Rational Mysticism: Spirituality Meets Science in the Search for Enlightenment by Horgan John

Author:Horgan, John [Horgan, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2004-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

The Cautious Psychedelicist

I heard a more sober assessment of the psychedelic experience from the Swiss psychiatrist Franz Vollenweider. Based at the University of Zurich Medical School and at the Psychiatric University Hospital, where Carl Jung once worked, Vollenweider is arguably the world's leader in psychedelic research involving humans. He has been remarkably successful in obtaining financial and political support for his studies and in getting his results published in peer-reviewed journals. One reason may be that he is so resolutely unpsychedelic.

Slender, neither tall nor short, with a trim mustache and longish hair graying above the ears, Vollenweider is unremarkable in appearance. He is mild-mannered, soft-spoken, prone to dry scientific abstractions. His research, he told me, has three major goals: understanding the neurobiological and cognitive effects of psychedelics, understanding the neurobiology of mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and finding better treatments for them, and studying the efficacy of psychedelics as aids to psychotherapy. One of his most ambitious projects involves using brain-imaging machines to map the neural circuitry activated by different drugs. Eventually, these studies might reveal how the physiological effects of psychedelics resemble and differ from the effects of meditation, schizophrenia, and other mind-altering influences.

Vollenweider has tentatively confirmed findings first reported by the German psychologist Adolf Dittrich in the 1980s (which I mentioned in the introduction). Dittrich interviewed more than fifteen hundred healthy subjects in six countries whose consciousness had been altered by drugs, meditation, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, sensory stimulation (exposure to intense images and sounds), and other means. He also examined people whose consciousness was impaired by schizophrenia and other illnesses. No matter how the altered states are produced, Dittrich concluded, they all fall into three broad categories, or "dimensions": oceanic boundlessness, dread of ego dissolution, and visionary restructuralization, otherwise known as heaven, hell, and visions.

Vollenweider observed this same pattern in the experiences of his subjects. By scanning their brains, he found that each dimension is associated with a different pattern of neural activity. To simplify a bit: Heaven is correlated with increased metabolic activity in the frontal and parietal lobes, regions at the front and top of the cortex, respectively, that underpin reasoning, language, and other higher cognitive functions. Hell corresponds with heightened activity in the thalamus, a walnut-sized structure deep in the brain that regulates emotion. Visions correlate with increased activity in the striatum, a cluster of nerves near the base of the brain that processes raw sensory data, and with suppressed activity in the occipital lobes, an area at the rear of the brain that underpins visual perception.

Vollenweider's findings do not mesh neatly with those of other investigators of mysticism. Whereas he links the classic, "heavenly" mystical experience to increased activity in the parietal lobes, for example, Andrew Newberg has speculated that activity in these regions decreases during mystical states. And unlike Michael Persinger, Vollenweider has found little evidence that the temporal lobes play a crucial role in mediating altered states. Of course, these divergences may reflect the fact that Vollenweider focuses on states induced by drugs rather than by meditation or electromagnetic pulses.

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