History of My Reading: Everybody Must Get Stoned (1967-8 etc.)

cover of Be Here Now by Baba Ram Dass

Throughout the school year of 1967-68 (plus a little before and for several years after),  I read books and articles about or partially inspired by psychedelic experiences and related topics.  This is a selection in context.

I got stoned for the first time in The Temple.  That's what it was called--an otherwise unused room in the attic, where the roof slanted down so the ceiling was very low. There were no windows.  It was dark and snug and safe, illuminated by candles and small lights.  It's sole purpose was to host the ceremonies of the weed.

This was in the house on West First Street in Galesburg where I lived my senior year of college.  I'd unsuccessfully tried cannabis the previous spring, and this setting definitely helped me achieve the desired state.  Once the ritual smoking was over--we sat in a loose circle passing the joint around and talking--I was urged to concentrate on the music playing on the stereo.  I was told to recline, and the two speakers were placed on opposite sides of my head, near my ears.  I knew I was stoned when I seemed to be hearing the music through both ears--basically a physical impossibility in my case (i.e. maybe the bass and drums to some extent.)

The Temple was gradually abandoned that year, as smoking dope became more open in off-campus apartments.  Everyone who smoked dope knew everyone else who did, and they could be trusted not to betray.  To the other operative student divisions was added the suddenly overriding one of Heads and Straights.  There were exceptions (those that hung out with Heads but didn't indulge, those that played it Straight but took a toke in secret) but mostly they were known, too.

Around us the culture was bending.  Songs were full of high points and stoned puns, stoned humor broke out of hiding to start appearing in public (even on television), while Dylan sang "I would not be so alone/ Everybody must get stoned."

We rediscovered our senses, as hearing, vision, smell, touch and taste all seemed enhanced, at least in terms of clarity and presence. At best, time slows and the sensory richness before you fills the moment.  The delicate movement of smoke through light becomes both more fully and beautifully what it is, and a joyful metaphor made real, an insight into the nature of existence.

 We might have experienced some synesthesia as well, in which the senses crossed in some way.  Concepts became experiences: that everything is alive, that it is all one. Before they all became cliches they were vivid perceptions, accompanied by awe and joy: the pure perception of beauty, that beauty is truth and truth beauty, all you need is love.  There would be entire stoned evenings when almost the only words spoken were "Oh wow!"

Mental operations could get a rush, as connections proliferated.  Short term memory couldn't keep up (though it didn't disappear: once when a group of us had a stoned discussion and everybody lost the thread, we successfully reconstructed the entire conversation, back to front), and I especially noticed that I had new access to long-term memories.  It seems strange to me now, but at 20, I was amazed to suddenly remember my childhood.  I recalled radio and television shows, boyhood friends and so on.  Once I not only recited the batting order of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, but demonstrated the batting stances.  I mean, it was only 1968! But it seemed an amazing recovery of what seemed gone forever.  (Although I can pretty much still do this.)

Those I associated with were, like me, uninterested in hard drugs, but curious about psychedelics.  But we were marooned in a small town in the Midwest, and these were hard to come by.  I didn't do any that year--at least not deliberately.  And that was a problem I ran into elsewhere later, one major factor in why I stopped: unless you were wealthy and/or well-connected, you never really knew what you were getting.

That winter of 1967-68 we hosted a big time cannabis dealer from California who called himself Reverend Jim.  He didn't spend much time in the house, as he spread the word all over campus, but as his hosts we got plenty of free product. We smoked it, and made brownies. It was either considerably stronger than we were used to, or it was laced with something else, because once I became a lot more stoned than I intended. I wound up paralyzed in my bed, watching movies in my head. It wasn't unpleasant, but it didn't need repeating.

I remember sitting around one afternoon with one of Reverend Jim's traveling companions who was quoting the wisdom of someone he considered to be "heavy," or enlightened.  "He said, life is a shit sandwich--at best."  Not something that we naive love and peaceniks wanted to hear, even if it came from California.

While seniors like me were just getting our stoned feet wet, some of the incoming first years were already veterans.  I remember being impressed by one who said he didn't smoke tobacco, clearly implying he smoked only something else.  Their culture was already different, and grass was simply part of it.

Our campus culture seemed to change remarkably quickly as well.  I remember once participating in a couples evening that was as conventional as suburban young marrieds except that alcoholic drinks weren't served, only grass.  The main event was an ice cream feast, designed for the blind munchies.

In the next few years, I tried "LSD" a few times, and "mescaline" once.  I place these in quotation marks because I was skeptical even at the time that they were exactly and purely that.  My experiences were mixed.  But taken all together, they did make a difference, and I did gain some lasting insights and memorable experiences.  I dove deep into Abbey Road on "acid" in Berkeley.  In the Colorado mountain countryside on "mescaline" I saw the swirl in wood as liquid and moving, the embodiment of its process over time.  I peered down into microscopic depths, watching microbes and molecules in motion.  Pretty simple visual hallucinations but I nevertheless "saw" profound truths about the substantial but not quite visible support of things.  So when the science started catching up, I was ready for it.

I eventually became discouraged by the unreliability of the product, and by the unreliability of people.  On almost every psychedelic occasion, and quite a few cannabis ones, I had to bring myself down to cope with something or someone gone awry.  Those stoned conversations also began to lose their charm.  Once I listened to two people conversing who were evidently more stoned than I was, because it was very clear to me that they were each talking about something entirely different from what the other person was talking about.  And neither of them noticed.  It was fascinating in its way, but also disconcerting.

Eventually "the scene" also got darker, with darker drugs, violent politics and enabled psychotics.  But before that, in my senior year, we took cannabis and psychedelics seriously as the keys to a new counterculture--more honest, sharing, hip, fun, loving and open to different sensual and internal experiences, for which there seemed to be some precedent in Eastern religions, western exoteria and indigenous cultures.  So in addition to experiencing what we could, we read about it all.

