Allene Symons's Blog, page 5

This is your brain on LSD

Photo courtesy of The Guardian,

April 11, 2016

 

Here’s a neuroriddle:

When does connected also mean disconnected?
When it refers to a brain dosed with LSD.

Reports of the first study using brain neuroimaging of a human on lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) went viral in the online psychedelic community this month. The research team, led by Robin L. Carhart-Harris along with his associates, published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Someone who takes LSD, psilocybin (or mescaline, an oldie now coming back in fashion) typically sees hallucinations, and also experiences the ego-melting sense of being intimately connected with an object or person or even the entire universe.

Using three complementary neuroimaging techniques, the study revealed changes in brain activity matching these characteristic psychological effects of LSD. For example, increased cerebral blood flow in one area pointed to greater visual processing, “thereby defining its hallucinatory quality,” according to the report.

But neuroimaging of blood flow and electrical activity showed decreased connectivity between two other areas. These areas of the brain are associated with “ego dissolution” and “altered meaning.” In an everyday state of mind, these areas (called the parahippocampus and retrosplenial cortex) are important for maintaining a sense of self or ego.

The researchers expect these results to “contribute important new insights into the characteristic hallucinatory and consciousness-altering properties of psychedelics that inform on how they can model certain pathological states and potentially treat others.”

In other words, such hard science results will lead to further studies, which in turn could loosen restrictions on supervised medical – and here I am speculating – possibly spiritual applications, even studies in creativity. It is not impossible that in the far future this might lead to safe dosage, and content secure, recreational use.

So this study’s implications are more nuanced than the digital image showing a riot of connectivity might at first suggest. Yes, the fMRI shows a graphic representation of a brain on LSD, and compared to the brain on a placebo, the one on LSD “lights up” while the other seems stodgy and dull. That stodgy brain enables someone to keep it together and function in their everyday lives.

The idea that the gatekeeper part of the brain is unplugged under sway of LSD is a long-standing theory of how psychedelics work, a theory put forth by author Aldous Huxley, who attributed the idea to French philosopher Henri Bergson. (I talk about this in my book Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science).

Such a theory might explain the therapeutic potential of psychedelics when taken under professional guidance (that is, versus dosing on one’s own). As clinical studies are showing, this can happen when an individual loosens the grip of recurring and damaging patterns – the kind imprinted in addiction, alcoholism, depression, and, perhaps most dramatically, in post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. For example, the trauma of war or sexual abuse becomes imprinted on who we are, and it takes a kind of opening up to make a psychedelic-assisted therapy patient receptive so those impressions and patterns can eventually be distinguished from the self and, hopefully, fade away.

It may be curious to know about the cranial seat of hallucinations, but far more important is the idea that two areas of the brain give rise to our identity. Enter the bad-pattern-breaking Ninja power of psychedelics. The explanation of how this takes place is tied to our identity – how the brain cobbles together the idea of “me.”

For more, read the journal article, Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging

A wordplay battle between two intellectual titans resulted in...

A wordplay battle between two intellectual titans resulted in the creation of the term “psychedelics” 60 years ago 

Earlier this month I wrote a guest blog for the great indie Vroman’s Bookstore in Pasadena, Calif. 

I republish it below, along with the addition of an image from the actual March 24, 1956 letter, in which Dr. Humphry Osmond first proposed the word in a letter to Aldous Huxley. It is spelled here with an O, though later modified to an E. After writing “So far psychodelics – mind manifestors – is most promising…” He continues to suggest, but details the drawbacks of, several alternative words. (Osmond’s letter excerpt shown here courtesy of Fee Osmond Blackburn).

If you’ve ever sampled or wanted to sample psychedelics, then this flashback is for you. Sixty years ago, in March of 1956, the word psychedelic was coined during an intense exchange of letters between a famous author and a psychiatrist whose specialty was schizophrenia. I tell the full story in Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science.

The famous novelist was Aldous Huxley, best known for his dystopian novel Brave New World. His friend and verbal sparring partner was Canadian psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, who ran one of the world’s largest mental hospitals.

In a previous incident, Osmond had guided Huxley through a heaven-and-hellish experience after Huxley convinced the doctor to give him a little-known drug called mescaline. Derived from the active ingredient found in the peyote cactus, mescaline was known to mimic the reality-shattering mental disorder called psychosis.

