdown of time during a strong high. Like Baudelaire, Ludlow also ingested large doses of hasheesh and was also completely absorbed by his intense imaginations and streams of thought during his high:

“The thought struck me that I would compare my time with other people’s. I looked at my watch, found that its minute hand stood at the quarter mark past eleven, and, returning it to my pocket, abandoned myself to reflections. Presently, I saw myself a gnome imprisoned (…) in the Domdaniel caverns, “under the roots of the ocean”. Here (…) was I doomed to hold the lamp that lit that abysmal darkness, while my heart, like a giant clock, ticked solemnly the remaining years of time. Now, this hallucination departing, I heard in the solitude of the night outside the sound of a wondrous heaving sea. Its waves in sublime cadence, rolled forward till they met the foundations of the building; (…) Now, through the street, with measured thread, an armed host passed by. The heavy beat of their footfall and the grinding of their brazen corslet rings alone broke the silence (…). And now, in another life, I remembered the fact that far back in the cycles I had looked at my watch to measure the time which I passed. (…) The minute hand stood half way between fifteen and sixteen minutes past eleven. The watch must have stopped; I held it to my ear, no, it was still going. I had traveled through all that immeasurable chain of dreams in thirty seconds. “My god!” I cried, “I am in eternity.”

 

Hasheesh User Fitz Hugh Ludlow, 1836-1870

“Mindracing”, Hyperfocussing, and Associative Leaps

Like Baudelaire, we can see how Ludlow’s mind is racing. He is going through so many associative chains of thought and detailed imaginations that it feels to him like a long time must have been passed since he began his reverie. Usually, he would need hours or days to go through those detailed reflections which actually only lasted for 30 seconds. Also, similar to Baudelaire, Ludlow describes that he is completely absorbed by his thoughts; in other words, he hyperfocuses on an inner stream of thought and, thus, does not pay attention to other processes around him that are unfolding in real time. Both accelerated thinking – or, as I like to call it, “mindracing”, as well as the hyperfocus of attention, then, are described in Ludlow’s report of a radical slowdown of his perception of time.

Ludlow’s story, however, adds another interesting aspect to Baudelaire’s report: His illustrious associative “chain of dreams” is not only detailed and long, but it is also “jumpy”: with various associative leaps, he jumps from one detailed imagined situation to another (“Now … and now .. and now..”). The unusual associative leaps, which are often reported about a high, probably add to his subjective feeling that he ‘mind-travelled’ a long distance, much longer than he would usually do in 30 seconds or even in 30 hours.

According to the reports above, the slowdown of time perception could then arise out of the effects of marijuana to lead to an attentional hyperfocus of the perceiver on an unusually accelerated stream of thoughts, a stream characterized by ‘jumpy’ associative thoughts or imaginations.

It is of course possible that marijuana has an even more direct neurological effect on the way we perceive time. Neuroscientists are beginning to better understand the neural substrates of interval timing, and it seems that these areas are abundant with cannabinoid receptors. However, as far as I can see, we have so far no clear understanding on the exact involvement of the cannabinoids in time perception.

 

The Uses of Time Slowdown

This account of the perceptual slowdown of time during a high would explain why many users of marijuana appreciate the effect of a perceptual time slowdown so much. With their racing and concentrated mind, users often find themselves to be better able to appreciate the subtleties and depths of immediate sensations. For them, the subjective slowdown of time is not merely a perceptual distortion, but can become a real mind enhancement.

Reggae Singer Peter Tosh with Robbie Shakespeare on the Bush Doctor tour, 1978

Arguably, the slowdown of time perception during a high played a fundamental role in the evolution of jazz music and in the evolution of other musical genres like that of reggae. I discuss the role of marijuana in the early evolution of jazz in my essay, “Vipers, Muggles, and The Evolution of Jazz.”

Joyful experiences like eating a great meal, looking at a beautiful piece of art, or skiing down a mountain seem wonderfully prolonged. In his magnificent essay “Mr. X” featured in Lester Grinspoon’s book “Marijuana Reconsidered”, an anonymous author wrote:

“The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.”

Lester Grinspoon would reveal the identity of the author after his untimely death; it was his best friend Carl Sagan.

The slowdown of time perception can be used for relaxation, to step outside the ever-accelerating speed of the demands and routines of our modern everyday lives, and to simply enjoy being in the here-and-now of existence. Countless users seek this perceptual slowdown to appreciate seemingly endless moments in which they can taste incredible details and nuances in a great wine, hear the endlessly complex and soothing sounds of gentle waves washing upon a beach at night or to go on a seemingly infinite voyage during lovemaking. And, as the psychoanalytic Erich Fromm once said:

“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.”

  Baudelaire, Charles (1860) “Le Poème du Haschisch”, in: Artificial Paradises, Citadel, 1998.

    Ludlow, Fitz Hugh (1857/2009). The Hasheesh Eater: Being Passages from the Life of a Pythagorean. Chapter II: “Under the shadows of Esculapius.” http://www.lycaeum.org/ne­penthes/Lud...

    Atakan et al. (2012), “The effects of cannabis on perception of time: a critical review.” Curr. Pharm. Des., 18(32):4915-22.

    Grinspoon, Lester (1971), Marijuana Reconsidered, Harvard University Press, Harvard, p.126.

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Marijuana, Pattern Recognition, and What it Means to be ‘High’

“To understand is to perceive patterns.”

Isaiah Berlin, philosopher, 1909-1997

“As long as habit and routine dictate the pattern of living, new dimensions of the soul will not emerge.”

Henry van Dyke, short story writer and essayist, 1852-1933

 

The Importance of Pattern Recognition

When we talk about patterns or pattern recognition, we tend to think of simple visual patterns like a striped blanket. But our pattern recognition abilities are way more sophisticated than just recognizing basic designs like that. We can visually recognize and distinguish types of trees, cars, or the different painting styles of particular artists. And we perceive not only visual patterns in our environment, but also hear patterns in sounds or music; we perceive the tactile pattern of a wooden surface, the gustatory pattern of the taste of a mango and we can intellectually “recognize” patterns such as the pattern of a certain defensive tactic used by an opponent in a chess game.

We easily recognize thousands of human faces despite their changes over time, and recognize places and objects even under completely different lighting conditions. We can recognize the auditory patterns of a flying wasp, the roaring of a lion or the inimitable style of legendary pianist Dinu Lipatti interpreting a Chopin waltz. Patterns are everywhere, and their perception, memory and recognition are imperative to our survival.

Enhanced Pattern Recognition During a Marijuana High

We have numerous reports from marijuana consumers about the enhancements of various types of pattern recognition abilities. The Harvard psychology professor Charles Tart evaluated enhanced pattern recognition as a characteristic effect observed by marijuana users during a high in his study “On Being Stoned”. About a third of the questioned students agreed with the following statement as correct for a strong or very strong high:

“I can see patterns, forms, figures, meaningful designs in visual material that does not have any particular form when I’m straight, that is just a meaningless series of shapes or lines when I’m straight”

Tart’s study shows that marijuana users not only report this enhanced pattern recognition ability for visual patterns, but also for the perception of all kinds of patterns perceived through various sensory channels. I myself have repeatedly noted that during a high I find myself able to better understand foreign languages, a fact also noted by some contributors to Lester Grinspoon’s website project marijuana-uses.com (see “Lady Chatterley Stoned” and “Some experiences With Language and Learning”). Another anonymous contributor “Rob” describes how a high made him recognize a pattern of “timid rigidity” in his walking style:

“I was also fortunate in that I got high that night, as many reefer virgins report not getting high the first time they smoke. An amazing understanding came to me while walking home. As I strolled along the tree-lined sidewalk carrying on a conversation with a friend, I felt an awkward stiffness in my stride, realizing with each step a timid rigidity. I have since altered my manner of walking to a confident, open gait of long strides and silent footsteps.“

Harvard Associate Prof. Emeritus of Psychiatry Lester Grinspoon

Rob’s experience shows what many reports about enhanced pattern recognition during a high have in common – a shift in attention. Rob does not primarily attend to the conversation he was having with his friend anymore, but to his own body and his walking style, allowing him to perceive a pattern he was unaware of before. Other marijuana users have reported similar pattern recognition processes, where they shifted their attention away from the verbal content of a conversation to the body language of their conversation partner.

 

Why do we Discover New Patterns During a High?

I am sure that there are many more alterations of cognitive processes during a marijuana high which allow users to better perceive patterns of which they were previously unaware. The hyper focusing of attention during a high certainly helps many users to come to a more acute perception of patterns in whatever they attend to. Also, an enhanced episodic memory probably helps to ‘re-cognize‘ patterns which are similar to patterns seen before; if I better remember my last encounter with a Dalmatian dog, this will help me to better see the pattern of a Dalmatian in a picture.

On a deeper, neurological level, I have suggested in my book, High. Insights on Marijuana, that marijuana leads to a synesthetic effect (or, with lower doses, to a ‘pre-synesthetic’ effect). According to the neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, synesthesia plays a major role in the explanation of pattern recognition.

Rob’s story also beautifully illustrates that the recognition of a pattern plays a major role in transcending this pattern. Rob had to first understand that his walking actually follows a pattern to be able to make a conscious decision to break it, because he felt that he wanted to change this pattern. Ultimately, then, a marijuana high not only allows a user to perceive new patterns in nature, music, art, in the workings of society, in the behavior of others or in himself. It also allows him to break with unwanted and previously unconscious patterns. This is not only one of the most important preconditions for creativity, but also an almost inexhaustible source for personal growth and can be used to get over patterns of addiction. A marijuana high may lead you to understand that you follow a routine pattern in lovemaking and help you to transcend it. You may find that you follow a learned routine when dealing with family issues or that you keep on reacting to stress in a bad way. If you use marijuana in the right way, if you learn to surf a marijuana high, it can help you to understand and get away from many unhealthy routines and patterns of behavior, which is why it can be helpful in the treatment of various addictions and help you to grow as a person.

 

What it Means to be ‘High

Marijuana can alter your consciousness in a way that enables you to take a different perspective on patterns in life, as if you were looking from high up, to see and evaluate your live and the lives of others in a privileged way.

You can see different patterns in life and in reality, patterns unfolding in space and time, patterns which are normally invisible to you. It is as if you were standing on a hill looking down at your neighborhood and realizing the generic pattern in which you and your neighbors have spent your lives, in those “little boxes on the hillside, little boxes made of ticky-tacky, (…) little boxes all the same”, as Malvina Reynolds once expressed in what would later become the theme song to the acclaimed comedy series “Weeds”. Maybe this euphoric and elevating feeling of looking at life’s patterns from this ‘high’ perspective, and then transcending them, is an inspiration behind the slang term ‘high’ itself.

 

    Tart, Charles T. (1971), On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication. Palo Alto, Cal.: Science and Behavior Books, p. 71.

 

 

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Vipers, Muggles, and The Evolution of Jazz

“I’m the king of everything

Got to get high before I sing

Sky is high, everybody’s high

If you’re a viper…”

‘Viper’s Drag’ (1934), by Fats Waller

 

Without doubt the history of early jazz and the use of marijuana are intimately intertwined. Thousands of Hindu immigrants from India had brought the use of cannabis to the West Indies in the 1870s; where black and Mexican sailors picked up the habit and introduced marijuana use to the harbor of Storyville, the red light district of New Orleans, the city usually considered the birthplace of jazz. At the beginning of the 20th century, countless black jazz musicians performing in the bordellos of Storyville and in other locations in New Orleans smoke what they call ‘gage’, ‘tea’, ‘muggles’, ‘muta’, ‘Mary Jane’. They will later call themselves ‘vipers’ – allegedly named after the hissing sound taking a quick draw at a ‘reefer’.

Viper Louis Armstrong

Working long night shifts, many vipers prefer smoking marijuana to alcohol. It doesn’t give them the hangovers associated with excessive alcohol consumption. Louis Armstrong, born in 1901, grew up in poverty in Storyville in a rough neighborhood known as “the Battlefield”. A proud viper himself from his youth and for all of his life, he will later say that a sequel to his biography might well be about “nothing but gage”. Armstrong will remember about his use of marijuana:

”First place it’s a thousand times better than whiskey … It’s an Assistant – a friend a nice cheap drunk if you want to call it that …Good (very good) for Asthma – relaxes your nerves …”

“We always looked at pot as a sort of medicine, a cheap drunk and with much better thoughts than one that’s full of liquor.”

Along with jazz, the use of marijuana spreads to bigger cities like Chicago, Detroit, and New York. Around 1930 during the prohibition of alcohol – while marijuana is still legal – there are countless illegal ‘speakeasies’ serving alcohol, but also around 500 tolerated ‘tea pads’ (marijuana bars) in New York alone offering joints for around 20 cents. In the 1930s, viper songs celebrating the use of marijuana become the rage of the jazz world, including ‘Muggles’ (Louis Armstrong), “Sweet Marijuana Brown” (Benny Goodman), Viper Mad (Sydney Bechet), “That Funny Reefer Man” (Cab Calloway), “Viper’s Drag” (Fats Waller), or “Gimme a Pigfoot” (Bessie Smith).

The open reefer party, though, will soon be over for the vipers. From the early days in New Orleans, white officials were not at all enthusiastic about this new self-confident, vibrant black jazz culture finding its way into the heart of white audiences. The first prohibitive laws against marijuana in the southern states were clearly targeted against its users – Hispanic immigrants and black musicians. Harry G. Anslinger, the nation’s drug czar, openly used outrageous racist claims to run his campaign against marijuana and to successfully justify a nationwide prohibition in 1937. In a Senate hearing on marijuana in 1937 he infamously said:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others. … The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races. Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death.”

 

The Multifaceted Influence of Marijuana on Jazz

How much did marijuana really influence the early evolution of jazz? Most of Anslinger’s claims above are, of course ridiculous, but arguably, he was not all that wrong in seeing a connection between marijuana use and jazz. Many historians clearly see this connection, but most usually play down the profound and multi-faceted influence of the marijuana high on the early evolution of jazz. First of all, they underrate the complexity of the marijuana high and its many diverse effects on the performance of musicians. Second, another aspect often completely neglected by historians is that the marijuana high affected not only individual performances, but was also crucially involved in the evolution of the sub-cultural new lifestyle of which jazz was an expression. Let us look at the latter claim first.

 

Marijuana and the Viper Culture

Life is extremely hard for black citizens in the 1920s and ‘30s in the U.S. The Jim-Crow racial segregation laws in the South are still in force and will be up until 1965. They do not only mandate a segregation of black and white citizens in public schools and other public places, but have countless other repressive regulations and norms restricting the liberties of black citizens. David Pilgrim reminds us about the thinking behind the Jim Crow ‘system':

“(…) The Jim Crow system was undergirded by the following beliefs or rationalizations: whites were superior to blacks in all important ways, including but not limited to intelligence, morality and civilized behavior; sexual relations between blacks and whites would produce a mongrel race which would destroy America; treating blacks as equals would encourage interracial sexual unions; any activity which suggested social equality encouraged interracial sexual relations; if necessary, violence must be used to keep blacks at the bottom of the racial hierarchy.“

Black musicians are constantly humiliated by racial segregation and repression, and many of them go through extremely traumatizing experiences. Violations of the Jim-Crow laws or norms – like stepping on the shadow of a white man – are punished with incredible violence; thousands of black citizens are lynched between 1882 and 1968, most of them in the South.

March of Ku Klux Klan members, Washington D.C. 1928

Many emigrate to cities in the north, but starting a life there isn’t quite exactly a stroll in the park either, especially not for black musicians moving to the bigger cities to establish a career. In his autobiography Really the Blues, jazz clarinetist Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow recalls:

“(…) it often happened that a man who migrated into town couldn’t eat unless his woman made money off of other men. But these people didn’t get nasty about it; many a guy kept on loving his woman and camping outside her door until she could let him in (…)“

The musical tradition of the blues had always helped the black community come to terms with their hostile life conditions; it expressed the sadness of many, but also created a space in which they could regain strength, faith, and joy. As Milton Mezzrow put it:

”These blues from the South taught me one thing: You take off the weight off a good man a little and his song will start jumping with joy.“

 

Marijuana for Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome, Anxiety-Relief, and as a Euphoriant

For many, marijuana takes some more weight off. We know today that medical marijuana is used very effectively to treat post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD). In the recent years, thousands of patients with PTSD in the U.S. have received medical marijuana; most of them report that it helps them better than any other medicine. A new study has shown that there are endocannabinoid receptors in the part of the brain that regulates anxiety and the fight-or-flight response; this could also explain why so many patients find that consumed marijuana can help them to reduce anxiety.