1964 edition

First there was the classic The Doors of Perception by Aldous Huxley.  Originally published in 1956, it was an augmented account of his mescaline experience a few years before.  It introduced me to the idea that the brain functions as a limiting filter to shape the otherwise overwhelming sense data into usable conclusions (though in some ways this resembles Quine's analysis of language.)  Huxley likened it to a "reducing valve."  Today's neuroscientists use the concept of models--that the mind has models of the expected reality that perceptions should match or at least be measured against.  Psychedelics bypass the reducing valve and the models.

Huxley took mescaline several more times, and said he had greater and more profound experiences on LSD, which he took for the first time in 1955.  His support for psychedelics was striking, in light of the role played by the fictional drug soma in his most famous novel, Brave New World.  But he didn't waver, and in the final stage of cancer, fulfilled his intention of dying while on an LSD trip.

Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert and Ralph Metzner were Harvard professors exploring the therapeutic uses of psychedelics in the 50s and early 60s, concentrating finally on LSD.  After being fired from Harvard, Leary became its best known advocate, partly through the enthusiasm of poet Allen Ginsberg.  LSD was technically still legal when I first read this trio's 1964 book, The Psychedelic Experience in my senior year.

 Its most influential sections are about preparing for an LSD trip.  There was already propaganda around about "bad trips" and the potential dangers of LSD, and I knew it was a powerful drug, so I paid attention.  The book recommended having a Guide and perhaps "programming" the trip, and it especially emphasized the importance of set (your mental preparation and attitude) and setting (the place and physical conditions.)  Though we basically only did cannabis together at our place, the Temple was all about set and setting.  Ironically then, when I first did "LSD" about a year later, I tripped with slightly younger people who had no concept of set and setting, but I deferred to their greater experience.  Early on, I found myself in a crowd of people watching a violent movie, while trying to appear normal.  Fortunately, whatever I took wasn't all that strong and I was able to bring myself down to a steadier state.

LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic by P.G. Stafford and B. H. Golightly was a paperback published in 1967.  It is a fascinating compendium of research findings suggesting therapeutic uses for mental disorders and the treatment of alcoholism and other addictions, as well as heightened creativity and life-changing insights among otherwise normal people.  But this was the last year that LSD was legal, even for research.  Medical and other research was basically forbidden and didn't happen for the next fifty years.

Nevertheless I continued to informally monitor related research.  I still have my 1972 copy of Altered States of Consciousness, a collection of research articles edited by Charles T. Tart, and another anthology from that year, Consciousness and Reality (edited by Charles Muses and Arthur M. Young) that has an aura of intellectual excitement and discovery.

 Before he became the gray-bearded guru of natural healing, Andrew Weil was a Harvard student involved (and in some ways implicated) in the Leary experiments and scandal, who published his own take on psychedelics in his book The Natural Mind, also published in 1972.

And then the rest was silence, except for occasional chapters in such arcane texts as the catch-all Alterations of Consciousness by Imants Baruss, which I reviewed for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2003, and the occasional account of a post-60s trip, as Sting's detailed description of taking ayahuasca in Brazil that opens his autobiographical Broken Music.

  That was the situation until the completely unexpected How to Change Your Mind in 2018 by Michael Pollan, best-selling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma.  As research began to cautiously revive around the world, Pollan produced this combination of reportage, interview and personal account that the New York Times named as one of the ten best nonfiction books of that year.

Pollan covers much of the history, including the scare stories about people on LSD going blind from staring at the sun, which 60 years later is exposed as fake news.  He confirms the continuing promise of psychedelics in addressing a range of illnesses and conditions, confirms LSD's power to spur creative re-thinking (many of those Silicon Valley innovators tripped out) and generally updates that 1967 paperback LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic.  I found him most interesting on the plant-derived psychedelics, particularly mushroom-based.  These substances really do have life-changing and even "miraculous" effects.

Every study I've seen since Leary et al has confirmed the determinative importance of set and setting.  Pollan's own trips were conducted very much to that 60s script: he had a  guide, the setting was quiet and had objects to contemplate (though mostly his eyes were masked), music was played and so on.  These have become standard in the new, well-organized tripping, governed by a kind of New Age professionalism.

But the importance of set and setting were established long before Leary. Most plant-based psychedelics were used for many thousands of years by indigenous peoples in serious explorations of the larger reality. These traditional cultures used their psychedelics within ritual settings and with elders as guides--i.e. attention to set and setting.

What Pollan experienced on his trips made it impossible for him to ignore the so-called spiritual dimension, the beyond-ego experiences.  He confirms that the effects of these substances substantiate the descriptions of the mind's workings that have been refined over thousands of years by Buddhist meditators and other Eastern (and a few Western) practitioners.  These also are being confirmed by neuroscientists, and explored over the several decades in the Mind and Life conferences sponsored by the Dali Lama (I reviewed the books resulting from the first seven conferences in 2004, also for the San Francisco Chronicle.)  

This connection has a long history. Practitioners of Eastern religions attain their insights mostly without even plant-based substances, but with fasting and various forms of meditation.  Yet the insights are similar.  In the decades before he took his mescaline trip, Aldous Huxley studied Hindu and other Eastern texts and consulted with well-known gurus.  The Leary/Alpert/ Metzner The Psychedelic Experience was subtitled "A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead."

Richard Alpert soon became Baba Ram Dass, and his first book Be Here Now (1971) became a revered text in certain quarters.  But that takes us into the counter-culture, subject of our next installment in this series.

To wind up the more specific elements of the substances themselves and their effects, there is now more of a distinction between cannabis and the psychedelics (LSD, and of increasing interest, psilocybin.)  Cannabis has been legalized in many states in the US through popular vote, but there is not the same acceptance for psychedelics.  In my past experience, at least some of the effects to some extent that are claimed for psychedelics were available with cannabis (assuming that's all I was ingesting.)   There may well be a qualitative difference, and in that sense I'm sorry I missed a true psychedelic experience.  Even in the lap of the cannabis industry, the likelihood that I'll run into a dependable opportunity isn't great.    