Huxley ingested mescaline, and the result was a powerful and visionary adventure with elements of both mysticism and madness. Huxley wrote about his biochemical rite of passage in The Doors of Perception, a book that shook up his loyal readers and astonished literary critics.

That slim book influenced both Huxley and Osmond’s future endeavors in many ways. The two became advocates of research into the therapeutic, creative, and spiritual benefits of this drug, and not only mescaline but its chemical cousin LSD, the magic-mushroom derivative psilocybin, and other related substances as well.

The Doors of Perception led to numerous speaking engagements and article commissions for Huxley and Osmond, but it was a cumbersome mouthful to refer to this constellation of drugs by always listing their separate names. So on March 31 of 1956, in a letter to Osmond, Huxley complained: “About a name for these drugs – what a problem!”

Humphry Osmond had expressed a similar view in a letter to Huxley a week earlier when he wrote: “The name should have a clear meaning, be reasonably easy to pronounce, and not be too much like some other name.” He suggested several new words formed from Latin roots, but the one he preferred was ‘psychodelics.’

At this point cultural history almost took a detour because Huxley misread the word. He thought it was spelled with a letter T as ‘psychodetics,’ suggesting mind dividing, which didn’t make sense to him. The misunderstanding was not a surprise, because Osmond’s handwriting was spiky and odd, and it didn’t help that Huxley had been partially blind since contracting an eye disease at age seventeen.

After objecting to Osmond’s proposed term, Huxley put forth one of his own – ‘phanerothyme,’ its Latin root meaning ‘soul,’ then introduced it in a ditty: “To make this trivial world sublime, take half a gramme of phanerothyme.”

In a volley of wordplay, Osmond tweaked the vowel by changing the O to an E and fired back: “To plumb the depths or soar angelic, just take a pinch of psychedelic.”

Huxley got it.

Before long this feisty word would attach itself to the music, art, fashion, and spirit of protest of the 1960s — the offspring of a debate, and misunderstanding, between a psychiatrist and a celebrated author sixty years ago this month.

Huxley and the Visionary Experience

February 2016 marks the 60th anniversary of Heaven and Hell, Aldous Huxley’s sequel to his more famous paean to psychedelics,The Doors of Perception.

In his sequel Huxley focuses on “the visionary experience.” This may be induced by chemical changes in consciousness brought about mescaline or lysergic acid, or cultivated through a psychospiritual discipline such as meditation or fasting. The result, Huxley writes, is an override of the normal state of mind. This enables an intrusion of “aesthetically and sometimes spiritually valuable material.”

Such an intrusion provides a glimpse into the realm described by mystics, including the occasionally terrifying nether world tour. At times it supplies a peek into how great artists behold their world.

Enter Huxley’s personal connection to great art and artists. It turns out that one of his favorite painters is also a favorite of mine.

Aldous had a lifelong interest in fine art. Despite his near blindness resulting from an illness when he was 17, he carried his magnifying glass for assisted-vision close up and his spyglass for distance, essential tools when he wrote art criticism during his early days as a journalist living in London. He also took up painting as an avocation and pursued it on both sides of the Atlantic during his lifetime.  

The day Huxley first experienced mescaline as described in The Doors of Perception, one of his activities was thumbing through pages of art books where one page showed a reproduction of Vincent Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles (“the legs of that chair!” Huxley exclaimed to his guide, Dr. Humphry Osmond). Another reproduction, a work by Sandro Botticelli, struck Huxley like a thunderbolt: the folds in the gown of the goddess were identical with the folds of his own trousers.

Art and artists play an even greater role in Heaven and Hell, in which Huxley offers examples of  “vision inducing works of the highest order,” notably when the eye is drawn to the nearest or the farthest point imaginable.

He cites post-Impressionist French painter Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940), of whom he first writes in The Doors of Perception: “Vuillard, incidentally was a supreme master both of the transporting close-up and of the transporting distant view. His bourgeoise interiors are masterpieces of vision-inducing art…In Vuillard’s interior every detail however trivial, however hideous even…is seen and rendered as a living jewel…”

I have loved Vuillard since discovering him in the 1970s when I worked in the bookstore of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. When I started that job, I set out to caulk the chinks in my art education in an A-to-Z approach, and when I got to V and discovered Vuillard…well, he has been my favorite ever since.

Earlier this month I heard about a Vuillard show soon to close at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, where several of his small works were temporarily on view before moving elsewhere. When we arrived, I saw that one of his large pieces, recently restored, was also on display. (I show only a section of me standing by the mural because otherwise it would not fit into the template of this blog; the other painting is typical of his small pieces).