Marijuana presumably helped many jazz musicians to deal better with their traumas, fears and culturally imposed restrictions. Accordingly, we can see the heavy use of many jazz musicians at least to some degree as self-medication. At age 11, Billie Holiday’s neighbor attempts to rape her; at age 14, she reportedly has to work as a child prostitute in Harlem for $5 a client. Holiday starts smoking marijuana (and drinking alcohol) habitually before she is a teenager. Her big idol, and life-long marijuana user, Louis Armstrong has to work as a young boy to support his mother, but can not prevent her from also having to work as a prostitute. Holiday’s other idol Bessie Smith, the Queen of Blues – who, like Armstrong and Holiday, also used marijuana throughout her career – grows up in extreme poverty, is an orphan aged nine and starts to work on street corners to escape poverty.

Consumed cannabis can influences the endocannabinoid system in mood regulation, and there is another additional cognitive effect of the high which that helps users with stress relief. Many marijuana users have described in detail a hyperfocusing-effect on their attention. While high, users strongly focus their attention, often dwelling in the here-and-now, forgetting about past troubles or future problems. To say it with Cab Calloway’s 1932 viper song “The Man from Harlem”: “I’ve got just what you need. Come on, sisters, light up on these weeds and get high and forget about everything.”

Also, we know that some marijuana strains can lead to euphoria during a high – which is presumably why we call it a “high” in the first place. Louis Armstrong remembers in his biography:

”It makes you feel good, man. It relaxes you, makes you forget all the bad things that happen to a Negro. It makes you feel wanted, and when you are with another tea smoker it makes you feel a special sense of kinship.“

 

The Empathic Effect of Marijuana

The ‘special kinship’ mentioned by Armstrong adds another important aspect to the picture. When thinking about the hippie era, we usually consider it a fact that a marijuana high made users more loving and empathic. We tend to forget that it had a similar effect for many musicians and their audiences in the swing era of the ‘Roaring twenties’ Twenties – which also helped to pave the way for the later 1950s beat generation. Louis Armstrong goes on to explain the nature of the kinship between the vipers:

”One reason we appreciated pot, as y’all calls it now, was the warmth it always brought forth from the other person – especially the ones that lit up a good stick of that shuzzit or gage (…).“

In a similar vein, Milton Mezzrow explains about jazz musicians using marijuana:

“We were on another plane in another sphere compared to the musicians who were bottle babies, (…) we liked things to be easy and relaxed, mellow and mild (…) their tones became hard and evil, not natural, soft and soulful (…)”

Viper and saxophone player Milton “Mezz” Mezzrow

The empathic effects of marijuana probably also helps the democratization of music which plays a crucial part in the early evolution of jazz. Strong empathy is an equalizer: hierarchies become less important; solos are not only restricted anymore to singers or the classic solo instruments such as guitar or saxophone. As jazz pianist Herbie Hancock will later put it: “It’s not exclusive, but inclusive, which is the whole spirit of jazz.” Racial boundaries and prejudices are more easily overcome. Mezz Mezzrow, the white viper from a Jewish family who famously sells the good quality “mezzroles” (joints) to other musicians, declares himself to be black – out of sympathy for black lifestyle and music.

 

The Effects of the Marijuana High on Musical Performance

So, our current knowledge concerning the medical uses of marijuana and reports from viper jazz musicians strongly suggests that their use of marijuana played a positive role in the evolution of an early jazz culture. But can a high also positively influence the performance of a jazz musician? And if so, how? The effect most often cited as an answer, is the altered sense of time during a high. Dr. James Munch, pharmacologist and associate of Harry G. Anslinger during the 30s and 40s, produced many ridiculous claims about the alleged horrible effects of marijuana, but clearly expressed this point years later, when he said about musicians using marijuana:

“(…) the chief effect as far as they were concerned was that it lengthens the sense of time, and therefore they could get more grace beats into their music than they could if they simply followed the written copy. (…) if you are using marijuana, you are going to work in about twice as much music between the first note and the second note. That’s what made jazz musicians.”

 

Hyperfocusing, Mind Racing, and an Altered Sense of Time

Munch’s point about the altered sense of time and its role in jazz music is important; however, this is only one of several crucial effects of marijuana which can play a positive role for jazz performers. If we want to understand them better, we have to look at the way these effects are interrelated. One of the fundamental effects of marijuana is to hyperfocus attention. Mezzrow remembers this hyperfocus for his auditory experience when he first got high:

“The first thing I noticed was that I began to hear my saxophone as though it was inside my head, but I couldn’t hear much of the band in back of me, although I knew they were there. All the other instruments sounded like they were far off in distance;(…)”.

This hyperfocusing allows him to concentrate more fully on his immediate tactile sensation of his instrument, which improves his control:

”Then I began to feel the vibrations of the reed much more pronounced against my lip (…) I found I was slurring much better and putting just the right feeling into the phrase.”

During a high, the hyperfocusing of attention not only allows for a more analytic perception of whatever it is directed at, the narrowing down of informational processes in the attentional focus probably also leads to mind-racing, which may then lead to an altered sense of time. In his 1938 report Marihuana, America’s New Drug Problem, R. P. Walton states:

“The exaggeration of the sense of time is one of the most conspicuous effects. It is probably related to the rapid succession of ideas and impressions which cross the field of consciousness.”

The connection between the prolonged sense of time and ‘mind-racing’ seems intuitively plausible and is backed by the experiential reports of many marijuana users throughout history. In his 1877 report about a marijuana high, the French doctor Charles Richet explained:

“Time appears of an immeasurable length. Between two ideas clearly conceived, there are an infinity of others undetermined and incomplete, of which we have a vague consciousness, but which fill you with wonder at their number and their extent. With hashish the notion of time is completely overthrown. The moments are years, and the minutes are centuries; but I feel the insufficiency of language to express this illusion, and I believe, that one can only understand it by feeling it for himself.”

Richet mentions an infinity of ideas between two ideas clearly conceived – we can take his “ideas” to refer to what we would usually call thoughts today. The acceleration of a stream of “ideas” or thought processes is sometimes experienced as a stream of associatively connected thoughts, memories or imaginations, much depending on the dosage consumed. Obviously, the acceleration of mental processes in a narrowed down tunnel of attention can help a musician to more rapidly play an improvised solo, or to keep up with the speed of fellow musicians. While this acceleration during a high probably leads to a musician’s ability to “work in about twice as much music between the first note and the second note”, it can also hinder musicians in keeping in time with others. We will come back to this particular downside later on. Beforehand, we should look at some other effects of the marijuana high which may have had a positive effect on the musical performance of the vipers.

 

Short-Term Memory Disruptions, Enhanced Pattern Recognition & Imagination

With their mind unusually focused to the present moment or thought, marijuana users sometimes forget about the original subject framing the discourse. This often leads to a “what-were we-talking-about?” moment when we are loosing the thread of the conversation. Whereas inexperienced users – especially when using high dosages of certain strains – become disoriented, skilled users who consume certain other strains of good quality marijuana can keep the thread. Still, their stream of thought is usually less constrained by the original theme or frame where it started, and also less constrained by the goal where it was intending to go. The stronger concentration on the here-and-now allows a stream of thoughts or imaginations to ‘jump’ more freely along unusually wider associations.

Many marijuana users have also reported an enhanced ability to see new patterns during a high and they often find new similarities between various patterns. In a musical performance, these effects can then lead to a rapid improvisation over known musical themes, which loosely associate them to new patterns and ideas or they can also lead to new connections or transitions between musical themes. Subjectively, this leads to the feeling of a rapid and effortless flow of ideas.

Furthermore, innumerable marijuana users have described that a high enhances their imaginative abilities – visually, auditory, gustatory or otherwise – a capacity which is crucial for the production of new ideas. It goes without saying how important an enhanced ability for auditory imagination could be for a musical performer coming up with a new improvisation on stage, or for a composer working on a new song.

In Mezzrow’s first high, the interrelated effects of a hyperfocus of attention, mind-racing, an enhanced pattern recognition ability and an enhanced imagination lead to a smooth, imaginative flow in his playing:

”All the notes came easing out of my horn like they’d already been made up, greased and stuffed into the bell, so all I had to do was to blow a little and send them on their way, one right after the other, never missing, never behind time, all without an ounce of effort. The phrases seem to have continuity to them and I was sticking to the theme without ever going tangent. I felt I could go on playing for years without running out of ideas and energy”.

 

Marijuana as an Aphrodisiac

Apart from these interrelated cognitive effects of the marijuana high, Mezzrow mentions another interesting and important way in which marijuana affected jazz:

“Us vipers began to know that we had a gang of things in common: (…) we all decided that the muta had some aphrodisiac qualities too, which didn’t run us away from it.”

Many commentators who cited Mezzrow’s passages about the influence of marijuana on his performance on stage usually forget to mention that his high adventure on stage ends in an ecstatic group experience similar to scenes witnessed decades later at the height of Beatlemania.

“The people were going crazy over the subtle changes in our playing; (…) some kind of electricity was crackling in the air and it made them all glow and jump. (…) it seemed like all the people on the dance floor were melted down into one solid, mesmerized mass; (…) looking up at the band with hypnotic eyes and swaying (…). An entertainer (..) was throwing herself around like a snake with the hives. The rhythm really had this queen; (…) what she was doing with (..) her anatomy isn’t discussed in mixed company. “Don’t do that!” she yelled. “Don’t do that to me!”

That’s probably what Duke Ellington meant when he said about jazz, “By and large, jazz has always been like the kind of a man you wouldn’t want your daughter to associate with.”

Swing dancers

 

The Enhancement of Empathic Understanding

I have argued in various places that for skilled users, the marijuana high can lead to various cognitive enhancements, which can also lead to a fundamental enhancement of empathic understanding of others. This effect goes way beyond stronger emotional bonds or the warm sense of sympathy between the vipers as mentioned above. The enhancement of empathic understanding actually allows marijuana users during a high to actually better understand what others are feeling and thinking. In his study On Being Stoned, Charles Tart found that many marijuana users who had received his questionnaires agreed that the following effects are characteristic or frequent for moderate levels of a high:

“’I have feelings of deep insight into other people, how they tick, what their games are when stoned (…).

I empathize tremendously with others; I feel what they feel; I have a tremendous intuitive understanding of what they are feeling.

I feel so aware of what people are thinking that it must be telepathy, mind reading, rather than just being more sensitive to the subtle cues in behavior.

Can marijuana really help people during a high to better understand others? Countless users have not only described that they understand others better while high; they have given detailed descriptions of empathic insights during a high. If we look at some other cognitive effects of marijuana, this makes sense. Take, for instance, the numerous reports of enhanced episodic memory retrieval during a high. Marijuana users have reported in detail how they vividly remember previously forgotten episodes from their past during a high – often, they feel as if transported to the past. This enables them to for instance better emphasize with kids. They have also reported all kinds of enhanced pattern recognition abilities. This can lead to an enhanced ability to read motion patterns in body language, which may, for example, allow you to empathically understand that your friend shows signs of insecurity in a conversation.

Musicians with a better empathic understanding of each other communicate better – both on and off stage. When performing live together, jazz musicians improvise and do not follow strict pre-meditated rules; their performance as a group is crucially dependent on their mutual understanding, reacting to each other within the flow of their performance. Empathic understanding is not only helpful for jazz musicians; it is absolutely crucial to their new and liberated form of music, which depends upon a mutual interplay between musicians spontaneously reacting to each other during their performances.

In the swing era of the 1930s, legendary Billie Holiday and Lester Young were known for their almost telepathic performances; both were experienced vipers and used marijuana regularly. During the time of performing in the Cafe Society, Billie Holiday used to go on taxi rides between the sets to smoke some marijuana, because smoking marijuana wasn’t allowed in the club. Like many other jazz vipers, their use of marijuana may have helped them to come to a closer mutual understanding. We will never know for sure in individual cases how much of a positive influence the marijuana high had on the mutual understanding of musicians; but from what we know about the influence of the high on empathic understanding and from personal reports of jazz musicians and their friends, it certainly seems like many jazz musicians profited from this effect of the high.

 

A Note of Caution

In an interview, jazz clarinetist and bandleader Artie Shaw said he once got frustrated with viper Chuck Peterson, the first trumpet player in his band. Shaw felt that Peterson made the band lag when playing high. He confronted Peterson, who thought he was playing just fine and they came to a deal. Shaw, who had smoked marijuana for a while as a young adult suggested they perform high together – if that worked he said, they would turn on together every night from then on:

“ He gave it to me, I smoked it, and I was playing over my head. I was hearing shit I’d never heard before in those same old arrangements. I finished and turned to him. ‘You win,’ I said. ‘No, man,’ he said. ‘I lose.’

He had been giving me incredulous looks during the evening and I thought he was thinking, ‘Man, this guy is blowing his head off.’ I was hearing great things. But the technical ability to do it – it’s like driving drunk. You feel great, but you don’t know what you’re doing. At least he was honest about it.’

Now, does this show that jazz musicians smoking marijuana were generally undergoing a delusion about their own performance during a high? Hardly. From all we know, experienced vipers like Loius Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, Lester Young, Cab Calloway, Fats Waller, Theloneous Monk, Anita O’Day, Lionel Hampton, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and many others were doing more than just fine performing under the influence of marijuana. Dizzy Gillespie, who wrote he was turned on to pot when he came to New York in 1937, remembers in his autobiography that almost all jazz musicians he knew were smoking pot and some of the older musicians had been smoking pot for 40 or 50 years. Surely, they were not all victims of a self-delusion when it came to performing high.

Jazz trumpet player and viper Dizzy Gillespie

 

However, Artie Shaw’s story reminds us that not every musician can perform well while high; a true viper has to master the effects of the high and has to learn how to ride a high – just like a surfer has to learn how to ride a wave with a surfboard. Note, however, that even musicians who cannot deal with a marijuana high on stage, the high can still turn out to be helpful to them in other ways. Artie Shaw notes above that under the influence of marijuana, he was hearing things in old arrangements that he had never heard before when playing straight. This new perception could have also paved the way for him for new interpretations or arrangements. A marijuana high can help creative processes or activities in many ways and in various phases.

For instance, a writer may feel that he can generate great ideas during a high, while actually feeling that the high doesn’t really help or even strongly interferes with the process of actually writing down the details. If used in the wrong way, marijuana can certainly also have a negative influence on creative performances. The lesson to learn here is that generally, if you want to use marijuana positively for creative purposes, you have to learn how much of which strain can help you in a specific phase of a certain creative processes.

The marijuana high probably enhanced Louis Armstrong’s performance; he was an expert in riding a marijuana high, and he loved it. But that certainly does not mean that his musical ability can be reduced to the influence of marijuana. It was made possible by his enormous talent, his character, his discipline, training and experience. Likewise, the evolution of jazz certainly was not driven solely by marijuana use, but rather was made possible by many factors including the cultural mixture of African, European and Caribbean music and lifestyles, the sociological process of urbanization, amongst many other factors. The aforementioned red light area of New Orleans Storyville, for instance, played a big role in the early development of jazz: “it was a rough area where white values of taste were absent. This made it easier for musicians to develop expressive techniques, slow tempos (for sexy, slow dances) and timbre variation.”

But if we look at the many now better known cognitive changes during a high we come to understand that marijuana substantially contributed to the evolution of jazz. It helped countless skilled vipers to repeatedly come up with new inventive solos, fluid, rapid and imaginative playing; it helped them not just in their individual performances, but also, to better understand each other and to ”click” together on stage. Off stage, the use of marijuana changed the thinking and lifestyle of many jazz musicians from an early age. “If you don’t live it, it won’t come out of your horn”, Charlie Parker once said. From the very beginnings in New Orleans, the marijuana high was integral to the early evolution of a free, joyous, empathic, rebellious, uninhibited, imaginative and creative viper subculture and lifestyle. They celebrated this lifestyle with their jazz – a radically new form of music, one of the greatest cultural achievements to come out of the U.S. and a lasting inspiration to people all around the world.

Armstrong, Louis (1999), In His Own Words, Selected Writings, Oxford University Press, p. 114.

