After I finished the book How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, I was struck, or rather haunted, by a theory proposed by ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini. Here is a short excerpt from the book that explains the theory:
“Here we venture out onto highly speculative, slightly squishy ground,
guided by an Italian ethnobotanist named Giorgio Samorini. In a book
called Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to
Alter Consciousness, Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid
environmental change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a
few of its members abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and
experiment with some radically new and different behaviors. Much like
genetic mutations, most of these novelties will prove disastrous and be
discarded by natural selection. But the laws of probability suggest that a
few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the
individual, the group, and possibly the species to adapt to rapid changes
in their environment.
Samorini calls this a “depatterning factor.” There are times in the
evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the
radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that
psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation.
Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a
population.
It is difficult to read about Samorini’s lovely theory without thinking
about our own species and the challenging circumstances in which we
find ourselves today. Homo sapiens might have arrived at one of those
periods of crisis that calls for some mental and behavioral depatterning.
Could that be why nature has sent us these psychedelic molecules now?” (123)
Woah, right? If you watched my animation, I briefly described how animals also take these substances - cattle, horses, and dogs too. But, this theory suggests that perhaps, psychedelics may serve an evolutionary advantage for these animals. Another theory comes to mind when I hear this, and that is Terrence McKenna's Stoned Ape theory:
"McKenna posited that psilocybin caused the primitive brain’s information-processing capabilities to rapidly reorganize, which in turn kick-started the rapid evolution of cognition that led to the early art, language, and technology written in Homo sapiens’ archeological record. As early humans, he said we ‘ate our way to higher consciousness’ by consuming these mushrooms, which, he hypothesized, grew out of animal manure. Psilocybin, he said, brought us ‘out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination" (source).
This is interesting to think about, but highly difficult to prove as it would not show up in fossil records of early humans. McKenna believed that psychedelics gave us the gifts of language and introspection, which allows early hominids to evolve into homo sapiens.
I am a firm believer in the idea that everything has a reason or purpose. When you learn about nature and the environment, everything is a connected system. This makes me really think about the role that psychedelics play in this grand system.
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