Below I quote from the Norton Simon Museum curator’s description:

“Édouard Vuillard was among the most innovative artists in turn-of-the-century Paris … Vuillard is best known for small-scale paintings of domestic interiors, populated by friends and family members and crowded with competing patterns: wallpapers, textiles, latticed windows. These patterns contribute to the emphatic flatness of his work, a sense that space recedes not into his pictures but up and across their surfaces….”

I think Aldous would relish the curator’s notion that the artist, along with his close-up-and-distant-view mastery, also orchestrates how we perceive the movement of surface and space … in a most unusual way.

Twin Dystopias Revisted

   Lately I have been rereading Aldous Huxley’s 1932 dystopian novel Brave New World, which is often conflated with 1984 by George Orwell.

    Earlier this month I caught a multimedia stage version of 1984, reportedly a big hit when it originated in London’s West End. Perhaps audiences there, as well as those here at the Broad Theater in Santa Monica, were whiplashed as I was by the combination of certain prescient themes evoking ongoing news about NSA surveillance – yet the portrayal struck me as an overheated concern with government control. In the back of my mind I envisioned what Orwell had never imagined: the possibility that penetration into our personal lives might equally come from hackers and the commercial digital complex. Perhaps in a future 1984 variant we might see Google standing in for Big Brother.

  The post-Internet era casts a new light on so many Orwellian notions. One need go no further than marketing to pre-teens and beer drinkers and fashionistas for newspeak, and Orwell’s idea of policing thoughtcrime is hardly a black and white indictment today. This notion takes a more nuanced turn if applied to a trio of communication crimes society deems unacceptable – kiddy porn, hate crimes, and terrorist-groups advocating assassination of their designated enemies. Many would agree that such nefarious outreach should be banned from websites or Facebook.

  This updated 1984 as a stage production featured riveting scenes of personal betrayal and brainwashing and grisly torture seemingly straight out of a Cold War scenario. 1984 was published in 1949, after all. Nor, sadly, is torture a thing of the past, although more likely to take place overseas. Still, watching it portrayed live under the proscenium arch was beyond uncomfortable, but that was and is largely the point. We are reminded.

   Now, back to that other dystopian masterpiece, Brave New World. Having just seen this stage rendition of 1984 (I also re-read Orwell’s novel a year or so ago), I have to say that I agree with media theorist and cultural critic Neil Postman, whose comparison of the two gives Huxley higher marks for predicting the dystopian-leaning elements of our era.

   First, as Postman points out, Orwell feared banned books, whereas Huxley thought a distracted populace would not want to read them. (A telling line from BNW reflects the idea that patriotic duty is associated with shopping: “You can’t consume much if you sit still and read books.”)

   Orwell’s unfortunates are controlled by pain; Huxley’s people don’t know they are unfortunate and deprived of freedom because they are controlled by the doling out of pleasure. One feature of the society Huxley envisioned in Brave New World is soma, the fictional drug that delivers you from reality for hours or days at a time and averts any questioning of the injustices of society.  

  In Orwell’s world the truth is concealed, while in Huxley’s world the risk is that truth will be swamped by irrelevance. In the Orwellian dystopia we would be deprived of information, while in Huxley’s a glut of information would drown us in trivia.

   It occurs to me that I may be contributing to Huxley’s darkly imagined future by launching this essay into the blogosphere.

*image from production courtesy of  “1984,” a collaboration of Headlong, Nottingham Playhouse, and the Almeida Theatre. http://www.thebroadstage.com/1984/

The Flotation Tank, Psychedelics, and the CIA (Part I)

Photo Courtesy of Art of Floating

This is my first stab at a two-part blog – but I can’t resist a tempting fork in the road. In this case, I have stumbled upon a few snippets of history that beg to be connected, perhaps for the first time.

I’ll start with the present, as represented in the image of a modern isolation tank. In this setting, an individual experiences perceptual deprivation by being suspended in warm water inside a tank where all external stimulation such as light and sound are eliminated. Flotation tanks are enjoying a resurgence of interest thanks to the practical benefits of relaxation and offsetting jet lag, as well as for the claimed mind-body enhancements of depth meditation and amplifying creativity.

Among many locales where the devices are found is San Francisco on the West Coast, and a company called The Art of Floating in Bloomsburg, PA (not far from the state’s capital city, Harrisburg), which claims to have the largest float center on the East Coast. All apparently base their techniques on the work of John C. Lilly.