Jones, Max, and Little, John Clifton (1988) Louis. The Louis Armstrong Story 1900-1971 DaCapo Press.

Statement of Anslinger, H.J., Commissioner of Narcotics, Bureau of Narcotics, Depart­ment of the Treasury, http://www.druglibrary.org/schaffer/h...

Pilgrim, David (2000/2012), „What was Jim Crow“, www.ferris.edu/jimcrow/what.htm

Mezzrow, Mezz (1946/1990), Really the Blues, Souvenir Press, London, p.46.

Ibid.

Snyder, William (March 6, 2014), “Discovery sheds new light on marijuana’s anxiety re­lief effects.”http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2014/03/di...

Jones, Max, and Little, john Clifton (1988) Louis. The Louis Armstrong Story 1900-1971, DaCapo Press.

Mezzrow, Mezz (1946/1990), Really the Blues, Souvenir Press, London, p. 94.

Sloman, Larry “Ratso” (1998), Reefer Madness. The History of Marijuana in America, pp. 146-147.

Mezzrow, Mezz (1946/1990), Really the Blues, Souvenir Press, London, p. 72.

ibid.

Compare Marincolo, Sebastián (2010) High. Insights on Marijuana, Chapter 6, “Intensi­fied Imagination, Mindracing, and Time Perception Distortions”, Dog Ear Publishing, Indiana.

Walton, R.P. (1938), Marijuana. America’s New Drug Problem, Philadelphia, Lippincott, S.105.

Malmo-Levine, David (2003), Cannabis Culture, Dec. 5., http://www.cannabisculture.com/articles/3075.html.

Mezzrow, Mezz (1946/1990), Really the Blues, Souvenir Press, London, p. 93.

ibid, p. 73.

For a detailed argument on how a marijuana high might positively affect empathic under­standing compare Sebastian Marincolo (2010) High. Insights on Marijuana, Dog Ear Publishing, Indiana, and Sebastian Marincolo (2013), High. Das positive Potential von Marijuana, Klett-Cotta/Tropen, Stuttgart.

Tart, Charles T. (1971). On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxica­tion. Palo Alto, Cal.: Science and Behavior Books., p. 133.

Compare for instance Lester Grinspoon (ed.), marijuana-uses.com

See Clarke, Donald (2002), Billie Holiday: Wishing on the Moon, DaCapo Press, p.160.

Saroyan, Aram (August 6, 2000), „Artie Shaw Talking“, Los Angeles Times, http://articles.latimes.com/2000/aug/...

See my „Marijuana and Creativity – A Love Story“.

Devaux, Scott, and Giddins, Gary (2009) “Jazz” , College edition online, chapter 4, 8. Storyville, http://www.wwnorton.com/college/music...

For a great source on cannabis and music take a look at Jörg Fachner’s publications on the subject. Also, see Cronin, Russell (2004), „The History of Music and Marijuana“, Cannabis Culture Magazine. http://www.cannabisculture.com/conten....

 

The post Vipers, Muggles, and The Evolution of Jazz appeared first on High Perspectives.

Nightmare Prohibition. Why the Prohibition Against Marijuana Has to End

Watanuga Lahele is radiating. His glassy eyes peep out under a large, conical straw hat, his movements slightly erratic. He has been chewing on a dark-greenish kalangi root and the drug tetralin it contains now clearly shows its euphoric and mind-altering effects. Lahele sits at a huge wooden table, as he does every in May, at the kalangi root festival in Bomaki, the capital of the Republic of West Africa. Hundreds of thousands of visitors have come here again to get collectively intoxicated at the festival. Lahele does not quite manage to get up from the table, he stumbles and falls sideways onto some other visitors. Soon, several people get in a brawl. The kalangi root is not only highly addictive, but also makes many of its consumers more aggressive. In the Republic of West Africa tetralin is completely legal, despite its mind-altering effects and various dangerous side effects.

A Legal Drug Festival in Africa

During the kalangi festival there are dozens of rapes every year, and sexual harassment is quite common. Many visitors end in emergency rooms after dangerously overdosing the drug. But these aspects are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the destructive potential of Tetralin. Its effects on perception and motor control during strong intoxication are so devastating that tens of thousands of consumers in the Republic of West Africa die or get injured every year. Tens of thousands die from overdoses or from the consequences of prolonged overconsumption and addiction. The side effects of chronic abuse of the drug on the human body and mind are disastrous. Prolonged heavy use can lead to hepatitis, liver cirrhosis, nerve cell damage, psychosis, laryngeal-, liver-, stomach-, or pancreatic cancers, as well as to cardiac insufficiency, depression, and forms of dementia such as Korsakow’s syndrome, a pitiful state in which patients forget earlier experiences and are also incapable of remembering new experiences; their personalities simply fall apart. According to a study by English scientists recently published in the renowned medical journal “The Lancet”, tetralin appears to be less toxic than hard drugs like crack or heroin, but ultimately more dangerous if we take the catastrophic sociological consequences into consideration. The addiction to tetralin, often initiated by even small amounts of the drug, destroys tens of thousands of families each year. According to estimates from government reports, almost every third rape happens under the influence of the drug. It is also involved in approximately one third of cases of aggravated assault and manslaughter and approximately one half of cases of civil disorder.

How is it possible that the Republic of West Africa does not prohibit the drug, that they even celebrate and worship it in their society? Why is this culture so much more permissive than other countries, where a substance like marijuana, which according to many experts is even less dangerous than alcohol or nicotine, is strictly prohibited?

These are the wrong questions, of course. Some better questions would be: Have you realized that I was playing a game with you, that the Republic of West Africa does not exist and that there are no such things as the ‘kalangi root’ or the drug ‘tetralin’? Do you have at least a suspicion of what I was really talking about?

 

The Largest Drug Festival in the World

Please visualize again the scenery of the drug-consuming West African. From there, let’s cross-fade to reality. We are now in Germany, Bavaria, Munich. Replace Watanuga Lahele with Michael Wohlgemut, the 33-year old project manager of a mid-sized software company. He wears his traditional Bavarian festive outfit: leather pants, a plaid red and blue shirt, and a big grey conical bowler hat. Michael, usually a timid guy and diligent employee, is sitting in a giant tent and belting out Bavarian folk songs while occasionally grabbing the backsides of passing waitresses. He is drinking his fifth beer, and his perception and motor coordination are just as deteriorated as described for Watanuga Lahele above. He is attending the biggest and most famous drug festival in the world, the Oktoberfest in Munich, in Germany, central Europe, the self-proclaimed epicenter of civilized European post-Enlightenment rational society.

So, no, Watanuga Lahele does not exist, the kalangi root does not exist, and there is no tetralin. But Oktoberfest exists, alcohol exists, and all the statistics and facts cited above for ‘tetralin’ actually apply to the Oktoberfest and alcohol consumption in Germany – a drug legal in most countries worldwide. The statistics on fatalities, rapes under the influence, the long list of horrible side effects, all these are well known statistics on alcohol abuse in Germany, and it certainly does not look significantly different for most other countries. And yes, in fact, the mentioned study in “The Lancet” really does say that alcohol should be considered more dangerous than crack or heroin, if you consider the destructive social consequences. 42 The study was published by Prof. David Nutt, the renowned expert and chief drug advisor of the British government, who was fired after publicly stating what many colleagues in his field believe: that substances like marijuana, LSD and ecstasy are, from a pharmacological point of view, far less dangerous than alcohol.

So, do we need a strict prohibition against alcohol to protect our society and especially our youth from this dangerous drug? We could punish even the possession of small amount of alcohol and expel students from high school when consuming any small amount of alcohol – a zero tolerance policy. Illegal alcohol drinkers, which we would then call “criminal drug consumers”, could be stigmatized as such with entries in their criminal records. We could force them to take unannounced blood tests to get a job and to keep it. Certainly, we would also have to start a “war” of epic proportions to fight the illegal market created by our prohibition, with myriads of policemen, undercover agents, soldiers, and border control troops to go after producers, dealers, smugglers and consumers. We could expect a huge illegal market with millions of criminal users, so we would have to send millions to jail. As is the case for marijuana in the U.S. now, we would probably have to send more than half a million consumers every year to jail – wine and scotch connoisseurs well as those who simply enjoy their beers during the Super Bowl final.

Of course, an alcohol prohibition would be a bad idea – we all know that now.

The infamous mobster Al Capone profited immensely from the black market during the alcohol prohibition in the U.S.

But as a reaction to the story of Watanuga Lahele, a strict prohibition probably seemed to you a necessary measure to fight the use of the kalangi root – a drug for which I described in detail exactly the side-effects known for alcohol. What is wrong with our perception here? Could it be that we have heard too often phrases like “drugs, tobacco and alcohol”, phrases that presuppose that tobacco and alcohol are not really drugs at all?

Why do we still have a nationwide and almost worldwide marijuana prohibition, while a much more dangerous drug like alcohol is legal despite all of its destructive toxicological side effects and its negative impact on society? It’s been evident for a long time now that marijuana prohibition is just as inefficient and destructive as the alcohol prohibition during the first world war.

Police raid during the alcohol prohibition in the U.S.

 

We know that some countries with a strict prohibition have higher rates of marijuana users than, for instance, the Netherlands, where the use of marijuana has been decriminalized now for decades.43 Decriminalization of marijuana in the Netherlands and other countries did not lead to higher increase rates of consumption than in countries with a brutally enforced prohibition. On the contrary, the numbers dropped compared with countries with strict prohibition. This shows not only that a strict prohibition fails to diminish the use of marijuana; it also undermines the argument of prohibitionists that without a prohibition, the gates of hell would open and that the numbers of consumers would increase uncontrollably. The prohibition in the U.S. costs billions of dollars and creates a gigantic black market, where uncontrolled and low-grade substances find their way to consumers without being taxed. Why haven’t we learned our lesson?

 

The Prohibition of Marijuana in the U.S.

The marijuana prohibition for the most part has its origins in a disinformation campaign which began in the 1930s. After the end of the catastrophically failed alcohol prohibition, the federal prohibition agency had to look out for a new task to stay in business. To that end, Harry G. Anslinger, the head of the new “Federal Bureau of Narcotics”, started a mixed media campaign against marijuana. Horror stories about marijuana were invented and placed in newspapers nationwide and found their way into radio spots and propaganda films. Anslinger let his spin doctors portray marijuana as a deadly poisonous drug that would turn consumers into aggressive and out-of-control rapists and killers, leading even the occasional user to chronic insanity and death. One of his extremely cynical strategies was to exploit existing racial prejudices against those minority groups who predominately used marijuana at the time: Mexican immigrants and black jazz musicians like Louis Armstrong. At a time where marijuana was hardly known in the white mainstream, Anslinger’s scare tactics turned out to be remarkably effective. One of his famous statements testified to Congress was:

“There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the U.S., and most are negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana use. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others. … The primary reason to outlaw marijuana is its effect on the degenerate races. Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality and death. You smoke a joint and you’re likely to kill your brother. Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.”44

Anslinger’s campaign eventually led to the prohibition of marijuana in the U.S.. Medical experts of the American Medical Association testified against its prohibition, but were ignored. The House of Representatives followed Congress and approved the “Marijuana Tax Act”, which effectively started the prohibition in 1937 after a 90 second long discussion of the bill. During said discussion two questions were raised. In response to the question about the opinion of the American Medical Association (AMA), a committee member falsely informed them that the AMA would fully endorse this measure. The other question was to summarize the purpose of the bill: The speaker of the committee replied: “I don’t know. It has something to do with a thing called marijuana. It is a narcotic of some kind”.

It is hard to believe that such an extensive prohibition would have its roots in a disinformation campaign based on manufactured racist lies and purely invented claims about the toxicological effects of marijuana. Yet, the history of marijuana would take an even more bizarre turn. In the following years, more and more experts doubted Anslinger’s claims. The first serious interdisciplinary study on the subject of marijuana, initiated by New York’s Mayor Fiorella LaGuardia in 1944, refuted almost all of Anslinger’s claims.

New York City mayor Fiorello LaGuardia

 

Experts found that marijuana use would not lead to violent or criminal behavior, that it would not act as a gateway drug and they could not find scientific evidence for the claim that marijuana would be dangerously physically harmful to users. Faced with this evidence, the outraged Anslinger struck back with a new strategy – another disinformation campaign geared to the new political climate. In the heated atmosphere of the anticommunist McCarthy era, Anslinger now claimed that marijuana had to be outlawed because it would make users too peaceful and because communist China would illegally bring in marijuana to the U.S. to undermine the defensive morale of the military and the public. The absurd twist in Anslinger’s argumentation did not seem to bother politicians much. The prohibition was prolonged and the penalties would get even more severe under the “Bogg’s Act”, which was signed by President Truman in 1951.

Anslinger was not only the chief commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from 1930 to 1962. Additionally, he served as the American representative of the United Nations Drug Commission and used his influence to implement the “Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs”, in which marijuana was put on the same level with opiates. The global ban of cannabis cultivation can primarily be traced back to the efforts of a man whose main sources of information were publications of the boulevard press, as a posthumous searching of his files reveals.

 

The Ongoing Disinformation-Campaign against Marijuana

Anslinger’s campaign led to a lasting marijuana prohibition and effectively shaped the public’s image of marijuana worldwide. Even today, our understanding of marijuana is strongly affected by negative associations drilled into the public’s consciousness by Anslinger’s previous disinformation campaigns. Cognitive scientists speak of “cognitive priming” if a previous process of conditioning leads to certain associations, such as when we hear a notion and automatically associate images or have certain expectations previously paired with this notion. The ongoing prohibition keeps generating the stereotypes which it needs to survive: marijuana consumers are made criminal by prohibition laws and so we associate marijuana use with criminal behavior. Prohibitionists continue to use their spin doctors to create absurd arguments in support of their cause. It has been argued, for instance, that there would be a growing number of marijuana users in recent years seeking help from therapeutic institutions; there are statistics to back up this claim. However, one key aspect is concealed: there is an increasing number of marijuana users ‘seeking’ therapy because there is an increasing number of users forced to do so as part of a sentence for possession.

Anslinger’s disinformation strategy has been refined by later prohibitionists. The new PR strategies can most prominently be see in the misleading rhetoric of the slogan ‘war on drugs’, which was introduced under President Nixon. But there has never been a war on drugs. If we look at our history, we can only see an ongoing conflict amongst various drug users.

In ancient Mexico, for example, the consumption of alcohol was punishable by death, while the ritualistic use of the psychedelic drug mescaline (from the peyote cactus) was highly worshipped. In Russia, tobacco smokers were threatened with mutilation or decapitation, while alcohol was legal. In Prussia, coffee drinking was prohibited in the second half of the 18th century (except for by higher state officials and noblemen) and was punished with a jail sentence of up to four years or birching, while other drugs like alcohol were legal at the time.

Countless myths about marijuana continue to circulate today, even though they have long been refuted by scientific evidence. In their study “Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts”, the authors Lynn Zimmer and John P. Morgan collected all the myths and quote in detail and summarize the scientific studies debunking those myths.45 To name only a few, they investigate and debunk the myths that marijuana “has no medical value,” that it is a “gateway drug to harder drugs,” that it “causes an amotivational syndrome,” that marijuana “kills brain cells,” “causes crime,” “impairs the immune system,” or that it is “more damaging to the lungs than tobacco”.

 

The Destructive Consequences of the Prohibition

But even if we agree with a more scientifically informed view about marijuana, which clearly states that the overall risk potential of marijuana is much lower than that of a legal drug like alcohol, we certainly have to take the risks seriously. Every psychoactive substance brings risks for consumers. Adolescents are especially vulnerable to problems with marijuana abuse – mainly not because marijuana would physically harm them, but because psychological addiction and chronic overdose can heavily contribute to failure at a critical stage in their educational careers. Adolescents and people with personal instabilities need the special protection of our society. Tragically, though, it is exactly in this respect that the prohibition of marijuana fails the most. In recent surveys, high school students say that despite the strict and ongoing prohibition, marijuana is easy to get on the street these days.46 In spite of all the efforts, prohibition is not only ineffective – it is also destructive and deadly on a monstrous scale; parents lose their jobs or even go to jail for even minor cases of possession, students are expelled from school or college. Every year, more than half a million marijuana users are jailed in the U.S. alone, most simply for possession of small quantities of marijuana. Families are torn apart and the prohibition generates a huge illegal market, in which gangs violently fight for control and consumers often get laced and contaminated marijuana.