The Tripper's Dilemma

How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression and Transcendence

By Michael Pollan
Penguin Press

Best known as the author of the best-selling Omnivore's Dilemma and other food-related books in a food-conscious culture (at least among those with the income to buy books on the subject), Michael Pollan caught another wave with this comprehensive volume on a subject whose time has come back.  With the widespread legalization of cannabis, it was a good bet--but a risk nevertheless--that the total reign of silence on psychedelics was due to be broken.

Pollan did that with a revealing and objective account of the history of psychedelics in the 20th century and the revival of research and other uses in the present.  In between he narrates some of his own recent experiences with organic and chemically created psychedelics.   He makes deft use of figures like fungi scientist Paul Stamets who span the first wave of interest in the 60s and today's revival.  The result is a 450 page book that the New York Times has named one of the ten best published in 2018.

By the time Pollan was a college student in the late 1970s, the psychedelic period was largely over.   At the start Pollan seems perhaps too preemptively embarrassed  by that era's subsequent reputation, seemingly fearful of scaring readers away.  But he is judicious and forthright in the historical narrative: how the explosion of LSD, magic mushrooms and mescaline out of the research laboratory and into youth culture, as well as the messianic excesses of Timothy Leary and others,  led to a total ban of psychedelics, including scientific research, that's lasted for decades.  Where would soldiers from Vietnam come from, or willing cogs in the profit-making machine?  It couldn't be allowed.  This despite the unsurprising fact that most of the scare stories about LSD were untrue (nobody went blind staring into the sun on an acid trip) and that the research was promising, especially in treating addiction and mental illnesses.

However when I was in my senior year of college in 1967-68, that period was in full bloom, though on my perhaps backward Midwestern campus we were still mostly catching up with cannabis culture.  Nevertheless, we were listening to psychedelic music, seeing psychedelic art, wearing psychedelic clothes, and noting the mind-expansion enthusiasm of the Beatles and so many others.  In my off-campus house I carefully read The Psychedelic Experience by Leary, Ralph Metzner and Richard Albert (later, Ram Das)--all clearly labeled as Ph.D'--with its tribute to Jung and its programmatic LSD trip advice, particularly in selecting the right "set and setting" for the experience.  It was serious, if not sober, stuff.

The first opportunity I had to actually do LSD didn't come until the following winter of '68, and though I considered the decision carefully, in the end I unaccountably jumped in without any regard to set and setting or a programmed trip.  I was one of a group of younger and paradoxically more experienced students, who simply dropped acid and went about a normal Saturday night, that included going together to a movie.  I don't recall what movie it was, but it definitely contained violence that upset me, especially given the Vietnam and assassinations times. Going to this film seemed a terrible decision, and I realized I couldn't really trust the people I was with. So I deliberately brought myself down. That I was able to do so with relative ease made me suspect the substance I'd taken wasn't LSD, either wholly or at all.

I had three more subsequent experiences with substances I was told were LSD or mescaline, and they were largely the same.  I had a few experiential insights in a Colorado wilds on the supposed mescaline, and a fine time tripping to Abbey Road in Berkeley while trying to ignore the intense head trip discussion in the next room,  but in general the same two factors pertained: I doubted the substance was pure LSD or mescaline, and I couldn't trust my environment (or in one case I had to cope with somebody else's crisis.)  In terms of a psychedelic experience, I went farther in my senior year with too much Humboldt cannabis of a strength I wasn't used to, or it too could have been adulterated.  (Ironically perhaps, I've lived more than 20 years in Humboldt County now without so much as a toke.)

So it is especially interesting to me that today's trips tend to be controlled, with experienced "guides" in safe--if sometimes seemingly soporific--environments.  (Compare Pollan's descriptions of his trips with Sting's account of taking ayahuasca in Brazil in his autobiography Broken Music.) Purity of product can still be a question, although as with today's cannabis, there's more sophisticated control possible.

Pollan reviews the substantive research into what can generally be called the medical potentials of psychedelics in the 1950s and 60s.  Though such research was described in such readily available books as the 1967 paperback LSD: The Problem-Solving Psychedelic, the cultural myth of that time tended to emphasize CIA-backed mind control research and the clueless psychologists that questioned volunteer Ken Kesey, tripping his brains out at Stanford (as referenced in LSD's first and only literary classic of the period, Tom Wolfe's The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.)

Pollan draws a government-broken line between that research and the now ongoing and growing research into the psychedelic potential for a range of psychological and even physical conditions. (Aging baby boomers may be particularly interested in the results being obtained with terminal patients who lose their fear of death.)

He reveals lesser known influences that outlived the 60s to extend their effects to today, such as the role these substances paid in the creative breakthroughs by Steve Jobs and others that led in part to the computer and tech explosion, and the inspiration they provided the legendary Bill K. to start his Alcoholics Anonymous program, the basis for many such programs since.

Pollan can't avoid the philosophical and (broadly speaking) spiritual effects of these experiences, though at times it seems he'd like to.  But eventually he comes clean, suggesting that even as psychedelics are useful in a wide range of medical conditions--even perhaps a miracle cure for some, or at least a radical redefinition of them--their utility transcends and perhaps redefines science.  That power to rearrange how the world is understood, more than anything, permeated the psychedelic 60s and early 70s, so that they changed the culture, which in turn suggested these insights and their effects to many of us whether or not we dropped that pure acid in the proper set and setting.

  Pollan is annoyingly, though understandably defensive at the beginning of the book, but it took some courage and discernment to tell this story as fairly and fully as he does. The evidence he provides more than suggests that psychedelics can be of great and perhaps transformative benefit, in medical settings and beyond.

 Because the fearful establishment of the 60s was right in one respect: psychedelics can foster big changes: in perception, attitude, consciousness, and relationships to the self, others, the world and all of reality. They can help change minds, and thereby, eventually, change the world.  Had they not been so thoroughly suppressed but allowed to mature, how different the past fifty years might have been.