Lilly (1915-2001), also shown here, is credited with establishing use of a flotation tank as a means of sensory deprivation. Lilly’s biography is quite a saga, from his days as a medical student (when he was a volunteer experimental subject in a protein deprivation study) through a career exploring the nature of consciousness.

While an undergraduate at Cal Tech in 1934, Lilly read Aldous Huxley’s novel Brave New World, in which Huxley describes a fictional drug that provides pharmacological control and effects social conditioning. It is said that this concept inspired Lilly to change his major from physics to biology. He would go on to earn a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania in 1942 with the intention of pursuing medical research rather than therapeutic practice.

His later explorations ranged from sensory deprivation experiments to research into potential human communication with dolphins (a topic next month in part II). And of course, like ‘psychonauts’ then and now, Lilly later sought extraordinary perception courtesy of LSD, ketamine, and other substances that came to be known as psychedelic.

Since 1954, Lilly’s name has become nearly synonymous with sensory isolation and the isolation tank with its arguable mind-body benefits, but a look back to Midcentury history raises a few questions. The previous year, on December 15, 1953, Humphry Osmond wrote to Aldous (who, the previous May, had experienced mescalin under the supervision of Dr. Humphry Osmond) reporting news from a psychiatric conference he had just attended in Montreal. There he heard a paper by the noted Canadian psychologist Donald O. Hebb.  

“There was something very important at Montreal … Dr. D.O. Hebb told of how he had experimented with volunteers in a restricted environment. Young men were placed in moderately sound proofed rooms, with ground glass goggles, cotton gloves and cuffs to keep the hands away from their sides. Those who put up with this developed mescalin-like experiences. Hebb was astonished. This was literally the last thing he had expected ….”

Lilly developed his first isolation tank the following year, in 1954, while working for the National Institutes for Mental Health, a government-funded agency. Although Lilly’s name is associated with the floatation tank, and that is the usual date pegged for this innovation, it seems that ideas about sensory deprivation were wafting through the air around this time. Moreover, the spread of this research may have been connected to government work with interrogation. Funding, after all, made many studies into the nature of consciousness possible.

The aforementioned Dr. Hebb is quoted as speaking at a Harvard symposium on sensory deprivation four years later, in June 1958:

      “The work that we have done at McGill University began, actually, with the problem of brainwashing. We were not permitted to say so in the first publishing ….”

Recent research has argued that Hebb’s sensory deprivation research was funded by and coordinated with the CIA (McCoy, 2007).

Judging by Humphry Osmond’s letter to Aldous Huxley, it appears that the idea of experiencing profound effects from sensory deprivation was wafting in the air by December of 1953. Osmond and Huxley had in mind mescalin-like effects and exploring the “inscape” known by mystics and adepts—to others (though I am not suggesting that Lilly was one of them) a practical application of sensory isolation was for interrogation, the unholy grail of Cold War research funding, perhaps alluded to in Hebb’s presentation in Montreal in December of 1953.

Today’s revival of interest in flotation tanks resembles the positive psychonaut legacy of exploring deep meditation and even creativity. This was what Osmond signaled as  “important” in his letter to Aldous on December 15, 1953.

*(this item was sourced from Wikipedia, but I include it because the documentation is provided).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_O._Hebb.

When a Forgotten Story Comes to Light

 My new nonfiction book – Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science – will be published December 8, so to celebrate I want to honor the age-yellowed index card that prompted my writing a book about Aldous Huxley and my father’s edgy experiments in the first place.

   Here are two links to purchase the book, which can be pre-ordered (or, if you are reading this after December 8, simply ordered) in either paperback or e-book formats. Aldous Huxley’s Hands is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

   This humdrum index card stood on edge (pun intended) in a storage box, forgotten for half a century, until I uncovered it one hot summer day when digging through what had once been my grandparents’ garage. I was simply trying to rearrange the space for storage of books I’d brought home after living for a decade in New York when I came upon several boxes obscured behind old paint cans. Inside them I found oversized photographs of hands with numbers … and inside one particular box, I found two smaller boxes with a sequence of hundreds of index cards.

   Written in my mother’s handwriting, this one bore the name of Aldous Huxley, Number 249.

   The index card refers to a photograph of Huxley’s hand, or rather both hands, which had been taken by my father with his customized camera as part of his obsessive hand study. My father and his camera are shown here too.

