Nicolas Langlitz is a penetrating wordsmith, a great writer, and one who can wrestle the meta better than most. (His other book is a study of the people who study primates, a meta-primatology study.)
Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research Since the Decade of the Brain
Nicolas Langlitz, University of California Press, 2013
- On the importance of the "principle of measured sloppiness" for experimental systems (see Rheinberger, Toward a History of Epistemic Things, Stanford, 1997) - sloppiness is what led Hofmann to "accidentally" discover LSD; he is usually meticulous in his bench work.
- "The fact that hallucinogens make an organism more susceptible to its surroundings and the increased impressionability they induce bring about a situation in which locality and social context are strongly implicated in the findings of hallucinogen experiments." (p76) This is a good example of the meta-scientific lens, which is deployed expertly by Langlitz, especially in his book Cultural Primatology.
- The problem with hallucinogens as medicine (and a valuable lesson for anyone interested in the burgeoning cannabis industry, both medicinal and recreational) - "From the pharmaceutical industry's point of view, the problem drugs are not the opiates or cocaine but the hallucinogens, the drugs so indelibly associated with the 1960s. The problem is not that these drugs could tell us a lot about ourselves and this knowledge might foment revolution, although these do seem to be possibilities. The problem is that with each dose every individual is likely to have a different experience. This is the very antithesis of quality as corporations currently define it. It seems difficult to see how hallucinogens can be brought into the area of standardization." (p77) Referencing The Creation of Pharmacology by David Healy in 2002.
- Describing participation in a psilocybin experiment: "For a moment, I felt irritated by the fact that my brain could do no better than imitate the geometric forms prevailing in psychedelic art." (p89)
- The neuromolecular gaze - The Birth of the Neuromolecular Gaze by Abi-Rached et al in 2010
- The neuralese dialect - "In its rejection of conventional manners of speaking and the corresponding social institutions, this radicalism, despite the different political undertones, was not so far removed from Timothy Leary's "neurological revolution," which had been propagated in an early neuralese dialect. (p205)
- The neurochemical self - "One scientist who had just fallen in love was joking about his oxytocin level. E-mails were signed "seronteregically Yours." And after, I had given him the sociologist Nikolas Rose's (2003a) article of the same title to read, pharmacologist Felix Hasler began to speak of himself as a "neurochemical self."
- Bioautomatons - "We're nothing but senseless bioautomatons!" (quoting Boris Quednow, p211)
- On the Self:
Honza Samotar, Swiss physician of Czech descent who worked on 2 theses simultaneously: one on insect navigation with respect to potential applications in robotics, the other on the effects of hallucinogenic drugs on the human brain (p215) ... What distinguishes Samotar's mysticism of biology from the biology of the mystical (as investigated in neurotheological studies) is that its spiritual focal point is not the extraordinary mental states engendered by hallucinogenic drugs but rather the ordinary existence to which the self-experimenter eventually returns. (p218)Honza Samotar: In my eyes, the mystical cannot be found in such ego dissolution experiences, which make you feel at one with everything. The truly mystical is that, when the drug effects wear off, you always return to your point of departure in everyday consciousness, to the baseline, so to speak. It's about the fact that I can lose myself in a state in which I'm not a human anymore, in which I lack both individuality and sociality, in which I have no lifetime because I'm eternal, being everything and nothing, neither dead nor alive, not divided into subject and object, not located in a universe with a beginning and an end -- and that this state eventually comes to an end, that I can even remember it. In retrospect, I then tell myself: yes, there are states in which I'm eternal, but then I'm not myself -- then it simply is, that state is. And strangely enough, I always come back here, to the same body at the same place. That's what I conceive of as mystical. (p219)
Image credit: AI Art - Neuropsychedelia - 2022
No comments:
Post a Comment