The Essential William James
Edited by John R. Shook
Prometheus Books

Long eclipsed by the giants of psychoanalysis, Freud and Jung (James met them: liked Jung, hated Freud) and seemingly made irrelevant by drug-happy behaviorists that dominate psychology now, William James is currently receiving new interest and respect.  His trust in self-examination and what's sneeringly referred to as anecdotal evidence together with laboratory evidence is increasingly getting a second hearing.  His emphasis on practical effects and action that brought Aristotle up to date, yet his insistence on complexity and room for mystery, keep him current in many fields of science and speculation.  As an early link between philosophy and psychology, he continues to show the way.

This selection of 18 essays by William James is preceded by the editor's 41 academically-oriented pages on his thought.  Any selection of James is welcome, especially published-- as this one is-- in a sturdy paperback with clear type.  But there are other such selections--for instance The Heart of William James, edited by the excellent James biographer Robert D. Richardson.  A few of the essays are the same in both collections, but many are different.  Though the editor of this volume implies reasons for some of his selections, a clearer explanation for why these constitute the "essential" William James would be helpful.  Annotations and footnotes could also clarify the many casual references James' makes to events etc. that his audience would have known, but which are now forgotten.

A Couple (of Books) in Search of Happiness

In The Great Disruption, Paul Gilding foresees that the onrushing climate crisis in combination with resource depletion and other factors will create catastrophes that force major changes, including (and especially) the transition to a no-growth, steady-state world economy. So in such a society, what will replace material acquisition and the joy of shopping as the definition of the good life? He calls his best case scenario “the happiness economy.”

Never out of style, redefining happiness acquires new urgency when contemplating these immense future challenges. The two books noted in this review are among recent examples.

Arthur Dobrin is a former Peace Corps volunteer and leader of the Ethical Culture movement. In The Lost Art of Happiness (Prometheus Books), he emphasizes the link between personal happiness and doing good for others that he finds reflected in founding religious texts and classic philosophers as well as the work of social scientists. He uses his own experiences with traditional cultures to relate their sources of happiness in relationships, moral behavior and appreciation for the beauty of the world.

Dobrin astutely summarizes research that shows the roots of empathy and altruism in animal and human evolution. These tendencies, strongest for close relatives and members of the band, can be extended to strangers. He reviews relevant research in modern societies, including the work of Samuel and Pearl Oliner in their work on Holocaust rescuers, particularly in The Altruistic Personality.

Though he skillfully weaves the research and writings of others to support his thesis, Dobrin’s book has a strong point of view, and is occasionally dogmatic. In contrast, Exploring Happiness: From Aristotle to Brain Science (Yale University Press) by famed Harvard philosopher Sissela Bok is more scholarly in approach and more nuanced in its judgments.

Bok deals with even more philosophy, literature and neuroscience, and the complex and competing definitions of happiness. She places a greater emphasis on the individual (such as those who find value in solitude) in contrast to Dobrin’s brief for relationship as the source of happiness. But Bok as well as Dobrin explores the roles of morality, empathy and resilience in happiness. Like both Dobrin and Gilding, she sees happiness related to more equality (gender and racial, as well as economic) but not wholly residing in material wealth.

Dobrin skillfully makes his largely inspirational case, but Bok asks more questions and suggests more complexity, irony and subtlety. Both books are thought-provoking, well constructed and written. Both books—plus Gilding’s—suggest one important area of inquiry about how to cope with the challenges ahead. Once the reality of those challenges is accepted, one task will be to encourage the values, attitudes and virtues that will be needed in the oncoming future.

Getting Darwin Wrong: Why Evolutionary Psychology Won’t Work
by Brendan Wallace
Imprint Academic

The New Science of the Mind: From Extended Mind to Embodied Phenomenology
by Mark Rowlands
MIT Press

One of the unfortunate consequences of relentless attacks on the Darwinian concept of evolution by religious and political zealots is that scientists and others often respond to all challenges in Darwin’s neighborhood as fundamentalist enemy attacks. But there are legitimate questions from those who also reject creationism and broadly speaking consider themselves Darwinists.

These challenges are represented by three books with similar titles: What Darwin Got Wrong (by Fodor and Piattelli-Palmarini, 2010) questions some of Darwin’s own conclusions. Darwin’s Blind Spot (Ryan, 2002) summarizes new science that challenges Darwin’s most dominant scientific descendants, known as Neo-Darwinists (Richard Dawkins, for example.) And this book, Getting Darwin Wrong, challenges a theory in another field that in the author’s opinion misuses or misconstrues Darwinian evolution.

This epic theory has been misused from the start. Even 90 years ago George Bernard Shaw observed that Darwin “had the luck to please everybody with an axe to grind.” The first and perhaps still most influential were the Social Darwinists (survival of the fittest justifies predatory capitalism, etc.) and proponents of what philosopher Mary Midgley calls the Escalator Fallacy of evolution as inevitable progress. These days it can also be the sloppy or cynical use of natural selection to support a supposition, scientific or otherwise.

In this book Brendan Wallace is not attacking the general idea that the human psyche was influenced by evolution, but the particulars of the school of experimental psychology that uses Evolutionary Psychology as its brand name. He identifies it as holding that the brain processes information as a digital computer, and related “cognitivist” theories of mind as popularized by Steven Pinker, for example. Evolution, they say, has bequeathed a rigid “cognitive architecture” with pre-installed programs for dealing with the world. (Ironically, another theorist attacked in Getting Darwin Wrong is the co-author of What Darwin Got Wrong.)

While there’s some metaphorical appeal in such general statements, Wallace argues that the precise theory is a logical and empirical house of cards, and leads to a warped sense of how our minds work—one that turns out to repeat inferential errors of both the Social Darwinist and Escalator fallacies, and the simplistic Neo-Darwinist emphasis on the individual, as opposed to the group and the environment.