   My dad’s study was focused on looking for personality (and pathology) characteristics that might be mirrored in the structure of the hand. After photographing almost 1,000 hands, he found indicators that appeared to be significant. A professor named Joseph Gengerelli agreed; Gengerelli was the chair of the UCLA psychology department at that time, and he successfully replicated my father’s study.

In Aldous Huxley’s Hands, I write about Huxley’s pursuit of extraordinary states of consciousness, ranging from ESP and hypnosis to séances and unorthodox healing – and of course his adventures with mescaline (and later LSD) that led him to write The Doors of Perception and unexpectedly earned him a reputation as the literary godfather of psychedelics.

What few people know, however, is that Aldous Huxley was fascinated with hands.

“Heaven and Hell” on Day of the Dead

   On campus today I saw ghouls and animal spirits and glamorous vixens, young people who assume public fantasy lives for a night or two each year around Halloween, also commemorated as the Day of the Dead.

   Santa Ana, California, hosts this nation’s largest display of Noche de Altares, altars honoring the departed. Each booth takes up merely a few square feet, but collectively they command many city streets open only to those arriving on foot. The photograph shown here is one of the hundreds of altars displayed last year.

   The idea of departed loved ones with whom we might communicate may seem like a holdover superstition. Admitting that one has had a brush with a discarnate, beloved or not, tends to peg us as incredulous. But for the many people of all backgrounds and education levels who have had such an encounter, including myself, the experience stands out as a personal (and usually impossible to replicate) fact.

   Scattered throughout his books, Aldous Huxley said quite a bit about what he called the “posthumous state.” For example, in his novel Time Must Have a Stop he wrote an extended scene portraying a character disoriented after death, unsure of where he is, half grasping for a different state of being, half clinging to his past.

   Huxley’s Heaven and Hell was published in 1956 in the form of a slim hardcover book. It was also the sequel to his Doors of Perception. At one point in Heaven and Hell, Huxley writes:

   “If consciousness survives bodily death, it survives, presumably, on every mental level—on the level of mystical experience, on the level of blissful visionary experience, on the level of infernal visionary experience, and on the level of everyday individual existence.”

   I look forward to being one of the black-clad participants among face-painted, costumed celebrants when Noche de Altares rolls around this year on November 7. I relish the dark carnival of absorption into the swirling crowd, simulating a loss of the wall of self.

Medieval Light

Aldous would have appreciated “Touching the Past: The Hand and the Medieval Book,” an exhibition combining contemplation, books, and symbolism that I had a chance to catch this month at the Getty Museum.

I’ll lift a few snippets from the catalog to show how the curators made their point through illuminated manuscripts, each one jewel-like and subtly lit under glass.

In the Middle Ages, the hand (manus in Latin) had special status. Manuscript is a Latin term meaning “hand written,” a reminder that Medieval books were inscribed by monks entirely by hand and intended to be held in the hands. The hand was considered the servant of the body and the primary organ of touch, and it was believed that fingers had exceptional powers of expression.

In antiquity, the joining of right hands symbolized harmony.

One of the illuminated manuscripts on display was “The Creation of the World” (from the Wencenslas Psalter, circa 250 A.D.). As the curator tells us: “The anonymous artist of this psalter imagined creation as a hands-on affair. In eight scenes God is shown gathering all things into existence…. He shows his satisfaction by raising the index and middle fingers of his right hand.”

In antiquity, this gesture was one of pledging or taking an oath.

At one point in my life, I passed through a spiritually inclined phase when I could envision living as a contemplative in the tradition of those who devoted their days to hand-lettering manuscripts. I thought about the contemplative life again a few years ago when I read Huxley’s nonfiction work Grey Eminence, in which he recounted the life of a cloistered monk, Father Joseph, who was recruited as a strategist for the infamous Cardinal Richelieu.  

In that passing cloister-fantasy phase during my college days, I scraped together the money to buy a single vellum page, number 49, from a 17th century Spanish antiphonal. It hangs framed in my home today, a modest successor to magnificent early works like those shown at the Getty, a homely cousin but kindred, too, because the words and musical notations on mine were also hand written.

Aldous would have appreciated “Touching the Past: The Hand and the Medieval Book,” an exhibition combining contemplation, books, and symbolism that I had a chance to catch this month at the Getty Museum.

I’ll lift a few snippets from the catalog to show how the curators made their point through illuminated manuscripts, each one jewel-like and subtly lit under glass.