Overcrowding in California State Prison

Even worse, our youth loses their trust and respect for a government that prohibits a substance widely known to be far less dangerous than the legal substances alcohol or tobacco. This loss of trust is disastrous when it comes to the general relationship between citizens and their state. In connection with behavior towards drugs it may also lead many teenagers to underestimate the much more dangerous toxicity of legal drugs like alcohol. The ongoing irrational treatment of marijuana makes it impossible to correctly and objectively educate an entire generation of adolescents. As a result, we miss our only chance to actively educate and lead millions of citizens to a more healthy attitude and behavior towards psychoactive substances in general.

We can protect our adolescents and citizens in general much more effectively with a regulation of marijuana similar to that of alcohol or tobacco. In order for the government to be credible and effective, it has to start behaving rationally – which means finally listening to scientific experts in the field. However, the sad historic record is that government agencies repeatedly issued scientific studies on marijuana, only to have the governments ignore the results. All the most important studies refuted Anslinger’s myths about the dangers of marijuana and recommended a decriminalization of marijuana, whether it was the Report of the Indian Hemp Commission (England 1984), the study of the Mayor LaGuardia Commission (1944), the Baroness Wooten-Report (England 1968), the Report of the Lading-Commission (Canada 1972), the Shafer Commission Report (1972), or the Report of the Canadian Government Commission of Inquiry Into the Non-Medical Use of Drugs (Canada, 2002) – to name only a few.

According to a 2005 report by Dr. Jeffrey Miron, replacing marijuana prohibition with a regulation similar to that used for alcohol would save the U.S. government between $10 billion and $14 billion per year, based on the expected savings and tax revenues.47 Among the endorsing economists are three Nobel laureates, including Dr. Milton Freedman. This money could effectively be used for education as well as therapeutic measures, especially for those who according to medical statistics need it most: alcoholics, and nicotine and prescription drug addicts.

 

The Rediscovery of the Potential of Cannabis

More than a 15 years ago, scientists discovered an endogenous cannabinoid system in the human brain, a signaling system in our bodies that uses cannabinoids and their receptors to control several types of physiological and cognitive processes. Since then, scientists have made vast progress in the understanding of this system. This research is already useful to understand what thousands of patients have told us about the medical usefulness of marijuana, patients who have claimed that marijuana helped them so effectively in so many ways – without most of the horrible side effects of the prescription drugs they were historically forced to use instead. Of course, the pharmaceutical industry has only limited interest in expensive research of a plant which cannot be patented and which can be grown by anyone in their garden. There’s simply no money to be made. At this point, our government has to take action and invest money in the medical research of this plant which has been listed as useful in the pharmacopoeias of various human cultures for more than 5000 years. Other funds should be used to educate the public about the general risk potential of all psychoactive substances.

It is time now to come to a more realistic treatment of the subject of psychoactive substances. It is unreasonable to think that we should demand complete abstinence from all drugs from our citizens. The use of psychoactive substances has not only been prevalent in all societies throughout human history, but goes much further back in evolution. The American psychopharmacologist Ronald K. Siegel, perhaps the world’s foremost scientific expert concerning the interaction between animals and psychoactive plants, states:

“History shows that we have always used drugs. In every age, in every part of this planet, people have pursued intoxication with plant drugs, alcohol, and other mind-altering substances…Almost every species of animal has engaged in the natural pursuit of intoxicants. This behavior has so much force and persistence that it functions like a drive, just like our drives of hunger, thirst and sex. This “fourth drive” is a natural part of biology, creating the irrepressible demand for drugs. In a sense, the war on drugs is a war against ourselves, a denial of our very nature.“48

Instead of trying to preach abstinence or a war on drugs, we should educate people who have decided to use psychoactive drugs to come to a more respectful and meaningful relationship with them. In order to do so, we also need to acknowledge the fact that psychoactive substances have not only risks, but also a positive potential. The dangers of alcohol are clearly evidenced when we see drunk and aggressive hooligans violently and uninhibitedly beating down on their victims. On the other hand, alcohol has a positive potential, not only medically speaking, a potential that many of us have made use of before. The disinhibiting effect of alcohol allows the shy lover to talk to the girl of his heart, the wine gourmet experiences a mind-boggling burst of taste sensations, and writers and many others have used alcohol to better concentrate or to facilitate their stream of thoughts. Millions of us use alcohol, not because they are addicted drug consumers, but because they have made a decision to enhance the quality of their lives in spite of the risks associated with alcohol use.

The findings in endocannabinoid research are not only beginning to explain the medical potential of marijuana. They are also beginning to deliver explanations for the thousands of reports of healthy and otherwise law-abiding citizens who use marijuana for recreational and inspirational purposes. Even if only a fraction of the myriad user reports about the positive potential of marijuana for various purposes is correct, we must ask ourselves if a prohibition is not a severe intrusion into the personal rights of millions of citizens who have obviously decided to explore that potential for themselves – just as millions of people have decided to use (or, abuse) alcohol.

The legalization of marijuana is not a dangerous experiment. Marijuana has been used throughout history in many cultures and has been legal for most of that time worldwide. Even in a country like India, where marijuana has been used by large parts of the population for centuries, studies have not found any of the health or other problems that prohibitionists would predict. Users did not run amok in masses and there was no increase of schizophrenia or other mental problems in the population. In the Netherlands, there has been no dramatic increase of use and no trafficking-related chaos ensued since marijuana was decriminalized. Legalization is not an experiment – the prohibition is the experiment, and it is becoming more and more clear that it has failed dramatically, with millions of victims all around the world. More and more citizens have come to this conclusion in recent years. The Global Commission on Drug Policy, organized to provoke a science-based discussion of humane and effective ways to reduce the harm caused by drugs to people and societies, recently presented their new report, which makes a clear case to end the drug war. Members of this commission include such prominent figures as Kofi Annan, the former United Nations’ chief secretary; George Shultz, the former foreign minister of the U.S.; George Papandreou, current Prime Minister of Greece; Fernando H. Cardoso, the former president of Brazil; Mexican president Ernesto Zedillo, former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria, as well as the former NATO’s chief secretary Javier Solana.

Kofi Annan, former Secretary General of the United Nations (1997-2006)

Many politicians will have to swallow their pride to rectify the fatal errors of the past. Especially ‘law and order’ – hardliners will have a hard time understanding and admitting that their draconic prohibition has never helped to fight criminals, but that it created the catastrophe itself – just as the alcohol prohibition did. We can expect those politicians at best to slowly and silently retreat under extreme pressure, only when they understand that even with their scare tactics they will no longer be able to impress voters. Massive lobbying interests such as the pharma-, alcohol-, and private jail industries still stand in the way of a sensible political change in our drug policies. These lobbyists will need to see that they are out of touch. They need to understand that people have started to wake up from the nightmares Anslinger and his followers made all of us dream.

The post Nightmare Prohibition. Why the Prohibition Against Marijuana Has to End appeared first on High Perspectives.

Addiction and Marijuana

They really make me nervous sometimes. And they seem to be everywhere. Frantically, they move around in circles, slaves to implemented passions – addicts, manipulated, betrayed, and in self-denial. At six in the morning, the first type of addicts run to get their daily fixes: the classic workaholics. They swarm out of their houses to go and work like maniacs. Some are craving for more power, suppressing the persistent feeling of having slowly turned into corporate marionettes. Others work excessively to satisfy their shopping addiction and buy whatever they have been told makes them better, more happy, or more valuable people.

Most of them are multiple drug addicts with a long history of abuse: hundreds of millions are addicted to several caffeine-shots in the morning and afternoon, or they need their drug sugar and its instant hit almost hourly, and many of them are additionally addicted to nicotine and the dozens of other psychoactive chemicals in cigarettes which gives them a short-lived dopamine high and staves off their inherent depression for just a few minutes before the craving starts all over again. A growing number of people are physically addicted to alcohol or other depressants, sleeping pills, stimulants like amphetamines or alkaloids like cocaine, pain relievers, or are psychologically dependent on selective serotonin-, noradrenaline- or dopamine re-uptake inhibitors or various other new antidepressants. And that is only the beginning of a much longer list of substance addictions.

A more recent class of addicts are what I like to call the cybersociaholics – those unhealthily obsessed with abundant yet meaningless communication through a multitude of social networking tools and other communication channels. Compulsively, they check their three or four email accounts, then go to their facebook mailboxes and pinwalls, chat a little while constantly looking up and responding to their sms, Viber, or WhatsApp messages on their smart phones, then maybe an occasional glance at their LinkedIn or XING accounts, then switch and check what happened on their blogs or in their internet dating portals match.com or perfectmatch.com (they don’t just want to be matched, they want to be perfectly matched). Once they finish dealing with the last of their 10-15 communication platforms – not counting landline telephones, one or two mobile phones, their post boxes, or fax machines – they return to the start of the loop. It’s been almost hour .. maybe somebody finally posted something new on facebook? Maybe somebody replied to the blog?

Naturally, the myriads of cybersocioholics are only a subgroup of the larger group of the internetaholics, just like the cyberpornaholics, cyberpokeraholics, and other cybergameaholics. If their internet activities would not be so compulsively restricted to satisfying their respective addictions, they might stumble upon Kimberly Young’s website netaddiction.com, which offers treatment services in the categories “Cyberporn/Cybersex, Online Affairs, Online Gambling, Online Gaming, Compulsive Surfing, ebay Addiction.”

Other media addicts are sticking to a more old school addiction for television or computer games. On TV or in the movie theater they watch action movies or war movies, car races, or professional wrestling to kick up their adrenaline levels like nothing else in their safe and streamlined ‘real’ lives does anymore – and so one way or another they spend half of the time in simulated virtual realities. They belong to the larger class of virtuaholics, which includes everyone addicted to the ever-growing virtual world, a safe and controllable refuge helping them to escape from reality. Wiiholics are the blessed ones in the group of virtuaholics: to outsiders, they may look ridiculous jerking their limbs around in a weird way, but the industry actually made a nice little concession to their human nature by encouraging them to actually move around a bit while perceptually hooked up to their virtual reality, whereas other virtuaholics are usually sitting there like frozen dummies, perceptually hooked to screens showing strangely impoverished glowing colors. Most of them seem to have lost touch with their bodies after suppressing the feeling of a self-inflicted paralysis for years. Yet, their bodies come out of a long evolutionary process which predestinated them to run, hunt, and fight, so now they are all starting to feel uncomfortable and becoming addicted to Ritalin for their attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Their doctors are usually part of a “health care” system generating money off of turning people into prescription drug addicts rather than actually improving their health. And so they are handed out prescriptions for all kinds of tranquilizers and sleep inducing drugs to force their bodies to keep quiet even after a virtual day in subconscious paralysis on a stylish wheelchair. This health care system is only a part of an entire industry designed to nourish and satisfy the addictions of its consumers – reinforced addictions are magnificent money-making machines.

Sometimes I feel like I need a break from all these addictions and obsessions around me. I fly to Portugal to play at the Bar do Peixe Ultimate Frisbee beach tournament, chase a plastic disc all day long, breathe fresh air, and jump in cool Atlantic water. In theevening, I sit down on top of a sand dune at the magnificent Meco Beach, light up a joint, and watch the sunset. The marijuana high takes me in the here-and-now, and my mind frees itself from the daily hustle, needs, and plans. I breathe. Time is slowing down. I focus on the immediacy of my experience and feel my deliciously tired body, the warm wind in my face, and smell the salty scent of the sea. In this expanded head space, I begin to feel free as if standing on a tower, looking down on my life. My high enables me to perceive patterns in my life and in the lives of others, including our routines, addictions, and obsessions. Vivid memories come up and I can relive episodes long past. Marijuana helps to transport me back into my past. With my enhanced episodic memory, I mind-race through previous experiences, I can see personal developments, stand outside my routines and addictions and identify them as such. And yes, certainly, I realize that many of the addictions described above, like cybersociaholism or virtuaholism, are my own. But now my mind is flying, and my attention doesn’t seem to be drawn away by the usual forces. I feel free like a bird and momentarily liberated from my addictions. The marijuana high helps to break the routines, interferes with my addictions, helps me to step outside of the box, to make conscious decisions on my future behavior, and to get sudden insights. Associations come quickly. New notions occur to me, like “cybersociaholism”, based on my enhanced ability for pattern recognition during a high.

Don’t get me wrong: surely, the fact that marijuana can be used as an antidote for other addictions does not mean that it cannot itself be addictive for some. Marijuana may be generally much less addictive and less toxic than other legal drugs like alcohol or tobacco, and the addiction may be primarily psychological, but it can still be destructive and unhealty. So, well, surely there is a risk of addiction, too. But there is also a risk of getting unhealthily addicted to sex, car driving, or social networking – that does not mean that all these activities bring us harm and have to be prohibited. All these activities can bring us great advantages, if we know how to make good use of them – and I, like so many others, certainly make good use of marijuana.

Recently I was talking to a middle-aged man at a party and mentioned my marijuana use. He looked at me with this typically controlled, yet still visible “Oh-my-God-a-drug-addict!”- facial expression and then he said, fully convinced of himself, “I am not using drugs.” I couldn’t help but smile, looking at the cigarette in his left hand, which also held a glass of Vodka Red Bull. Altogether, this guy was holding a cigarette containing dozens of psychoactive drugs and a drink combining sugar, alcohol, caffeine, Taurin, and nicotine, and yet he was still completely oblivious to the fact that he was under the influence of several highly addictive psychoactive drugs. Advertising and decades of disinformation campaigns had successfully managed to convince him and so many others that there are “alcohol, tobacco, and drugs”- a classification scheme that presupposes that the former two are something other than psychoactive drugs.

For a few long seconds, I just smiled at him and the many psychoactive drugs in his hand. He still did not get it. And then I had an idea. I would just write an essay. This essay. And the next time a workaholic, alcohol-, sugar-, and caffeine-addicted cybersociaholic, virtuaholic, gameaholic or pornaholic would react to my marijuana use so condescendingly, I could just hand him something to think about.

And, yes, admittedly, when I wrote the essay, I was still a little high, and many of the thoughts in this essay originate in high thinking. This is what I find addictive about marijuana. I don’t need it daily or on a regular basis. But whenever I use it, I love the way it frees my mind and how it enables me to develop new ideas. And what do you get out of your addiction?

The post Addiction and Marijuana appeared first on High Perspectives.

Marijuana Insights: Myth or Reality?

Countless users of marijuana have claimed that marijuana can act as a catalyst to obtain real insights. Are these reports just exaggerations of users justifying their smoking habit? Or is it true that a marijuana high can lead to profound insights?

In his legendary essay “Mr. X” published in Lester Grinspoon’s study “Marijuana Reconsidered (1971),” an anonymous author stated:

“There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we’re down the next day.” 37

With the permission of the author, Harvard psychiatry professor Lester Grinspoon would reveal the identity only posthumously.

It turned out that the article had been written by Grinspoon’s best friend, the late Carl Sagan, famous astrophysicist and popularizer of science who died 1996. In his essay, Sagan claims:

“I can remember on one occasion, taking a shower with my wife while high, in which I had an idea on the origins and invalidity of racism in terms of Gaussian distribution curves. (…) One idea led to another, and at the end of about an hour of extremely hard work I found I had written eleven short essays on a wide rage of social, political, philosophical, and human biological topics. I can’t go into the details of those essays, but from all external signs, they seem to contain valid insights. I have used them in university commencement addresses, public lectures, and in my books.” 38

 

Carl Sagan with a model of the Viking lander that would land on mars

Marijuana VIP’s

Carl Sagan is not the only prominent marijuana aficionado who used marijuana for inspiration. Pulitzer Price winner Norman Mailer once said in an interview for the High Times Magazine:

“(…) what I find is that pot puts things together. Pot is marvelous for getting new connections in the brain. It’s divine for that. You think associatively on pot, so you can have real extraordinary thoughts. But the more education you have, the more you have to put together at that point, the more wonderful connections there are to see in the universe.”39

Other prominent testimonials who used marijuana for inspirational purposes include the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, physicist Richard Feynman, musicians Louis Armstrong, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, directors Robert Altman and Hal Ashby, the American writers Jack London and Alan Ginsberg, French writers Victor Hugo, Charles Baudelaire, and Marcel Proust, the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, and comedians Lenny Bruce, Bill Hicks, George Carlin, Bill Maher, as well as Groucho Marx, who enriched the world with some of the funniest statements ever made (“Either this man is dead, or my watch has stopped”). As you may imagine, this is only a short sequence of a much longer list of marijuana VIP’s.

