Sick Bucket Of The Universe

by Zoe Pollock

Vaughan Bell reports on visions of a psychedelic future, by imbibing a muddy brown brew known as yagé:

In a hut, in a forest, in the mountains of Colombia, I am puking into a bucket. I close my eyes and every time my body convulses I see ripples in a lattice of multi-coloured hexagons that flows out to the edges of the universe.

Bell's spirit quest was in response to an article in September's Nature Reviews Neuroscience, which tries to assess the growing research on...