In general Wallace asserts that this theory at best oversimplifies both natural selection and the human mind, as well as revealing yet another academic dogma that may have survived not because it is valid but because famous people professed it, and academic departments and careers depended on it.

In The New Science of the Mind, Mark Rowlands argues for an approach to mental processes different from the dominant cognitive science models, without rejecting them. He argues that cognition is “embodied” (it occurs not only in the brain but elsewhere in the body) and “extended” (mental processes “extend out, in various ways, into the organism’s environment.”) He develops his theory of the “amalgamated mind” as “the conjunction of the mind embodied and the mind extended.”

Neither Wallace or Rowlands directly addresses the work of the other; neither even appears in each other’s index. (For those keeping score at home, Rowlands does subdivide the field into Cartesian, non-Cartesian and anti-Cartesian cognitive science. As far as I can tell, he’s non, Wallace is anti.)

Rowlands treatment is more extensive and theoretical (and his book has the more appealing cover and layout) but strikingly, neither he nor Wallace delves into much brain science. Their approach is philosophical, emphasizing close logical analysis (Wallace mostly in dispute, Rowlands mostly in support of his theory.)

While both books are written clearly enough to be read by readers who haven’t followed the ins and outs in this field, they both require a lot of attention and some specialized knowledge (especially Rowland.) Though both eventually include a level of detail that was beyond my interest, I do remember this kind of writing (rigorous, with a minimum of jargon and some humor) with some affection from my philosophy courses in college.

I come away from these books still suspicious of theories of mind based so much on computers (or in Rowland’s case, on ideas that sound as if inspired by GPS and the Internet), but noting the cautious expansion of ideas of mind Rowland espouses. I’m not convinced they are expansive—or accurate—enough to do the rest of us much good, yet.

The Emotion Machine
Commonsense Thinking, Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Human Mind
By Marvin Minsky
SIMON & SCHUSTER; 387 Pages; $26

Science may begin with wonder and strives ultimately for understanding, but as a practical matter, science is interested in how to do things. Physics formulated a few simple laws (governing how falling bodies behave, for example), which enabled engineering and technology to develop.

So when some scientists set out to create intelligent machines -- "machines to mimic our minds" -- Marvin Minsky writes, they looked for simple laws that govern how our brains work. They didn't find them, he argues, because our brains are "complicated machinery" and we need "to find more complicated ways to explain our most familiar mental events." Humans adapt to different environments and situations because our brains are resourceful -- we have lots of different ways to solve problems, and if one doesn't work, we can switch to another. This book is about what Minsky believes those processes are.

continued at the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review

Two for the Ages

This spring , Yale University Press has published summary works by two distinguished Americans in different fields that address attitudes and actions forming our common world : the famed psychologist and writer Jerome Kagan, and the veteran expert on public opinion and social values research, Daniel Yankelovich. Both books are of special interest to their disciplines but in this era of boundlessly bounded expertise, both are of immense value to a wider readership. This relevance reflects the careers and lifelong concerns of both authors to relate their work to the general welfare, and to the major public dialogues of their times.


Jerome Kagan’s An Argument For Mind is structured around autobiography, beginning with his graduate work in psychology in 1950. Kagan describes his own state of mind and views, as well as the state of psychology in the context of relevant public events and dominant ideas of the time. Without jargon or smothering detail, he creates a generous and thoughtful history of the discipline over the past half century.

Psychology is a field where battle lines have long been drawn between those who rely strictly on experiments and statistics and other data, and whose therapies usually involve drugs, and those whose observations are more general and contextual, and whose therapies involve “talking” and applying concepts in active partnership with patients. There’s conflict between those who emphasize environmental factors, and prescribe cognitive or behavioral therapies as well as particular parenting procedures, and those who emphasize genetics and brain chemistry, prescribing drugs and other methods of manipulation and control.

Kagan not only uses insights and techniques from all camps, based on his own researches, but further relates his observations in this book to characters and situations in literature, movies or shared popular culture, accessible to all of us.

Kagan is renowned for his work in developmental psychology and how children learn. He is not afraid to use concepts such as virtue and morality in describing aspects of his findings and conclusions, without getting mired in judgments. This willingness to use broadly known concepts also contributes to making this book more accessible and relevant to public debate as well as personal insight.

In his concluding chapter, Kagan writes about the limitations and the relevance of biology to psychology, of (among other things) brain to mind. In writing about these issues as well as others of general concern in a field that continues to have vast direct and indirect importance to all of us, he displays a quality much missed since the passing of the founding giants of modern psychology: wisdom. You (like me) may not agree with every conclusion, but Kagan writes with the authority, clarity and generosity that gives us the information and context to grasp the issues and make up our own minds.

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'>WHEN THEY SEVERED EARTH FROM SKY:
How The Human Mind Shapes Myth
by Elizabeth Wayland Barber & Paul T. Barber
Princeton University Press.

'>WHY LIFE SPEEDS UP AS YOU GET OLDER:
How Memory Shapes Our Past
by Douwe Draaisma, translated by Arnold and Erica Pomerans
Cambridge University Press.

by William S. Kowinski

These two books are about memory, although on very different scales: the cultural memories stored over long periods of time through myth, and human memory in an individual's lifetime.

Though I started reading these books at about the same time only because of the accident of their arrival in close proximity, the idea that they are both about memory came quickly, for early in each book they each cite the same 1880 memory experiment, conducted in Germany by Hermann Ebbinghaus. Though they make entirely different (but not opposing) points from their examples, the coincidence suggested how the books naturally go together.

In '>When They Severed Earth From Sky, E.W. and P.T. Barber cite the Ebbinghaus research to support the idea that memories are remembered better when they are structured as stories rather than strung together as isolated facts. The basic premise of their book is that ancient myths are essentially stories that preliterate people used to help them remember important information about the real world, and pass it down. But for various reasons, we no longer recognize the events and phenomena these stories are meant to describe.

