Learning From Mindless Pleasure

For Oliver Sacks, who turned 81 this week, getting high can be a lesson in empathy. Melissa Dahl marked Sacks’ birthday with the above video, in which the neurologist talks about what he gained from his experiences with LSD and amphetamines:

So one bonus, then, of drug experiences is that it allowed me to be more empathic, and to understand from my own experiences what various patients were going through. But also, it gave me some very direct knowledge of what physiologists would call the ‘reward systems’ of the brain. It had been found, for example, with rats in the 1960s that if they had an electrode in certain nuclei of the brain, and could get a jolt of electricity, which apparently gave them great pleasure, the rats might go back to the lever again and again. They would ignore food, they would ignore sex, and they would keep pressing the lever, till they died. …

For good and for evil, I think I experienced a similar sort of thing when taking large doses of amphetamine.

It produced intense pleasure, sometimes pleasure of an almost orgasmic degree. And this sort of pleasure is one sort of wants it to go on and on even though it doesn’t really teach one anything, and it’s maybe sort of base in a way, and it almost reduces one to the level of one of these rats pressing the reward center.

Also paying tribute, Popova quoted from Sacks’ recent book Hallucinations, in which he describes the distinction between ordinary imagination and hallucinogenic experience:

When you conjure up ordinary images— of a rectangle, or a friend’s face, or the Eiffel Tower —the images stay in your head. They are not projected into external space like a hallucination, and they lack the detailed quality of a percept or a hallucination. You actively create such voluntary images and can revise them as you please. In contrast, you are passive and helpless in the face of hallucinations: they happen to you, autonomously — they appear and disappear when they please, not when you please.

Watch his TED talk on hallucinations here. Previous Dish on Sacks here, here, and here.