So, you’re saying the brain is not mysterious?
While digging around the NYTimes website for their glowing obituary of the recently deceased Albert Hoffmann, I uncovered this little gem from 2001. Let’s see if we can spot the manufactured controversy here:
Users of LSD and many psychiatrists who have used the drug in therapy sessions say that [psychedelic] effects provide a window into the human unconscious. When people let go of the past in an altered state, they can dredge material from the deep within themselves.
Or can they? To Dr. Jack Cowan, a mathematician at the University of Chicago and a number of other scientists who study the architecture of the brain’s visual areas, the dancing geometical patterns observed by Dr. Hoffman are not in the least mysterious…. People may find the results helpful or insightful, he said, but they flow not from some mysterious netherworld world [sic] but from the architecture of their own brains.
Sigh. That’s right, the architecture of our brains could not possibly harbor some mysterious netherworld. The statement is not logically false, but neither does it actually contradict the possibilities of mysteries being hidden in the human brain. It’s precisely because of LSD’s interaction with our brains’ complexities that psychiatrists believe it might be useful to us at all.
Comments like this one that betray an utter illiteracy of psychology and anthropology on the part of the speaker, but can also, sadly, aid in perpetuating public misconceptions about a drug that might well offer a valuable gateway into the workings of the human mind.
When you study natural science and the miracles of creation, if you don’t turn into a mystic you are not a natural scientist.
– Albert Hoffmann
RIP, Dr. Hoffmann.