Their first example is a story of the Klamath people, about the fire-flinging Chief of the Below World battling the Chief of the Above World at Mount Shasta. Thanks to the sacrifice of Klamath medicine men, the Chief of the Below World was overcome, and his mountain disappeared. It then rained for many years, filling the hole where that mountain had been. The people were saved from the threat of fire, but were cautioned not to look upon the sorrowful waters.

Using details of the story matched up with known geological history, the authors maintain this is actually a story about a volcanic eruption which in fact blew away a mountain near Mt. Shasta, and left a hole now filled with water, which we call Crater Lake. The warning to stay away from the lake (which the Klamath people obeyed for many years) essentially was to protect them from any later eruption.

This book is a pleasure to read. The authors give the impression that they had a good time traveling and doing their research over a number of years, and they seem to have worked hard to make the writing seem easy, which is always appreciated. The result is a very readable romp for any intelligent reader, with lots of forward momentum (at least until the "Of Sky and Time" section) and employing a mostly engaging style consisting of lean, robust sentences and breezy diction. They anticipate the reader's logical questions, and present their theories about why myths are encoded as they are and the mechanisms they use, using a series of cleverly named "Myth Principles," like Memory Crunch, Silence Principle, Lethe Effect, Zone of Convenient Remove Syndrome and UFO Corollary.

Along the way readers will learn what getting up on the wrong side of the bed actually means, as well as fascinating interpretations of dragons (as a collection of ideas stuck together with the same name) and the Prometheus Myth.

The weaknesses of the book, apart from an awful lot of the myths turning out to be descriptions of volcanoes (including Prometheus) and attendant tsunamis (parting of the Red Sea), are in its limited usefulness and jovial reductionism. While it may come as a surprise to some academics that Native stories record real events, in my part of the world---which is not far from the Klamath---even geologists refer to stories of indigenous peoples when they talk about seismic events on the North Coast of California, and they've used these stories for at least a decade to help them understand local geologic history. As these authors admit, on this quality of Native stories, Vine DeLoria got here ahead of them in his impassioned and at times hilarious diatribe, Red Earth, White Lies.

While I'd be surprised if the premise that myths can refer to actual events is big news to academia (but I'm prepared for that eventuality), the authors are really on shaky ground with their apparent contention that this is all these myths represent. For instance, in her A History of God, Karen Armstrong refers to the possibility that the Bible story of the parting of the Red Sea may refer to earlier pagan stories, and that the Israelite god Yahweh might have originally been a god of volcanoes. But Armstrong goes on to discuss how the Israelites changed the nature of this god, and adapted this and other stories to refer to themselves. For them and I suspect in many other cases, the myths are not merely explanations of natural events; the natural events and the stories about them are incorporated into the myths to support a religious, philosophical, political or tribal idea. In other words, at least some myths use the natural events to explain beliefs, not the other way around.

The authors also completely dismiss Carl Jung's theory of mythic archetypes (central to Joseph Campbell's work, too), and later refer only to minor features of their ideas. (They also dis dreams with an oversimplified and reductionist "scientific" explanation that would surprise some neuroscientists.) They apparently reject what I take to be much more likely: that myths can be stories by which peoples remember some natural events, and they express other kinds of beliefs, and they reflect archetypes that may be universally present in human life. Sometimes one, two or all of them, and probably more. There's really no contradiction. We don't call them the mystic chords of memory for nothing.

In '>Why Life Speeds Up As You Get Older, Douwe Draaisma , a professor of history of psychology in the Netherlands, describes Ebbinghaus' researches (which he doggedly conducted using himself as the subject) as one pioneering kind of memory research, which became the dominant kind because it allowed for quantified data. Another early self-researcher, Francis Galton, experimented with associating subjective memories to current observations, but for much of the twentieth century, this way of approaching memory (as actual autobiographical memories) was neglected.

Draaisma uses the fruits of both kinds of researches, in the laboratory and out, as well as the musings of philosophers, writers and psychologists, to freshly examine several phenomena of memory, which always involve the content of memories. He explores reminiscence, so-called photographic memory, forgetting, déjà vu, and other questions of how we experience time and memory, and examines unusual cases, such as the memory of savants and grandmasters, trauma victims, and two people who seemed never to forget anything: one of them fictional, and one real.

Draaisma is a graceful writer (the English version's virtues aided no doubt by translators Arnold and Erica Pomerans), and most chapters have the length and structure of short self-contained essays. Many address questions we all have about memory and memories (since we all have both)with stylish economy and a treatment of relevant research that is involving. The questions begin with why don't we remember more of our earliest years? (Memory, or access to our memories, is autobiographical, and seems to depend on self-awareness and the development of speech.) How do people with unusual or prodigious memories remember so much? (Their memories seem to be laden with more sense data, and their brains structure memories in spatial relationships.)

One of the best essays is on "Smell and Memory," which confronts the question of why certain smells can instantly bring a long forgotten moment to life. Draaisma begins with the literary reference that has become automatic: Proust's moment with the madeleine dipped in tea that floods his memory with images and feelings (which is relevant because taste is so strongly related to smell.) But instead of referencing what has become a cliché, he goes back to the text and reveals that Proust's description of this experience takes up four pages, and his narrator goes through a long process of remembering, which requires hours, and not one but ten tastes of the tea-soaked cake.

Draaisma then examines other similar recorded experiences and the relevant laboratory research. It appears that smell is the exception to the rule: that associations are formed in memory that don't depend on language, which is why memories inspired by smell are different from most other kinds.

Of course, there's more to each question than these paranthetical and somewhat reductive summaries, and much of the pleasure here is in the reading journey. There are intriguing insights within chapters, such as our predeliction to remember insults and humiliations with great clarity, and unlike other memories to see ourselves in these painful scenes, as if from outside.