But how much did marijuana really help them to come to creative insights? Maybe marijuana simply helped to relax and to get their already talented creative minds started. Also, they could be self-deluded about the inspiring powers of marijuana because of what we could call forgetful glorification – ideas during a high often seem to be profound and glorious revelations, just like taste experiences during a high become so much more intense.

 

The Evidential Challenge

So, even if we document and evaluate myriads of stories from prominent and other users about deep and interesting insights during a high – can we take them at face value? We should expect marijuana users to be biased towards justifying their use, so they will probably emphasize and document their insights during a high.

How could we possibly find better evidence for the insights claim then? I suggest the following approach: first, we have to clarify what kind of cognitive processes insights are in general. We have to find out which cognitive processes are involved when we obtain insights, such as episodic memory retrieval, changes in attention, or pattern recognition. Second, we should look at studies and personal reports which concern the effects of a marijuana high on those various processes. We can then put the puzzle pieces together and see how marijuana affects our ability to produce insights by affecting a whole array of underlying cognitive abilities.

 

Insights in Psychology and the Cognitive Sciences

We all have those “Eureka” experiences and little or more profound insights once in a while. Suddenly, you realize that you can take a shortcut to drive to the supermarket. In an instant, you understand one day you have to become an artist, or you realize in a flash that your marriage is going nowhere. Insights occur spontaneously, like sudden quantum leaps in understanding; rather mysterious in nature, but sometimes with a profound impact on our lives. For a long time, the mainstream of psychology in the last century has persistently ignored this phenomenon. Insights seemed to be a myth bound to the classic greek concept of a privileged genius who “receives” great ideas through the inspiration of the gods. It was only at the beginning of the last century that a group of scientists around the German psychologist Max Wertheimer started to look for explanations of what he called “productive thinking”. In the last two decades, psychologists and cognitive scientist around the globe have tried to develop the existing models of the so called “Gestalt school” in psychology in order to better understand insights.

 

Insight Problems and the Gestalt School

One of the basic ideas of the Gestalt psychologists was that in the “Eureka moment”, a thinker unconsciously “restructures” his perception of a situation and finds a new pattern, or, as they would call it, a new Gestalt. Let me explain this shortly by looking at one of the most famous experiments of the Gestalt school. In order to study the process of insights in experiments, psychologists created problems that needed an insight on the part of the problem solver. The German psychologist Karl Duncker, Wertheimer’s most talented student, invented the now classic “Candle Problem”, where the subjects are given a matchbox, a candle and some thumb tacks and are asked to attach the candle to the wall.

The candle is too thick to be directly tacked into the wall – the only solution is to use the tacks and attach the inside container of the matchbox to the wall and then to put the candle on it. The crucial step for the problem solution is to see the matchbox container not as container for matches, but as a tray for the candle. The subjects need to restructure their first perception of the matchbox only as a container. Duncker showed that the subjects needed longer to solve the problem if the matchbox container was presented to them with matches inside, highlighting the original function of the container. The subjects were blocked from coming to an insight because their perception and thinking of the box was “functionally bound”; they did not see the box as a mere object with a certain form that can be used in various ways, but as a container with the specific function of holding candles. Duncker’s candle experiment shows that a problem solver comes to an insight only if he overcomes this functional boundness by redirecting his attention to aspects of an object that he has not perceived before.

Let’s assume that the subjects who solved the candle problem be faced with a similar problem a few months later. This time, they are presented needles instead of thumbtacks, a little cardboard box and a little toy figure inside with a similar goal of attaching the toy to the wall. Obviously, subjects who succeeded in solving the candle problem would see the similarity of the solution and would easily solve the toy problem. Wertheimer would call this the use of “structural analogues”: we transfer our knowledge from past similar experiences of problem solutions to new situations.

We now have three crucial notions for the characterization of the process of insight: restructuring a problem representation (where we have to perceive a situation in a different way), thus overcoming functional boundness (where we are bound to perceive or think of certain things as serving a certain function only), and finding structural analogues (or, in other words, finding similarities between patterns).

I will now use these three notions to give a rough explanation how marijuana can affect our ability to generate insights.

 

Marijuana Insights

Users have described many effects of a marijuana high on their consciousness, but for the sake of brevity, I will name only three here. One of the most common effects of marijuana during a high is on attention: stoners tend to have a stronger focus in attention, they hyperfocus. Sometimes they hyperfocus on sensations, a focus which leads to a more intense experience of the here-and-no. Sometimes they hyperfocus on memories or imaginations or on a stream of thought. Second, many users have reported an enhanced episodic memory, i.e. an enhanced ability to vividly remember past events in their lives. In an article about the philosopher John Stuart Mill, N.S. Yawger wrote in 1938:

“John Stuart Mill … wrote of (cannabis’s) power to revive forgotten memories, and in my inquiries, smokers have frequently informed me that while under the influence, they are able to recall things long forgotten.”40

Third, many users describe an enhanced ability to find structural analogues, or, similarities in patterns (“Eric Dolphy sounds like the early Coltrane on this record”), (“This painting looks like an early Edgar Degas”).

There are many other effects of a marijuana high which can positively affect our ability to gain insights, but for sake of brevity, let us for now stick to these three effects: hyperfocusing, enhanced episodic memory, and enhanced pattern recognition. These will be enough to give us a rough outline how marijuana can positively influence our ability to produce insights while high.

Here is what I take to be a very typical report of a marijuana insight:

“Martha found herself smoking (marijuana) with (…) Alice: ’During the conversation with Alice and Karl, I realized that she was being very self-conscious, and kept stepping back out of herself. I looked at her and thought, “That’s a whole new way of looking at Alice.” I had never seen her insecurities so palpable before. (…) I suddenly understood that her insecurity was a key to her personality, and then I also understood how it was a big key to my own, as well. I understood, too, how she and I clashed because both of us are insecure, and that each of us was waiting for the other to give the cue of reassurance that actually never came. That’s the type of insights I get when I am stoned, and for me it’s very useful.”41

Under the influence of marijuana, Martha’s attention is more focused on the here-and-now. She is intensely watching Alice’s behavior. Her attentional focus has changed. Usually, she would probably be sharing her attention more, thinking about the content of the conversation, maybe listening to music and keeping better track of time to make preparations for a dinner for her guests. Her high makes her hyperfocus on a certain patterns in Alice’s behavior. Martha’s attention is not functionally bound anymore to merely following the literal content of the discussion or to catering her guests, as it would normally be. She is now open to perceive a certain pattern in Alice’s behavior, namely, behavior that shows a certain insecurity. In the words of Gestalt psychology, she has “restructured” her perception of Alice. She can see a different pattern Gestalt, or, pattern in Alice’s behavior and character now.

The change in attention during her high is not the only factor that allows Martha to proceed to her insight. In order for Martha to see this pattern in Alice’s behavior, she must be able to recognize overall behavioral clues as fitting a pattern she already knows. Martha’s enhanced episodical memory during her high might help her to remember past events in which she has seen Alice acting insecure; also, her enhanced episodic memory may help her to compare Alice’s behavioral clues (like avoiding eye contact, or a certain tone in her voice) to behaviors she has seen throughout her life that she has learned to perceive as signs of “insecurity”. Furthermore, Martha has to rely on her episodic memory to infer that she his insecure herself; she needs to remember episodes of herself showing that pattern. The insecurity-behaviors of that Alice has seen or acted out herself before may be similar to that of Alice now. Last but not least, Martha’s enhanced ability to see similarities between pattern allows her to see a “structural analogue” between other behaviors of insecurity and some behavior she sees now in Alice. This allows her to understand that she and Alice are both insecure and therefore clash as personalities.

Of course, this is only a possible explanation of how Martha’s insight actually occurred. Martha’s report is certainly not detailed enough to exactly pin down how exactly she arrived at her insight. But the possible explanations helps us to begin to understand how the interplay of various effects of marijuana may positively influence Martha’s ability to gain an insight on the background of the Gestalt model of insights.

 

The Path to Evidence

But is it really true that marijuana leads to effects like an enhanced episodic memory or to hyperfocusing? We will have to leave it to the empirical studies in psychology and the cognitive (neuro)-sciences to come up with more evidence. However, now we have broken down the question about insights during a high to something that can be studied more easily. We should take the many detailed anecdotal reports about various mind-enhancements during a marijuana high serious and start to investigate them empirically. Once we better understand the effects of marijuana on memory, attention, and other cognitive processes, we will be able to get a better picture of how these changes in cognition can add up to actually lead to more complex enhancements of insights under favorable conditions. So far, the overall anecdotal evidence is already strong, not because we have many detailed reports about stoner insights, but because we have hundreds of independent detailed accounts of many typical cognitive effects during a marijuana high; effects which, as we have seen, are crucial for the generation for insights. It becomes more and more clear now that our ability to creative insights crucially depends on right hemisphere activity- a fact that Carl Sagan had already addressed in a footnote of his “Dragons of Eden,” where he speculated that marijuana might suppress left hemisphere activity in favor of right hemisphere processing. Surely, further research in this area will be both fruitful for the understanding of marijuana effects as well as for our understanding of creativity and insights in general.

For a long time, our perception of marijuana has been “functionally bound” too much by focussing on its risk potential. Don’t get me wrong: I do not want to argue that we should ignore any risks or negative aspects of marijuana consumption. But we need to free ourselves from the still predominant one-sided fixation to get a deeper insight into the positive potential of marijuana; a potential that so profoundly and positively affected millions, if not hundreds of millions of users – and through them and their work, the history and shape of societies worldwide.

The post Marijuana Insights: Myth or Reality? appeared first on High Perspectives.

High Love, Empathy, and the Mirror Neuron System

Is Marijuana really good for sex? Recent debates around this question have mostly taken place in internet portals or in psychological e-journals like “Psychology Today”, with hundreds of users telling about their experiences. Generally, commentaries fall into two groups: while one group argues that marijuana can actually at as an enhancer for sexual pleasure, many others insist that marijuana does not really help or has actually negatively affected their sex life.

Importantly, however, many of the critics are marijuana consumers who complain that a heavy long term use with an ensuing tolerance diminished their sexual appetite. Other critical voices often come from obviously inexperienced users who have only tried marijuana few times complain that they got too confused or anxious for sex.

Now, of course it is interesting to know about the possible negative impact of marijuana for heavy abusing consumers and beginners, but I think for most of us the much more interesting question is this: What is the potential of marijuana to enhance our sex life? While this may sound to you like the same question rephrased, it is actually different – and the answer to it seems to me to be much more interesting. Let me explain why.

If we ask about the potential of marijuana, it does not make much sense to just ask anybody and to make a poll, counting votes for or against a possible enhancement. If you would want to know about the potential of a new type of surfboard, would you give it to just anybody, swimmers, non-swimmers, kids, grand parents, and water phobics alike and then start a poll on it? Would you care if half of that group would dislike the new board? Wouldn’t you want to have experienced professionals testing the board?

If we really want to know about the potential of marijuana when it comes to its possible enhancement of sex, then, we have to listen to what experienced users say, users who know how much to smoke for which purpose and under which conditions. These users will have learned to ride a high, to choose the best strain for the respective activity they want to engage in. They will know facts about which strains give them a more cerebral, uplifting high, and which strains of will put them in a more reverie pre-dream state of mind and affects their body more. Aficionados will also know how various strains affect them with a certain route of administration – bong, vaporizer, or ingested – and which is the best dosage for them to enjoy sex.

 

Marijuana and Tantra

Cannabis using experts have usually learned from living in a certain cannabis (sub)culture, a culture that has given them the skills and knowledge to use marijuana for sex. Reports about marijuana as an aphrodisiac go back as far as 3.000 years ago, when the Indo Persians (or, “Aryans”), brought their Cannabis culture to India. Cannabis was used to enhance sexual enjoyment, but it was already considered to go way beyond a mere function as an enhancement for sex as many of us understand it today. For the Aryans, Marijuana was sacred. Later, its use was integrated in many rituals in their society, as for instance for wedding ceremonies, but also in some forms Tantra, a philosophical framework including a set of spiritual and physical practices which developed in the Hindu-Buddhist culture under Aryan influence. Unlike the distorted Western image of Tantra as merely involving sexual practices suggests, the framework offers are whole array of practices and guidelines for living. The ultimate aim is to break free from uncontrollable repetition problems and to reach enlightenment, a state that helps you to help others as best as you can.

In the west, many people know Tantra only from seeing or hearing about the sexual practices described in Tantra teachings like the Kamasutra. But even when we focus at the sexual techniques addressed in Tantra, it must be stressed that they were much more than practical guide to just improving sexual pleasure. They were supposed lead to “lead to enlightenment through to Liberation (moksha) taking the path of enjoyment (Pravritti) to an understanding of the real nature of reality. For the early Indians, Cannabis was not only use as a simple aphrodisiac that simulates sexual appetite or enjoyment. It was – and, for many, still is – used to enhance much deeper feelings of intimacy and lovemaking, and many holy sadhus have used it for centuries to achieve spiritual freedom and enlightenment in their meditations.

Marijuana and Empathy

Independently of this tradition, modern users of marijuana have also reported that marijuana stimulated deeper feelings in them, as this American husband explains in a letter to his wife, who does not use marijuana and is a bit anxious about his use:

“Speaking of sexual relations, remember all of those times when you have told me, “Wow, I have never felt like that before.” Where, at the end of our love making, a simple touch would leave you trembling on the bed, shaking and laughing because it all felt so good? Where two hours of foreplay was followed by hour-long love making sessions that left us holding each other tightly and remembering the love that we have for each other? That was, oddly enough, a product not only my love for you, but also pot. Don’t get me wrong, the sex is great without it, but when I’m under the influence of this “horrible” substance, I slow down and really enjoy each moment, making particular sure to give attention to everything you need and completely satisfy you.”28

Lovemaking is more than sex, and this letter gives us a wonderful description of what really makes the difference: ”making sure to give attention to everything you need and completely satisfy you.” Under the influence of marijuana, the author of this letter became more empathic and able to feel and understand the needs and desires of his wife much better.

The last three thousand years have brought us a good amount of literary descriptions and personal reports of marijuana as an aphrodisiac. They describe that it helps to loose inhibitions, to intensify feelings of touch and the feeling of an orgasm, to subjectively slowdown time, which can be used for a more prolonged experience of one’s sexual experience, and to keep the user focussed and in the here-and-now, excluding disturbing factors during sexual encounters. But could it really be true that it helps a user to better empathically understand another person? Does marijuana really hold a potential for us to enhance our empathic understanding?

Without doubt, the human ability to empathically understand others is one of our most advanced cognitive skills, evolutionary speaking. No other animal species beats us at that or comes even close. The human success story is based on the development of empathic skills, and humans who lack empathic skills have a radical disadvantage in society. As the Harvard psychologist Daniel Goleman puts it,

“If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.”

Marijuana users have reported various ways in which their empathic understanding becomes enhanced during a high. The Harvard psychologist Charles Tart’s study On Being Stoned (1971) names the following two descriptions effects confirmed by many students who participated in the survey as characteristic for the marijuana high:

“I have feelings of deep insight into other people, how they tick, what their games are, when stoned (…)’”. “’I empathize tremendously with others; I feel what they feel; I have a tremendous intuitive understanding of what they are feeling.”29

For moderate levels of a high, Tart also found that fairly frequently consumers would agree with the following statement:

“I feel so aware of what people are thinking that it must be telepathy, mind reading, rather than just being more sensitive to the subtle cues in behavior.” 30

Here is a report from a marijuana user cited in another book, “High Culture. Marijuana in the Lives of Americans”, by William Novak, which also mentions “mental telepathy”:

“When I’m stoned with a very good friend, we just sit there and watch messages bounce back and forth between us, like neutrons. It happens rapidly, and we can feel it in an almost physical way. I often get onto a higher plane of communication with good friends when we smoke together. It almost seems as if we are experiencing mental telepathy, with communication going on rapidly (…)” 31

Another report in Novak’s book gives us a hunch how marijuana might lead to the enhancement of empathic understanding during a high:

“After a joint or two, I find myself paying more attention to what the other person is really saying, rather than hearing only the words he uses in trying to get his point across. By keeping track of his mannerisms and his tone of voice in a more concentrated way than usual, I can more fully understand his point, and can respond more directly than normal.”32

This user report mentions a shift of attention to the “his mannerism, and his tone of voice”. We know from other reports that a marijuana high can lead to hyperfocusing and to a shift in attention, and we know that often, a shift in attention to body language helps to understand others more than just focussing on the meaning of words. This is why dogs understand us so well, feel our sadness, joy, or pain without being able to understand our language; they attend to and understand our body language. Note, also, that to read a “tone of voice” or a certain mannerism, you have to be able to decipher a complicated pattern. We have numerous reports from marijuana users for all kinds of occasions that they are able to perceive patterns during a high that they have not perceived before; patterns in music, art, nature, or in a behavior.