In the Middle Ages, the hand (manus in Latin) had special status. Manuscript is a Latin term meaning “hand written,” a reminder that Medieval books were inscribed by monks entirely by hand and intended to be held in the hands. The hand was considered the servant of the body and the primary organ of touch, and it was believed that fingers had exceptional powers of expression.

In antiquity, the joining of right hands symbolized harmony.

One of the illuminated manuscripts on display was “The Creation of the World” (from the Wencenslas Psalter, circa 250 A.D.). As the curator tells us: “The anonymous artist of this psalter imagined creation as a hands-on affair. In eight scenes God is shown gathering all things into existence…. He shows his satisfaction by raising the index and middle fingers of his right hand.”

In antiquity, this gesture was one of pledging or taking an oath.

At one point in my life, I passed through a spiritually inclined phase when I could envision living as a contemplative in the tradition of those who devoted their days to hand-lettering manuscripts. I thought about the contemplative life again a few years ago when I read Huxley’s nonfiction work Grey Eminence, in which he recounted the life of a cloistered monk, Father Joseph, who was recruited as a strategist for the infamous Cardinal Richelieu.  

In that passing cloister-fantasy phase during my college days, I scraped together the money to buy a single vellum page, number 49, from a 17th century Spanish antiphonal. It hangs framed in my home today, a modest successor to magnificent early works like those shown at the Getty, a homely cousin but kindred, too, because the words and musical notations on mine were also hand written.

Aldous Tells it True

Stuck in LA’s clogged freeway traffic for hours last week, I was convinced that the arteries of what Aldous Huxley once called a “super-city” cannot handle any more cars.

Or maybe the planet cannot absorb more people. This summer we’ve seen images showing thousands of desperate refugees streaming into Europe.

Being rather obsessed with Aldous Huxley, I remembered that he once wrote a magazine article making a prediction about population and the future, and I thought I had it squirreled away somewhere in my collection of Huxleyana.

After round-tripping on the clogged freeway that day, I arrived home and dug around until I came up with one of my parents’ old magazines. There it was, with its silver cover: the February 1961 special 50th-anniversary edition of True, The Man’s Magazine.

Aldous Huxley’s essay was one of 13 pieces in the issue, where he shared editorial space with the likes of John Dos Passos, Bruce Catton, Art Buchwald, U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, Ernest Hemingway and half a dozen other writers whose names still sound familiar those of us who came of age in the 1960s.  

Huxley’s piece is called “The Shape of Things in 1986,” and it focuses on his projection of life circumstances a quarter century into the future. Of course, that would be thirty years in the past for us now, so I wanted to see how his predictions had held up over time.

The teaser over the headline of his essay posed this question:

“Will the reader of TRUE’s 50th Anniversary Issue live in a world of perpetual happiness, or one in which the dangers and tensions have grown worse. The renowned author of Brave New World predicts …”

Huxley speculated that the total population of the US would be about 250 million in 1986.

I had trouble finding information for 1986, since the census takes place every 20 years, so I jumped ahead to 2000, when the U.S. population was pegged at 281.5 million. It looks like he was not far off, considering the ten year difference.

He also speculated that Los Angeles alone would have about 20 million inhabitants. He was probably not far off there, either, if you count the many cities in LA County that comprise Greater Los Angeles.

His more futuristic take on the count of the planet at the end of the century, making it year 1999/2000, was an estimated six billion. Here we are in 2015, with an estimated count of 7.2 billion, projected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050.

What this amounts to, he wrote, and I doubt anyone would argue is: “The threat posed by rampant population growth is ever increasing pressure of numbers on resources.”

  Clearly.

Huxley had a few other predictions, some seemingly channeled from today’s news reports: China possessing an up-to-date armament industry, though we might state it in higher-tech terms today, including space capability.

Regarding Russia, he speculated that what was then a communist country “may well have taken its place in the community of highly developed Western nations…”

     How true.

    “By 1986,” he also wrote, “men will undoubtedly have landed on the moon and perhaps on Mars.”  

    Yes again.

He anticipated an efficient and cheap birth control pill (which came about in the mid 1960s), as well as mood changing drugs (enter Prozac in the 1980s, right on cue).

Of the nation’s ten super-cities ranging from New York to Greater Miami to LA, he wondered,  “How will the traffic problems of these super-cities be handled?

That was what I wanted to know, sitting amid fumes on the 405 Freeway.