Not all the chapters are successful either in the questions they ask or the answers. In particular, the chapter that addresses the title question, why does life speed up as you get older? is not very satisfying. One of the central difficulties in talking about memory and time is the difference between subjective experiences and objective facts of each. Sometimes in dealing with them, Draaisma is illuminating, but this chapter seems a bit too confusing. He acknowledges that part of the difference in experiencing time in youth and age is physiological, and some is experiential. His final metaphor in this chapter, of a man running along a river (at first as a child running faster than the river of time, then in youth at the same rate the river is flowing, then with aging, slower and slower until the river runs without him) is a lovely synthesis of the research he cites, but doesn't quite answer the question.

So why does life speed up as we get older? I think it has a lot to do with anticipation and hope. I am writing this a few days after Easter Sunday. In my childhood, Easter was a major holiday, and one that I anticipated and thought about far in advance. The day itself was full of events and feelings (some of joy, some of disappointment, some of boredom.) This Easter had such little significance that the fact that some places were closed was a momentarily unaccountable surprise.

Part of the difference is objective: Easter is not as big a holiday as it was in my particular ethnic Catholic western Pennsylvania context in the 1950s, though among my family still living in the area where I grew up, it is more significant than among people I know where I am now. Much of Easter became oriented towards children, so naturally it would have been more important when I was a child, or if there were children now in my household. But I think an important factor is also the change that comes with disillusion. After awhile, tempered by disappointments and fading possibilities, you no longer expect or anticipate wonders linked to a day or an event, so time does not slow down before or during it.

So much of youth and adolescence (when Draaisma says most retained memories occur) is the experience of discovery. Having discovered through experience the limitations placed on hopes and dreams leads to a disillusion that distances you from the moment. It becomes too painful and wearying to either anticipate or allow yourself to fully experience the flow of time. This translates more generally, as your priorities necessarily shift to dealing with daily responsibilities, especially now that the speed of life has increased. As the habit of anticipation and hope gives way to the habit of coping and the suppression of disillusion, we flatten experience and even hurry through it as unconsciously as possible. For this and other reasons, life speeds up because we aren't paying so much attention to it.

This may also be why as we get older, we live more in our memories. Memories are themselves timeless. The more time we spend in this timeless space, the faster time seems to speed on, in those fewer moments when we rejoin the present. So now when we bite into a marshmallow bunny, it is a more Proustian than present pleasure.

Dependent Arising: The Dalai Lama and the Scientists

by William S. Kowinski

The New Physics and Cosmology: Dialogues with the Dalai Lama
Edited and narrated by Arthur Zajonc
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS; 256 PAGES; $29.95

Destructive Emotions: A Scientific Dialogue with the Dalai Lama
narrated by Daniel Goleman
BANTAM paperback; 448 PAGES; $16.

Visions of Compassion: Western Scientists and Tibetan Buddhists Examine Human Nature

edited by Richard J. Davidson & Anne Harrington
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2002; 263 PAGES; $27.50.

Healing Emotions: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Mindfulness, Emotions and Health

Edited by Daniel Goleman
SHAMBHALA, 2003; 277 PAGES; $15.95

Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying: An Exploration of Consciousness with the Dalai Lama
Edited and narrated by Francisco J. Varela
WISDOM PUBLICATIONS,1997; 254 PAGES; $16.95

Consciousness at the Crossroads: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on Brain Science and Buddhism
Edited by Zara Houshmand, Robert B. Livingston and B. Alan Wallace
SNOW LION,1999; 183 PAGES; $15.95

Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind
Edited by Jeremy Hayward & Francisco Varela
SHAMBHALA, 2001; 272 PAGES; $17.95


When Charles Darwin proposed the crowning scientific theory of the 19th century, a wide public understood enough of it to passionately debate evolution and natural selection. But not even physicists today fully understand the similarly significant theories of quantum mechanics, first proposed early in the 20th century. With western scientific thought apparently at its limits, a group of scientists recently looked for help from a man who, until he was a teenager, believed the world was flat.

The resulting dialogue between Tenzin Gyatso, the 14th Dalai Lama, several other Buddhist scholars, and a group of western physicists and philosophers (including Tu Weiming, formerly of UC Berkeley) provides the substance and the narrative energy of physicist Arthur Zajonc's graceful and insightful new book.

This five-day conference at the Dalai Lama's compound in Dharamsala, India in 1997 was not the first or last of these conclaves. Since they began a decade earlier, there have been 11 discussions convened by the organization created to arrange them, the Mind and Life Institute. Seven books have resulted so far (though video DVDs of the most recent conference, at MIT in Cambridge last fall, are available from www.mindandlife.org.)

These are not the only books that have emerged from discussions between the Dalai Lama and western scientists (others include Worlds in Harmony from Berkeley's Parallax Press, and MindScience: An East-West Dialogue from Wisdom Publications) but the Mind and Life series is itself a kind of story, of continuing and fascinating cross-cultural collaboration---even a kind of convergence---on subjects suddenly of common importance.

Most of the conferences didn't deal with physics. They began with the mind. Though largely self-educated in western science, the Dalai Lama expressed keen interest in new developments in brain sciences and related fields, to test his belief that ethical behavior is inherent in human nature, and can be nurtured without reference to any religious doctrine. As leader of Tibetan Buddhism, he was also intrigued by what western science had to say on workings of the mind that Buddhist scholars and advanced meditation practitioners had been exploring for several thousand years.

At the same time, neuroscientists using new technologies were challenging old assumptions about the relationship of brain and body. Psychologists were trying to account for abilities to change physical states (such as body temperature) as specifically demonstrated by individuals adept at meditation, when such influences on the body by the mind was thought impossible. Western science had emphasized external influences, and was just beginning to investigate human life from the inside. So in various disciplines loosely grouped as mind sciences, some scientists were eager to experiment with more advanced meditation subjects, and they were ready to hear new points of view.