Hyperfocussing, a change of the direction of attention to body language, and an enhanced pattern recognition are all effects which have been independently and in detail reported by marijuana users, and the above reports show that these effects could in combination lead to an enhancement of our empathic understanding.

Also, Marijuana users have consistently reported that they are able to vividly remember past events, that they can retrieve memories which seemed to be long gone, and to almost “re-live” them. The following report of an anonymous 19-year old computer programmer about his high experiences beautifully illustrates this:

“Memories seemed to force themselves upon me, very rapid but very gentle. I started to remember things in my childhood that made me truly happy and joyful. Things I had either forgotten or just simply didn’t give the time of day to. I remembered raising my hands up as a signal for my mother that I wanted to be carried and the utter joy I felt when she would reach down and pull me up to her chest. I realized how much she really did, in fact, love me when I remembered how I longed for her goodnight kisses, of which never ran dry. I remembered the very simple joys of my very simple existence and marijuana helped me relive them all over again.”33

It is easy to see how an enhanced episodic memory retrieval during a high can help to understand other people better empathically. If you remember episodes of your feelings of teen angst during your last years of high school, you will probably understand your 15 year old son better in a similar situation. If you vividly remember how you felt during the day of your wedding, you will better understand the reactions of the young couple you are seeing at their wedding, pale, stressed and yet happy, clutching their hands and smiling nervously.

These cognitive skills – episodic memory retrieval, attention, and pattern recognition – are some of the crucial cognitive abilities for empathic understanding, and many independent user reports from various centuries suggest that all these can at some point become enhanced during a high.

But these are of course not the only skills important to empathic understanding. The most decisive cognitive skill for empathic understanding of others, for our ability to read the minds of others and to understand their feelings and moods, is our ability to “slip into their moccasins”, as the the native American indians say. For more than twenty years now, so called “simulation theorists” in the philosophy of mind and in psychology argued that our capacity to understand other people, to predict, explain and describe their feelings and behavior, is crucially based in a special capacity to simulate the feelings and the situations of others, to imagine being in their skin and to feel their feelings, to think their thoughts.

 

The Discovery of the Mirror Neuron System

The simulation theory received new supporting empirical evidence when Italian neuroscientists actually found a class of neurons that seems to be responsible for mimicking some behavior that a subject perceives in another. The revolutionary discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ began in the early 1990’s when Italian neuroscientists accidentally stumbled upon what seemed to be a weird phenomenon in an experiment with macaque monkeys. Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research team at the University of Parma in Italy had originally only intended to study motor neurons in the frontal cortex – neurons which are known to be responsible for our motor control system. With tiny electrodes attached to individual cells in a monkey’s brain, they wanted to find out how certain hand grabbing movements are initiated in the brain. These motor neurons showed the expected activity when a monkey moved his arm and picked up a peanut.

Surprisingly, however, the Italian research team witnessed how those monkey motor neurons also fired when the monkey just watched a lab assistant picking up the peanut. At first, the scientists could not believe what they saw: the monkey did not move at all, so why did the motor neurons fire? Was there something wrong with the cable connections or their measuring instruments? More tests, however, showed that there was nothing wrong with the wiring or the measuring system. These monkey’s motor neurons “mirrored” the activity that the monkey perceived in somebody else. They mirrored the perceived activity, even when the monkey only heard an activity without performing the act itself.

A baby makake imitating the mimic of a human

From our daily life, we all know about processes of mirroring the feelings and sometimes even the behavior of others. When you observe somebody in pain, you tend to mirror his feelings to some extent and often, to some degree even his behavior, like the his facial expression of grief. Yawning is so contagious to others that if somebody yawns in a class room, many others will follow and mimic the behavior and “mirror the action.” I actually bet that you feel like yawning like now even only reading this. In toddlers, this unsuppressed motor mimicry can be observed up to the age of about two and a half years. If a toddler sees another toddler cry, he will often cry himself, too. The toddler sees the crying behavior of the other and mimics not only the behavior, but feels the feeling of the other as if it was his own feeling. He literally is in pain himself.

Many neuroscientist today are convinced that the mirror neuron system is crucially involved in the process of empathy. If this is so, could it be that this mirror neuron system gets enhanced during a marijuana high? Such an enhancement could lead to the subjective feeling that we can more easily slip into the moccasins of others, that we can actually feel what they feel, that we almost slip into the skin of another person. Many users have noted a better ability to imagine situations in general, visually as well as auditory or in other sensory categories; but we also have many very specific reports from users about how they were better able to imagine themselves in the shoes of other people, to “slip in their moccasins”:

“Whilst stoned, I found it easier to put myself in the place of others. I could understand how people might believe any number of seemingly “irrational” or dense, impenetrable ideas. Marijuana opened me up to the existence of so many different views of the world, views I need not share to fathom or empathize with. (…) Let me give you one recent example. (…) One night, in the midst of a marijuana-induced reverie, I got to thinking about the real person we call Jesus. These days, we think of him as some ethereal figure in some far off land shrouded in historical mists of time. (…) I found myself imagining that at one time in history, this Jesus character was a living, breathing human like myself. Intellectually, I already knew this, but I increasingly felt as though I might be capable of fathoming what his disciples and apostles felt. His followers were in his presence, they looked into his eyes and heard his words and believed they were looking at God. It was only in this state of consciousness that I could truly imagine what it might have been like to be in the presence of this man and truly believe, and by extension, possibly experience what so many people on Earth experience during moments of great religious feeling and devotion. (…) In this case, being stoned allowed my mind to circumvent its ordinary non-religious bent, and if only for a few moments, come to know what the truly religious feel. While I don’t subscribe to the tenets of Christianity proper, I have come to understand how real it can all seem for people (…).“34

 

Marijuana and Autism

Faced with these reports of marijuana users and with those new findings about the mirror neuron system, I suggested some years ago that cannabis might in some way stimulate the mirror neuron system in normal people during a high, thus leading to an enhancement of their empathic ability to understand others. If this would be true, it might have interesting consequences for people with autism spectrum disorders, too. Autistic people have various deficiencies, but the most striking one is their lack of empathic understanding for others. Autism is a pervasive developmental disorder and children diagnosed with this mysterious syndrome show an in ability in developing human relationships, they have abnormal speech or cannot speak at all, are often engaged in almost ritualistic repetitive behaviors instead of imaginative play, and do seem to have special problems to understand the feelings and needs of others. Researchers therefore soon began to look for deficiencies in their mirror neuron system, and while this is still an ongoing debate amongst neuroscientists, there is evidence that the mirror neuron system in autistic children is at least developmentally delayed.

Now, the next question is rather obvious: if a cannabis induced high can be helpful to stimulate the mirror neuron system in normal people, could it also help autistic children? A few years ago, stories of a few mothers surfaced in the news, mothers who reported they had given medical marijuana to their kids and thereby radically improved their condition. When I heard about these stories I was of course curious to find exactly how marijuana helped those kids. At first, I was somehow disappointed when I read mostly details about how marijuana made the autistic kids calm and more happy, or how it helped them to loose some ticks or to regain appetite. All this is wonderful, but it was not exactly what I was looking for. Then, I was amazed to read descriptions about marijuana helping them to some degree “free” them of their repetitive behaviors, which reminded me a lot of the use of Indian sadhus, who have always used marijuana to free themselves from the repetitiveness and the routines of our thinking.

But reading further, I was then really amazed to read the following description of Marie Myung-Ok Lee, a Korean-American mother author and essayist, who wonderfully described the following change in her son “J”, a 9-year old boy who – despite being on several heavy prescription drugs showed from 50 up to 300 violent aggressions in a school day. After the removal of almost all other drugs and – helped by marijuana expert Lester Grinspoon – medicating him with a special marijuana strain, “J” showed few aggressive behaviors, sometimes for a day or two not even once. His mom reports:

“The big test, so far, has been a visit from Grandma. The last time she came, over Christmas, J hit her during a tantrum. This time, we gave him his tea, mixing it with goji berries to mask any odor, although it occurs to me that my mother, a Korean immigrant, probably doesn’t even know what pot smells like (and it actually smells a lot like ssuk, a Korean medicinal herb). She remarked that J seems calmer. As we were preparing for a trip to the park, J disappeared, and we wondered if he was going to throw one of his tantrums. Instead, he returned with Grandma’s shoes, laying them in front of her, even carefully adjusting them so that they were parallel and easy to step into. He looked into her face, and smiled.”“35

J’s behavior shows a remarkable act of empathy, given the severeness of his autism; it needs some understanding of his grandmother’s needs and feelings to neatly arrange the shoes like this, and his smile must have been priceless for her. Another extremely important detail told by his mother is this episode:

“J. still can get overexcited if he likes a food too much, so sometimes when he’s eating my husband and I leave the room to minimize distractions. The other day, we dared to experiment with doenjang, a fermented tofu soup that he used to love as a baby. The last time we tried it, a year ago, he’d frisbeed the bowl against a tile wall. (…) We left J. in the kitchen with his steamy bowl and went to the adjoining room. We waited. We heard the spoon ding against the bowl. Satisfied slurpy noises. Then a strange noise that we couldn’t identify. A chkka chkka chkkka bsssshhht doinnng! We returned to the kitchen, half expecting to see the walls painted with doenjang. Everything was clean. The bowl and spoon, however, were gone. J. had taken his dishes to the sink, rinsed them, and put them in the dishwasher – something we’d never shown him how to do, though he must have watched us do it a million times. In four months, he’d gone from a boy we couldn’t feed to a boy who could feed himself and clean up after.” 36

This activity may sound trivial to us normal people, but the fact that J was able to engage in that kind of mimicry behavior and clean up the dishes might actually show a better functioning of his mirror neuron system during the influence of marijuana. We have seen above that the mirror neuron system may be the neural basis for mental mimicry, and that mental mimicry serves as a basic skill for empathic understanding.

The findings about the mirror neuron system and their role in empathic understanding and in autism are still being hotly debated in the scientific community. Still, I think that the reports of marijuana users give us enough reason for an initial suspicion, a hypothesis that needs to be taken to the laboratory with brain imaging techniques. Does a marijuana high really temporarily affect the mirror neuron system? Or does marijuana help in some other way to stimulate other neuronal systems? If yes, what would the implications be for the treatment of autism or other disorders, for the use of marijuana in psychotherapy, or for the personal use of marijuana?

Of course, if we take a step back and take a look at the bigger picture, we should ask similar questions about other psychoactive substances like MDMA (“ecstasy”) which have been classified as “empathogens” or “entactogens” because they produce effects on our feelings of empathy.

I will leave this for scientists to pick up here. These questions are urgent, and the answers could have an enormous importance for millions of people – patients and normal users alike. With or without stimulation of the mirror neuron system, marijuana has obviously been successfully used by myriads of people for millennia to not only intensify their sexual experiences, but also to enhance their empathic skills. The answer to our initial question, then, whether marijuana enhances sex should be this: marijuana, if used correctly and under the right conditions, does not only hold a potential for us to enhance our sex live, but also to significantly enhance and develop our empathic understanding of others, to create real and unique moments of intimacy, and to deepen and intensify friendships and other human relationships, and to enrich our love lives.

Maybe it is true that, as the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa says:

“ The world belongs to who doesn’t feel. The primary condition to be a practical man is the absence of sensitivity.”

This might also be one of the reasons why many “practical men” are so afraid of a psychoactive substance like marijuana, which stands for “hippies, love, and peace”. The “practical men” are afraid that the substance’s influence might undermine their power, to bring an inhumane system down, by bringing people back to their senses, taking them in to the here-and-now of the extended experience of the wonder of love and empathy, and, thus, to remember the truth that the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell once expressed:

“The most valuable things in life are not measured in monetary terms. The really important things are not houses and lands, stocks and bonds, automobiles and real state, but friendships, trust, confidence, empathy, mercy, love and faith.”

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Marijuana, Introspection, and Personal Growth

“Once again the powers of the herb open up the mind. Seek deep inside. Tell me what you find.“

Cypress Hill, Temples of Boom III

As we mature, we have experiences and gain knowledge about a wide variety of situations and facts. Accumulating knowledge about the world lets us grow into students, teachers, professors, mothers or fathers, skilled professionals or masters of some kind. Clearly, however, there is a special form of knowledge that shapes us the most as we grow: self-knowledge. Our self-knowledge plays a central role in who we are and how we lead our lives. You may remain more or less the same person as you learn new facts about the moon landing, the behavior of red ants or about Fibonacci numbers, but once you learn that your inability to lead a happy marriage is caused by a trauma in your childhood, this one piece of knowledge may change the course of your life forever.

The tholos of the sanctuary of Athena Pronaia at Delphi, Greece

The Ancient Greek imperative “Know yourself” inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi unquestionably confronts us with a task that will never be completed. Nonetheless, the fact remains that we all know how rewarding and life-changing the path can be. Myriad consumers of marijuana, as well as consumers of other psychoactive substances like LSD or psilopsybin have reported instances of important insights into themselves – insights which significantly led to augment their self-knowledge and consequently, to their personal growth. On the basis of his questionnaires sent to 750 consumers, Harvard psychologist Charles Tart found the following to be a description of a characteristic effect of marijuana:

“Spontaneously, insights about myself, my personality, the games I play come to mind when stoned seem very meaningful”.“20

But how, and why, should marijuana be especially helpful in gaining self-knowledge?

 

„Introspection“ in Philosophy and Common-Sense

We usually consider introspection to be the main route to self-knowledge. Literally, the term introspection is a composite of the Latin words “spicere “ (“to look”) and “intra” (within). The metaphor suggests that we see or perceive our own inner mental processes. Obviously, however, this should not be taken too literally: neuroscientists did not find eyes, ears or other known sensory organs in our brains, and we certainly don’t expect them to do so in the future.

So, what is introspection, generally speaking? The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy states:

“Introspection, as the term is used in contemporary philosophy of mind, is a means of learning about one’s own currently ongoing, or perhaps very recently past, mental states or processes.“

Our common-sense notion of „introspection“, however, seems to be much broader construed: we usually say that we can introspect not only mental states like a current pain sensation, feelings of anxiousness, or a joyful mood, but we often say that we introspect dispositions (like a tendency to overreact to critique) or other aspects of our personality like character traits. This broader view of introspection is expressed in the following statement by Pete Brady, a contributor to Lester Grinspoon’s website marijuana-uses.com, who mentions an enhancement of introspection under the influence of marijuana:

“The marijuana high made me introspective, and I used it to catalogue my strengths, weaknesses and traits. The drug was a revealer, not an escape mechanism; it helped me see who I was and what I needed to be.“21

Another anonymous contributor („Twinkly“) to Grinspoon’s website reports:

“I was so much more tuned-in to myself and others. I could concentrate on my fears, my turmoil, my stress, my problems, and turn them into plans on healing and freeing myself from lifelong chains that had bound me. I felt calm and relaxed and capable of dealing with who I was, good or bad. (…) I am able to look deeper inside myself to make good, sound decisions based on my true beliefs and morals.“22

These reports show that marijuana users feel that a high can help them to understand aspects of their personality better, to „look deeper“ into their emotions, moods and character traits. In his study „On being Stoned“, Charles Tart also mentions that marijuana users feel that a high can help them to better introspectively access their current bodily sensations and feelings – which is, introspection in the more narrow philosophical sense. Many of the users surveilled confirmed the following effects as a „common“ effect of a marijuana high:

“My skin feels exceptionally sensitive”

“Pain is more intense if I concentrate on it”

“My perception of how my body is shaped gets strange; the ‘felt’ shape or form does not correspond to its actual form (e.g. you may feel lopsided, or parts of your body feel heavy while others feel light”

“I feel a lot of pleasant warmth inside my body”

“I am much more aware of the beating of my heart”

“I become aware of breathing and can feel the breath flowing in and out of my throat as well as filling my lungs“23

In the following, I want to explore several different ways in which a marijuana high may enhance our introspection in both senses, in the more narrow philosophical sense concerning feelings, thoughts and sensations, as well as more broadly construed concerning moods and character traits.