These attractive and carefully edited books chronicle this unique journey, though each is also self-contained. Gentle Bridges impressed me as a kind of crash course in contemporary mind sciences, while Consciousness at the Crossroads most eloquently explicates Buddhist thought, particularly in Alan Wallace's afterword. Healing Emotions and Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying delves into research in those subjects and pertinent Buddhist thought, while Visions of Compassion investigates the growing scientific interest in altruism, empathy and the psychology of violence. These all turn out to be at the cutting edge of science in these decades.

The mood of the early conferences seemed eager but uncertain, with the scientists especially amazed by the Dalai Lama's scientific mind. Scientists exclaiming that his questions anticipate their next area of research, or otherwise demonstrate remarkable analytical acuity, is a recurring theme throughout these books. The Dalai Lama often repeats that if science can prove a Buddhist assumption wrong, it should be discarded. Trust is established as the Buddhists find the scientists both forthright and respectful, and the scientists appreciate the sophistication of Buddhist thought, which is based on rigorous training in logical debate as well as introspection. As Alan Watts noted elsewhere, "Buddhism is absolutely, fundamentally a dialogue."

While personalities percolate more obviously on video, they manifest in print as well: in questions, quick exchanges and presentations of doggedly systematic, briskly trenchant and passionately eloquent character. These dialogues had to navigate deeply different assumptions (just the differences between Buddhist enlightenment and the European Enlightenment is revealing), but the findings and methods of each tradition illuminate the other, so for readers these books become an education in both.

By the conference in 2000, the subject of Destructive Emotions, scientists were collaborating with Tibetan Buddhists in designing and conducting new laboratory experiments involving skills of advanced meditators to influence activities of mind measurable in the brain, and in designing educational programs on emotional literacy. Some scientists took their own research in new directions partly as a result of these dialogues. (Participants from the Bay Area include UC Berkeley psychologist Eleanor Rosch, UC San Francisco psychologist Paul Ekman, psychologist Jeanne Tsai and professor of religion Lee Yearly of Stanford.)

Along with Daniel Goleman's Destructive Emotions and Francisco Varela's Sleeping, Dreaming, and Dying,Arthur Zajonc's New Physics provides narrative that suggests the dramatic quality of the dialogues as well as the emotional impact of the conference experience. Physics became a topic partly because of the Dalai Lama's curiosity, but western scientists had their own reasons. Because quantum physics implies an apparently determining role for the human mind on the phenomena observed, it shatters western notions of objective reality. Tibetan Buddhism has been investigating the correlations of thought and reality for centuries. The nuanced Buddhist ideas of "dependent arising," which explore relationships of perception, expectations and reality, were particularly intriguing to both physicists and mind scientists.

The physics dialogue didn't create a new way of understanding quantum reality, but did suggest a path to it. The new physics and mind science both lead quickly to questions once considered the sole province of spirituality, and also to other traditions---not only to Buddhism, but as Tu Weiming points out, to indigenous thought such as "Hawaiian, Maori, and Native American." "I think the time is ripe for imagining a new kind of education," he asserts. "It is highly desirable, maybe even necessary, that this new education integrates the self-cultivation of the Buddhist and other traditions...It will enhance the communal, critical self-awareness of some of the most creative and reflective members of the scientific community. This is absolutely necessary for a new breakthrough."

For the Dalai Lama, the emphasis on the human mind's profound role in reality has an ethical dimension. "Therefore, the future of humanity is in the hands of humanity itself," he says, concluding the physics dialogue. "We have the responsibility to create a better world, a happier world, and a more peaceful world." These books illuminate just how deep, common and unavoidable a responsibility that is, even if we don't believe it.

crash course in science and mind

Gentle Bridges: Conversations with the Dalai Lama on the Sciences of Mind
Edited by Jeremy Hayward & Francisco Varela
SHAMBHALA, 2001; 272 PAGES; $17.95

Readers shouldn't think this book is of interest only to Buddhist adherents of any school. In a series of presentations and dialogues, contemporary scientists---Newcomb Greenleaf, mathematician and artificial intelligence researcher; physicist Jeremy Hayward, neuroscientist Robert Livingston, biochemist Luigi Luisi, cognitive psychologist Eleanor Rosch, and biologist Francisco Varela---present a wonderfully succinct and relevant crash course in contemporary science from its methodologies to its latest findings (as of 1991) and their implications for questions that western science has in common with Tibetan Buddhist thought.

For it turns out that various schools of Tibetan Buddhism have been systematically investigating and building theories about the mind-how it perceives, what knowledge and thinking are, what the relationship of the individual is to common reality---for centuries. So this book reflects a true dialogue, in which western scientists and the Dalai Lama and other Buddhists present each learn from the other.

In fact, several of the scientists comment on how pertinent the Dalai Lama's questions are, often anticipating the next line of research they're going to talk about. "You think like a scientist!" one of them exclaims.

While the Dalai Lama explains the theories and explorations of various Buddhist schools with remarkably easy erudition, the emphasis of material in this book is on western science. This is the first of at least eight books emanating from conferences that the Dalai Lama has hosted with western scientists, on questions of mind. A much fuller presentation of Tibetan Buddhist theories of mind can be found in "Consciousness at the Crossroads," dialogues from the next conference, published by Snow Lion Press. The presentation and dialogue on the recent history of scientific theory pertaining to Darwinian evolution is especially valuable. There's more information about the series at www.mindandlife.org.

Personally I like dialogues, perhaps because I'm an aural learner. To me these books are like plays in the mind, about the mind. Some of these scientists know a lot about Buddhism already, while others know very little. But they all seem impressed by the long tradition of Tibetan Buddhists in investigating phenomena of mind, and in developing a sophisticated view of how mind relates to the universe. I'm sure they are heartened as well by the Dalai Lama's attitude that Buddhist doctrine is not dogma, and if science disproves these theories, they ought to be abandoned. But it's clear that western science has much to consider that Buddhist scholars have already thought about in a way more relevant to the most advanced western science than the science of even a few decades ago. Together they may help answer perennial questions about humanity's role in the universe. Maybe even the meaning of life, the universe and everything.