 

The Body Mapping System and the Enhancement of Bodily Sensations

According to neuroscientists like A. D. Craig and Antonio Damasio, we all have an intereoceptive sense which gives us a sense of the body’s interior. Accordingly, this inner sense rests on a representational mapping system, which developed in order for us to observe our internal states such as

“(…) pain states, body temperature, flush, itch, tickle, shudder, visceral and genital sensations; the state of the smooth musculature in blood vessels and other viscera (…).“24

Our brain has a body mapping system which represents bodily parts. The hands, for instance, are represented in much larger areas than the rest of the body, a fact visualized in this 3d homunculus sculpture.

In their groundbreaking book The Body Has a Mind of its Own authors Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee focus on recent research on this ingenious body mapping system – a system which has been underestimated so far in the cognitive neurosciences. They describe a system of ‘flesh bound’ somatic senses which fall into several categories, each subserved by different populations of receptor cells, such as the sense of touch, thermoception (feeling cold or hot), and nociception (detecting various kinds of pain, including piercing pain, heat pain, chemical pain, joint pain, tickle and itch). Two other somatic senses would be proprioception, a sense of your body’s position and motion in space, as well as the sense of balance. All these somatic senses deliver information to the brain’s “body maps”:

“Every point on your body, each internal organ and every point in space out to the end of your fingertips, is mapped inside your brain. Your ability to sense, move, and act in the physical world arises from a rich network of flexible body maps distributed throughout the brain – maps that grow, shrink, and morph to suit your needs.”25

A visual representation of the human body, where the size of the respective body parts correspond to the number of sensory neurons which represent these parts

 

Could it be that marijuana has a systematic effect on this system, intensifying the signals and thus leading to a redirection of attention to perceive and feel our own body? I will leave this as a hypotheses for now, but I think we have enough detailed reports here to encourage cognitive scientists to take this to their laboratories using new brain imaging techniques.

 

Introspection as „Reflective Contemplation“

As to the introspection of moods, more complex emotions and character traits, it is obvious that this is not a kind of ‘direct’ inner observation. If I introspectively realize that I am a courageous person, I have to make a judgement involving the evaluation of many autobiographical memories, of „courageous“ patterns in my behavior compared to the behavior of others, and involving my understanding of the concept „courageous.“ A marijuana high might have several effects on cognition which could lead to the many enhancements described by marijuana users. We could also call this kind of introspection „reflective contemplation.“

Let me briefly explain four effects of marijuana well known under marijuana users which are important here: the „Zen-effect,“ (a hyperfocus of attention), an enhanced episodic memory, enhanced imagination, as well as an enhanced pattern recognition.

One of the most important acute effects of marijuana is a hyperfocus in attention, an effect which I also like to call the „Zen-effect“ of marijuana, because Zen tells you to concentrate on one thing or activity at a time. This attentional focus often leads to an intensified experience of sensations and of a strong feeling of being in the here-and-now, but it can also lead to an hyperfocus on a stream of thought or on episodic memories – memories of past episodes in your life. Myriads of marijuana users have reported not only this hyperfocus, but also the enhancement of episodic memories. User often vividly remember past events, events that they have often long forgotten, with incredible details. Also, it is a very commonly reported effect of a marijuana high that users can imagine things better – and importantly, imagination does not only mean visualization, but it could also be auditory, or tactile, taste or olfactory imagination.

Enhancement of „Reflective Contemplation“

Now, how could these four enhancements (hyperfocus of attention, enhanced episodic memory, enhanced imagination, enhanced pattern recognition) affect our introspection? I think this is pretty easy to see. Let us assume you are reflecting on whether you are a courageous person. A marijuana high can help to redirect and hyperfocus your attention on your episodic memories and your inner stream of thought. Now you can search your episodic memories for episodes in which you have acted courageously, and also those in which you have not done so. Of course you want to know about a character trait, not a current mood or feeling, so you have to go back in time. Your enhanced episodic memory during a marijuana high will help you to associatively bring up memories, and the enhanced pattern recognition ability can help you to find similarities between courageous or not so courageous actions or feeling in the past. But also, note how your enhanced ability for imagination might also play a crucial role for a success of reflective contemplation concerning your character trait: if you want to judge whether you are a courageous person in general, you do not only think about your past, but you try to imagine whether you would act courageously in certain situations. Would you jump into the ice-cold Hudson river from a bridge to save that kid, like this man just did on television? During a marijuana high, you can often imagine situations like these more vividly and imagine how it would be for you, what you would actually feel, and how you would act. Thus, an enhanced capacity for imagination could be generally helping you to come to valuable insights about your dispositions and character traits, which is expressed in this statement by a college student:

“Pot is very therapeutic to me. When I’m stoned, I can really see myself. I can list my strengths and my weaknesses, and my goals. My mind is clear and eager to learn and understand, even when I have to understand awkward things, like those parts of my personality that I don’t want to change. I can see parts of myself that I don’t like, without hating myself in the process. I’ve learned things about myself that I have brought into my life when I haven’t been stoned, such as how to be less self-centered, and how to be more low-keyed about myself, and less anxious in the presence of others.”26

As far as I can see, there are many reports of marijuana users which confirm the effects described here, but of course this is only a beginning. I hope that in the near future, cognitive neuroscientist will start looking more into the effects of marijuana high concerning attention, memory, pattern recognition and imagination.

 

An Amazing Potential

Let me stress again that my claim is not that marijuana automatically enhances your introspection. My claim is that marijuana has the potential to enhance your introspection – but in order to use this potential you have to use it appropriately, with the right dose, with the right set and setting, and with knowledge and skills to „ride a high.“

It is obvious that an enhancement of our introspection can also help us get in touch with our feelings and other subjective states to help us understand others as well. Another anonymous contributor to Grinspoon’s website marijuana-uses.com reports:

“Friendships and Relationships, especially those involving sexual and romantic intimacy, can be developed and deepened by the use of marijuana with others. Marijuana tends to cause introspection and by altering one’s habits of thought, yields new perspectives on who one is and how one works, psychologically. Hence, marijuana works as an effective catalyst for understanding oneself and others, and discussing and developing one’s relationships with other people.”27

Clearly, then, marijuana holds a potential not only for introspection, but also for empathic understanding and for personal development.

It is about time that we recognize that many people use marijuana not only for „recreational purposes“, but are using it as a tool to find out who they are, to understand themselves and their relation to others better, and to grow as a person.

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Baudelaire, Ramachandran, and Colors Containing Music

Charles Baudelaire and the Club des Hashashins

The „Club des Hashashins“ was founded in 1844 in Paris, only four decades after the Napoleon’s troops had retreated from their catastrophically failed occupation of Egypt, bringing hashish as their new discovery with them. Napoleon’s troops had first encountered the use of hashish through local muslim dealers, and kept consuming it during the occupation despite the harsh prohibitionist orders imposed by the French government. In a few decades, the use of hashish for recreational as well as medicinal purposes had found its way deep into the societies of France and other European countries.

Many of the members of the Club des Hashashins belonged to the French literary and intellectual elite of their time: Dr. Jaques-Joseph Moreau, Théophile Gaultier, Charles Baudelaire („The Flowers of Evil“), Gérard de Nerval, Eugène Delacroix, as well as Alexandere Dumas („The Three Musketeers“), to name only a few. Their goal was to experiment and explore the hashish experience for various intellectual and artistic endeavors – and they did so ingesting large doses of hashish concoctions.

The French writer Charles Baudelaire

Interestingly, Baudelaire’s conclusion concerning hashish as an enhancer for creative purposes was rather critical, claiming that it would only „magnify“ impressions and thoughts of a user which are already there. In another passage he seemed to be more positive, but also warned:

“…that hashish gives, or at least increases, genius; they forget that it is in the nature of hashish to diminish the will, and that thus it gives with one hand what it withdraws with the other; that is to say, imagination without the faculty of profiting by it.” 9

Little did he know, however, that he stumbled over one of the key effects of cannabis responsible for the creative enhancement during a high when he described that „sounds take on colors and colors contain music.”10 While his description of this altered state of mind is fascinating, it sounds just as exotic as hard to believe. However, as we will see that only recent findings in the neurosciences revealed the validity and significance of Baudelaire’s observation for the understanding of the marijuana experience.

 

The Phenomenon of Synesthetic Experience

Baudelaire’s statement about sound and color describes what we would now call a synesthetic experience. The expression synesthesia stems from the Greek words syn (“together”) and aesthesics (“sensation”). Today, synesthesia is known as a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory pathway automatically results in correlated experiences in a second sensory pathway.

photo of music simulation software

In a synesthetic experience i.e. during an LSD trip you might have a corresponding smell coming with the tactile experience of touching a metal object, or you may see corresponding colors when listening to a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo – an effect simulated by music visualizing software like Milkdrop or G-Force. Synesthetic experiences can be induced by a psychoactive substances like cannabis, psylopsybin mushrooms, or LSD, but there are also natural synesthetes experiencing various forms of synestesia.

The phenomenon of synethesia had not been described in the scientific literature when Baudelaire experienced this phenomenon, so Baudelaire invented a name for this phenomenon: „equivocations“ („équivoques“).11 The first detailed description of synesthesia would only come a few decades later from the Victorian multi-talented genius Francis Galton in 1883, a half cousin of Charles Darwin.12 Since then, synesthesia has been largely ignored – only in the last decades did neuroscientists rediscover this phenomenon to find how crucially important it is for the working of the human mind in general.

Synesthetic experiences have been described by many users of marijuana only following the intake of large doses. It is not surprising, then, that not only the hashish eating Baudelaire, but also the famous marijuana users and writer Fitz Hugh Lludlow would describe this effect; both of them experimented with copious amounts of ingested hashish concoctions or hash oil. Ludlow famously wrote: “Thus the hasheesh eater knows what it is to be burned by salt fire, to smell colors, to see sounds, and, much more frequently, to see feelings.” 13

But these two are certainly not the only ones who described synesthetic experiences during a strong marijuana high. For his study „On being Stoned“ (1971), Harvard psychologist Charles Tart sent out questionnaires to hundreds of students to ask them about their high experiences and found that the phenomenon of synesthesia is a commonly reported effect of marijuana for high dosage levels.14

Now, while it seems interesting to see vexing colors during a high when listening to music, why should this explain the often reported enhancement of creativity during a marijuana high? Also, if this effect only occurs under higher doses of marijuana, could it be relevant when it comes to the usual high modern consumers usually experience? In order to understand how the synestetic effect can actually play a role in the enhancement of creative thinking, let us take a short look at the groundbreaking work of Vilaynur Ramachandran and other neuroscientists, who recently changed our understanding of the phenomenon.

Synesthetic experiences are not always triggered by psychoactive Substances only. Naturally synesthetic people experience various forms of synesthesia because of a genetic predisposition. Famous natural synesthetes include composers Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Leonard Bernstein, jazz legends Duke Ellington and drummer Elvin Jones, the painter David Hockney, and the writer Vladimir Nabokov, a “color-to-grapheme”-synesthete. A synesthetic person with this often-occurring variety of synestesia experiences normal black letters as colored. For example, a synestete might experience the letter “a” as red and the letter “g” as green, and this will consistently be so for this individual throughout his lifetime.

A synesthetic person with grapheme-to-color synesthesia sees words and numbers colored as in the picture, even if they are printed in black.

 

 

As opposed to Nabokov’s genetically triggered synesthesia, synesthetic experiences caused by psychedelic substances, or by a stroke, are called “adventitious synesthesia”. As observed above, the effects of adventitious synesthesia are more common for “trips”under the influence of psychedelic substances like LSD or psilopsybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms), but are also frequently reported by cannabis users for higher doses.70

In their highly influential article named “Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes” published in Scientific American in 2003, the neuroscientists Vilayanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard stated:

“When we began our research on synesthesia, we had no inkling of where it would take us. Little did we suspect that this eerie phenomenon, long re garded as a mere curiosity, might offer a window into the nature of thought.”15

According to Ramachandran and Hubbard, natural synesthesia is caused by cross-activation of neighboring brain regions. Cross-activation concerns through the chemical exchange of neurotransmitters, which travel between various brain regions. Usually, neighboring brain regions like the “hearing center” in the temporal lobes and the color signal procession – area produce inhibiting neurotransmitters to minimize cross-activation of those regions. Our brain manages to actively inhibit chemical interchange between these signal processing areas and, thus, helps to keep our senses separate.

Ramachandran and Hubbard assume that synesthetic experiences occur when these biochemical inhibitors are blocked, thus allowing two neighboring brain regions such as the hearing center and the brain area that receives color signals to exchange signals. As a result, on the subjective level this leads to cross-sensory channel experiences – thus, an auditory experience of a Shostakovitch symphony may stimulate the visual area and lead to the experience of an accompanying firework of colors.

It is well known that psychedelic drugs such as LSD or marijuana can produce synesthetic experiences in otherwise normal people, but the neurophysiology of this process does not seem to be explored much yet. Still, on the basis of the discoveries of Ramachandran and Hubbard, it makes sense to claim that these substances have a short-term effect on those inhibiting neurotransmitters and allow for the unusual cross-experiential phenomenon of synesthesia.

 

The Relevance of Synesthesia for the Understanding of Human Consciousness

“Fine,” you may say now, “but in the end, what’s the freak show good for? It certainly makes for a beautiful and unusual firework of the senses, but can’t we get that easier if we go and watch MTV, where we find music transposed into images in thousands of videos? Apart from being entertaining for a while, is it not just useless and disturbing to have those sensual crossovers? It may be fascinating to smell a movie, but can we learn anything here?”

The answer is an emphatic “yes”. I am convinced that the effect of synesthesia is one of the most central and interesting effects of marijuana. As Ramachandran and Hubbard observe, natural synesthesia is seven times more common in creative people as in others. They suspect that this may have to do with the enhanced ability of the synesthete to set up links between seemingly

unrelated domains, a capacity that importantly subserves the ability for inventing metaphors, when we for instance say that “the pigeons fountained into the air.” Remarkably, many of our every day metaphors are synesthetic in nature: common synesthetic metaphors would be ‘loud colors, dark sounds or sweet smells’, but of course, they can find much more sophisticated expressions in literature and poetry.

Ramachandran and Hubbard point out that inventing metaphors and the linking of seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas are an integral part of creativity. They also suggest that enhanced creativity may explain the advantageousness of the synesthetic trait, which in turn would explain the survival of the genetic predisposition in some individuals from an evolutionary perspective.

The synesthesia specialist Richard Cytowic, as well as Ramachandran and Hubbard, believe that in essence, all humans are “closet synesthetes”. Cytowic suggests that our perception may be

inherently “holistic”, but that after a pre-conscious information process, only the distinct sensual information enters our consciousness. Ramachandran and Hubbard point out that synesthetic effects can be observed in “normal” (and non-drugged) humans as well. They use an example from the famous German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Köhler to illustrate their hypothesis:

When normal people have to decide between “Bouba” and “Kiki” as names for these two graphics, 98% judge the left one to be Kiki and the right one to be Bouba.

If you look at these two inkblots, which one would you call ‘Bouba’ and which one ‘Kiki’? I hope you have made the right choice, because if not, there may be something seriously wrong with your angular gyros region. Ninety-eight percent of probands would call the left hand blot ‘Kiki’ and the other ‘Bouba’. Ramachandran and Hubbard believe that the angular gyros region is responsible for ‘extracting’ the abstract common denominators between the graphic shape of the blobs and the names, like the gentle undulation of the sound of the name Bouba and the gentle curves of the inkblot. Further, they note that the angular gyros is usually considered the brain region where sensorial information from touch, vision and hearing flow together and is involved in the synesthetic condition. They further believe that the natural synesthetic trait may bring with it not only excess communication between the sensual information centers, but could also help to ‘link’ seemingly unrelated concepts and ideas:

 

“It has often been suggested that concepts are represented in brain maps in the same way that percepts (like colors or faces) are. One such example is the concept of a number, a fairly abstract concept, yet we know that specific brain regions (the fusiform and the angular) are involved. Perhaps other concepts are also represented in non-topographic maps in the brain. If so, we can think of metaphors as involving cross-activation of conceptual maps in a manner analogous to cross-activation of perceptual maps in synesthesia.”16

 

Marijuana and Synesthesia

If we take this assumption seriously, then we will also have the beginning for a neurological explanation of an enhancement of creative thinking under the influence of marijuana. With a

decent marijuana high, a user may not experience full blown synesthetic experiences such as seeing colors corresponding to a guitar solo. Subconsciously, however, a pre-synesthetic effect may allow for facilitated communication between brain areas which represent structurally similar (or ‘isomorphic’) percepts or notions. In other words, during a high we can more easily find associations between structurally similar images, concepts, ideas or patterns, like the linking of the visual curved form of the “blob” and the auditory representation of the word “Bouba”.

 

This observation is fundamental. This kind of excess communication does not only allow us to create metaphors, but generally enhances our ability for what I would like to call “isomorphism extraction”. “Isomorphy” is a technical term for similarity. Less technically speaking, isomorphism extraction is the abstraction process that allows us to find a similarity, or a ‘common denominator’, between various patterns, structures, forms, events, and concepts. This could be an abstract similarity between our representation of the sound of “Bouba” and the visual representation of the actual ‘blob’; which could be subsumed as “soft and round”. But it could also be a much more complex similarity. For instance, you may perceive a similarity between the feeling depicted in a song of the recording of Miles Davies’s Kind of Blue to the mood of a scenery in the city in the evening with a deep blue sky.

We have many of detailed reports from marijuana users which report how their ability to recognize new patterns was enhanced under the influence of marijuana. We usually think of visual patterns, when we think about pattern recognition, but of course patterns are everywhere, and patter recognition is one of the most fundamental of human abilities: we can smell the pattern of something burnt, we recognize the pattern in the taste of a great cabernet wine, recognize a pattern in the way a friend plays chess, feel a pattern of the soft lips of a woman when we are kissing, and we hear recognize the sound of John Coltrane playing his saxophone in various recordings.

Many marijuana users have reported how they have found new patterns during a high. Here is the curious report of an anonymous contributor “Rob” to the Lester Grinspoon’s website “marijuana-uses.com,” who writes in a letter to his parents how he once became aware of a pattern of “timid rigidity” in his walking style:

“I was also fortunate in that I got high that night, as many reefer virgins report not getting high the first time they smoke. An amazing understanding came to me while walking home. As I strolled along the tree-lined sidewalk carrying on a conversation with a friend, I felt an awkward stiffness in my stride, realizing with each step a timid rigidity. I have since altered my manner of walking to a confident, open gait of long strides and silent footsteps. I have since altered my manner of walking to a confident, open gait of long strides and silent footsteps.“17

In another report, a woman “Martha” got high and suddenly recognized a pattern in her friends behavior and in her character:

“During the conversation with Alice and Karl, I realized that she was being very self-conscious, and kept stepping back out of herself. I looked at her and thought, “That’s a whole new way of looking at Alice.” I had never seen her insecurities so palpable before. (…) I suddenly understood that her insecurity was a key to her personality (…)“ (from: William Novak, „High Culture. Marijuana in the Lives of Americans“)18

If Ramachandran and Hubbard are right, then this enhanced pattern recognition during a high might be due to a pre-synesthetic effect. I find it interesting to note in this context that both Rob as well as Martha would use remarkable synesthetic metaphors in their descriptions. While Rob names his walking style ‘timid’, Martha says that she „never seen her insecurities so palpable before.“ The use of those metaphors here may well be a coincidence, but I think that in the light of this essay and its implications, we can see how it might not be fully coincidental after all.

Let me sum up. We can see how marijuana might even at lower doses have a subliminal synesthetic effect that does not show in full blown conscious cross modal sensory activation as in seeing a guitar solo, but also leading to a better ability to make associations between seemingly unrelated concepts or structures, to invent metaphors and to recognize patterns. The research on synesthesia, then, actually gives us a possible explanation of the hundreds of reports of artists, musicians, writers, scientists and comedians who have reported not only various creative enhancements during a high, but also, how generally, their pattern recognition ability was enhanced.

Nevertheless, we have to be careful with the concept of enhancement: an enhancement of our ability to make far fetched associations and to link seemingly unrelated concepts can certainly be useful for creative enhancement, but permanent consumption and abuse may also get in the way of our learning processes necessary to acquire skills and knowledge necessary for creativity on a high level. A high school student who is constantly stoned may be unable to process the information he needs to learn. This abuse can undermine his ability to work creatively as a poet, musician or painter because he misses out on learning the necessary skills for an expertise in his area. The pre-synesthetic effect of marijuana can only help you in your creativity if you learn to „ride your high“ and to integrate the high experience your life.

Many marijuana using writers find that marijuana helps them to generate some great ideas, but that they have to actually sober up first to develop these ideas in their writing, because they are not good at writing during high. I would like to stress, then, that the pre-synesthetic effect of marijuana constitutes a great potential for marijuana to be used for creative purposes and to see recognize patterns in all kinds of structures – but, again, we need skills and knowledge to use this potential.

Baudelaire, then, understated the potential of cannabis to enhance our creativity. Marijuana does not only „magnify“ ones own thoughts and sensation, but it causes an interesting processes in our brains that can truly help us to come up with new ideas and perceptions.

Surprisingly, however, when we go back and take a closer look at Baudelaire’s statement about „equivocations“, we find that he not only clearly described the now well know synesthetic cross modal sensory effect, but he also seemed to have intuitively grasped the intellectual creativity enhancing affect described by Ramachandran and Hubbard himself:

“The most singular equivocations, the most inexplicable transpositions of ideas take place . Sounds have a color, colors have a music. Musical notes are numbers …“ “19

In a way, then, the great poet Baudelaire not only left us one of the first descriptions of synesthetic experience, but he also hinted at how this phenomenon could actually be involved in the enhancement of creative thinking during a marijuana high

The post Baudelaire, Ramachandran, and Colors Containing Music appeared first on High Perspectives.

Marijuana, Introspection, and Personal Growth

 "Once again the powers of the herb open up the mind. Seek deep inside. Tell me what you find." 

Cypress Hill, Temples of Boom III

As we mature, we have experiences and gain knowledge about a wide variety of situations and facts. Accumulating knowledge about the world lets us grow into students, teachers, professors, mothers or fathers, skilled professionals or masters of some kind. Clearly, however, there is a special form of knowledge that shapes us the most as we grow: self-knowledge. Our self-knowledge plays a central role in who we are and how we lead our lives. You may remain more or less the same person as you learn new facts about the moon landing, the behavior of red ants or about Fibonacci numbers, but once you learn that your inability to lead a happy marriage is caused by a trauma in your childhood, this one piece of knowledge may change the course of your life forever.

The Ancient Greek imperative "Know yourself" inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi unquestionably confronts us with a task that will never be completed. Nonetheless, the fact remains that we all know how rewarding and life-changing the path can be. Myriad consumers of marijuana, as well as consumers of other psychoactive substances like LSD or psylopsybin, have reported instances of important insights into themselves – insights which significantly led to augment their self-knowledge and consequently to their personal growth. On the basis of his questionnaires sent to 750 consumers, Harvard psychologist Charles Tart found the following to be a description of a characteristic effect of marijuana:

"Spontaneously, insights about myself, my personality, the games I play come to mind when stoned seem very meaningful".

But how, and why, should marijuana be especially helpful in gaining self-knowledge?

„Introspection" in Philosophy and Common-Sense

We usually consider introspection to be the main route to self-knowledge. Literally, the term introspection is a composite of the Latin words "spicere " ("to look") and "intra" (within). The metaphor suggests that we see or perceive our own inner mental processes. Obviously, however, this should not be taken too literally: neuroscientists did not find eyes, ears or other known sensory organs in our brains, and we certainly don't expect them to do so in the future.

So, what is introspection, generally speaking? The Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy states:

"Introspection, as the term is used in contemporary philosophy of mind, is a means of learning about one's own currently ongoing, or perhaps very recently past, mental states or processes."

Our common-sense notion of „introspection", however, seems to be much broader construed: we usually say that we can introspect not only mental states like a current pain sensation, a feelings of anxiousness, or a joyful mood, but we often say that we introspect moods, disposition or other aspects of our personality like character traits. This view is expressed in the following statement by Pete Brady, a contributor to Lester Grinspoon's website marijuana-uses.com, who mentions an enhancement of introspection under the influence of marijuana:

"Semyniak Beach II", Bali, copyright Sebastian Marincolo 2006 (from the art series "Spaceport Bali"

 "The marijuana high made me introspective, and I used it to catalogue my strengths, weaknesses and traits. The drug was a revealer, not an escape mechanism; it helped me see who I was and what I needed to be."

Another anonymous contributor („Twinkly") to Grinspoon's website reports:

"I was so much more tuned-in to myself and others. I could concentrate on my fears, my turmoil, my stress, my problems, and turn them into plans on healing and freeing myself from lifelong chains that had bound me. I felt calm and relaxed and capable of dealing with who I was, good or bad. (…) I am able to look deeper inside myself to make good, sound decisions based on my true beliefs and morals."

These reports show that marijuana users feel that a high can help them to understand aspects of their personality better, to „look deeper" into their emotions, moods and character traits. In his study „On being Stoned", Charles Tart also mentions that marijuana users feel that a high can help them to better introspectively access their current bodily sensations and feelings – which is, introspection in the more narrow philosophical sense. Many of the users surveilled confirmed the following effects as a „common" effect of a marijuana high:

"My skin feels exceptionally sensitive"

"Pain is more intense if I concentrate on it"

"My perception of how my body is shaped gets strange; the 'felt' shape or form does not correspond to its actual form (e.g. you may feel lopsided, or parts of your body feel heavy while others feel light"

"I feel a lot of pleasant warmth inside my body"

"I am much more aware of the beating of my heart"

"I become aware of breathing and can feel the breath flowing in and out of my throat as well as filling my lungs"

In the following, I want to explore several different ways in which a marijuana high may enhance our introspection in both senses, in the more narrow philosophically sense concerning feelings, thoughts and sensations, as well as more broadly construed concerning moods and character traits.

The Body Mapping System and the Enhancement of Bodily Sensations

According to neuroscientists like A. D. Craig and Antonio Damasio, we all have an intereoceptive sense which gives us a sense of the body's interior. Accordingly, this sense rests on a representational mapping system, which developed in order for us to observe our internal states such as

"(…) pain states, body temperature, flush, itch, tickle, shudder, visceral and genital sensations; the state of the smooth muscular in blood vessels and other viscera (…)."

Our brain has a body mapping system which represents bodily parts. The hands, for instance, are represented in much larger areas than the rest of the body, a fact visualized in this 3d homunculus sculpture.

In their groundbreaking book The Body Has a Mind of its Own, the authors Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee focus on recent research on this ingenious body mapping system – a system which has been underestimated so far in the cognitive neurosciences. They describe a system of 'flesh bound' somatic senses which fall into several categories, each subserved by different populations of receptor cells, such as the sense of touch, thermoception (feeling cold or hot), and nociception (detecting various kinds of pain, including piercing pain, heat pain, chemical pain, joint pain, tickle and itch). Two other somatic senses would be proprioception, a sense of your body's position and motion in space, as well as the sense of balance. All these somatic senses deliver information to the brain's "body maps":

"Every point on your body, each internal organ and every point in space out to the end of your fingertips, is mapped inside your brain. Your ability to sense, move, and act in the physical world arises from a rich network of flexible body maps distributed throughout the brain – maps that grow, shrink, and morph to suit your needs."

Could it be that marijuana has a systematic effect on this system, intensifying the signals and thus leading to a redirection of attention to perceive and feel our own body? I will leave this as a hypotheses here, but I think we have enough detailed reports here to take this to the laboratories using new brain imaging techniques.

Introspection as „Reflective Contemplation"

As to the introspection of moods, more complex emotions and character traits, it is obvious that this is not a kind of 'direct' inner observation. If I introspectively realize that I am a courageous person, I have to make a judgement which involves the evaluation of many autobiographical memories, of „courageous" patterns in my behavior compared to the behavior of others, and it involves my understanding of the concept „courageous" A marijuana high might have several effects on cognition which could lead to the many enhancements described by marijuana users. We might also call this kind of introspection „reflective contemplation."

Let me briefly explain four effects of marijuana well known under marijuana users which are important here: the „Zen-effect," (a hyperfocus of attention), an enhanced episodic memory, enhanced imagination, as well as an enhanced pattern recognition.

One of the most important acute effects of marijuana is a hyperfocus in attention, an effect which I also like to call the „Zen – effect" of marijuana, because Zen tells you to concentrate on one thing at a time. This attentional focus often leads to an intensified experience of sensations and of being in the here-and-now, but it can also lead to to an hyperfocus on a stream of thought or on episodic memories – memories of past episodes in your life. Myriads of marijuana users have reported not only this hyperfocus, but also the enhancement of episodic memories. User often vividly remember past events, events that they have often long forgotten, with incredible details. Also, it is a very commonly reported effect of a marijuana high that users can imagine things better – and importantly, imagination does not only mean visualization, but it could also be auditory, or tactile, taste or olfactory imagination.

Enhancement of „Reflective Contemplation"

"Hand with Reflecting Sphere"
M.C. Escher, January 1935

Now, how could these four enhancements affect our introspection? I think this is pretty easy to see. Let's assume you reflect on whether you are a courageous person. A marijuana high can help to redirect and hyperfocus your attention on your episodic memories and your inner stream of thought. Now you can search your episodic memories for episodes in which you have acted courageously, and also those in which you haven't. Of course you want to know about a character trait, not a current mood or feeling, so you have to go back in time. Your enhanced episodic memory during a marijuana high will help you to associatively bring up memories, and the enhanced pattern recognition ability can help you to find similarities between courageous or not so courageous actions or feeling in the past. But also, note how your enhanced ability for imagination might also play a crucial role for a success of reflective contemplation concerning your character trait: if you want to judge whether you are a courageous person in general, you do not only think about your past, but you try to imagine whether you would act courageously in certain situations. Would you jump into the ice-cold Hudson river from a bridge to save that kid, like this man just did on television? During a marijuana high, you can often imagine situations like these more vividly and imagine how it would be for you, what you would actually feel, and how you would act. Thus, an enhanced capacity for imagination could be generally helping you to come to valuable insights about your dispositions and character traits, which is expressed in this statement by a college student:

"Pot is very therapeutic to me. When I'm stoned, I can really see myself. I can list my strengths and my weaknesses, and my goals. My mind is clear and eager to learn and understand, even when I have to understand awkward things, like those parts of my personality that I don't want to change. I can see parts of myself that I don't like, without hating myself in the process. I've learned things about myself that I have brought into my life when I haven't been stoned, such as how to be less self-centered, and how to be more low-keyed about myself, and less anxious in the presence of others."

As far as I can see, there are many reports of marijuana users which confirm the effects described here, but of course this is only a beginning. I hope that in the near future, cognitive neuroscientist will start looking more into the effects of marijuana high concerning attention, memory, pattern recognition and imagination.

An Amazing Potential

Let me stress that my claim is NOT that marijuana automatically enhances your introspection. My claim is that a marijuana has the potential to enhance your introspection – but in order to use this potential you have to use it correctly, with the right dose, with the right set and setting, and with knowledge and skills to „ride a high." (compare my essay „Marijuana, Surfing, and The Purity of The Moment").

It is obvious that an enhancement of our introspection can also help us get in touch with our feelings and other subjective states to help us understand others as well. Another anonymous contributor to Grinspoon's website marijuana-uses.com reports:

"Friendships and Relationships, especially those involving sexual and romantic intimacy, can be developed and deepened by the use of marijuana with others. Marijuana tends to cause introspection and by altering one's habits of thought, yields new perspectives on who one is and how one works, psychologically. Hence, marijuana works as an effective catalyst for understanding oneself and others, and discussing and developing one's relationships with other people."

Clearly, then, marijuana holds a potential not only for introspection, but also for empathic understanding and, thus, for personal development.

It is about time that we recognize that many people use marijuana not only for „recreational purposes", but are using it as a tool to find out who they are, to understand themselves and their relation to others better, and to grow as a person.