Hallucinations полностью

By the time I qualified as a doctor, at the end of 1958, I knew I wanted to be a neurologist, to study how the brain embodies consciousness and self and to understand its amazing powers of perception, imagery, memory, and hallucination. A new orientation was entering neurology and psychiatry at that time; it was the opening of a neurochemical age, with a glimpse of the range of chemical agents, neurotransmitters, which allow nerve cells and different parts of the nervous system to communicate with one another. In the 1950s and 1960s, discoveries were coming from all directions, though it was far from clear how they fit together. It had been found, for instance, that the parkinsonian brain was low in dopamine, and that giving a dopamine precursor, L-dopa, could alleviate the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, while tranquilizers, introduced in the early 1950s, could depress dopamine and cause a sort of chemical parkinsonism. For about a century, the staple medication for parkinsonism had been anticholinergic drugs. How did the dopamine and acetylcholine systems interact? Why did opiates — or cannabis — have such strong effects? Did the brain have special opiate receptors and make opioids of its own? Was there a similar mechanism for cannabis receptors and cannabinoids? Why was LSD so enormously potent? Were all its effects explicable in terms of altering the serotonin in the brain? What transmitter systems governed wake-sleep cycles, and what might be the neurochemical background of dreams or hallucinations?

Starting a neurology residency in 1962, I found the atmosphere heady with such questions. Neurochemistry was plainly “in,” and so — dangerously, seductively, especially in California, where I was studying — were the drugs themselves.

While Klüver had little idea of what the neural basis of his hallucinatory constants might be, rereading his book in the early 1960s was especially exciting to me in light of the groundbreaking experiments on visual perception that David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel were performing at the time, recording from neurons in the visual cortex in animals. They described neurons specialized for the detection of lines, orientations, edges, corners, etc., and these, it seemed to me, if stimulated by a drug or a migraine or a fever, might well produce just such geometrical hallucinations as Klüver had described.

But mescal hallucinations did not stop with geometrical designs. What was happening in the brain when one hallucinated more complex things: objects, places, figures, faces — let alone the heaven and hell that Huxley had described? Did they have their own basis in the brain?⁸

Thoughts like this tipped the balance for me, along with the feeling that I would never really know what hallucinogenic drugs were like unless I tried them.

I started with cannabis. A friend in Topanga Canyon, where I lived at the time, offered me a joint; I took two puffs and was transfixed by what happened then. I gazed at my hand, and it seemed to fill my visual field, getting larger and larger while at the same time moving away from me. Finally, it seemed to me, I could see a hand stretched across the universe, light-years or parsecs in length. It still looked like a living, human hand, yet this cosmic hand somehow also seemed like the hand of God. My first pot experience was marked by a mix of the neurological and the divine.

On the West Coast in the early 1960s, LSD and morning glory seeds were readily available, so I sampled those, too. “But if you want a really far-out experience,” my friends on Muscle Beach told me, “try Artane.” I found this surprising, for I knew that Artane, a synthetic drug allied to belladonna, was used in modest doses (two or three tablets a day) for the treatment of Parkinson’s disease, and that such drugs, in large quantities, could cause a delirium (such deliria have long been observed with accidental ingestion of plants like deadly nightshade, thorn apple, and black henbane). But would a delirium be fun? Or informative? Would one be in a position to observe the aberrant functioning of one’s brain — to appreciate its wonder? “Go on,” urged my friends. “Just take twenty of them — you’ll still be in partial control.”

So one Sunday morning, I counted out twenty pills, washed them down with a mouthful of water, and sat down to await the effect. Would the world be transformed, newborn, as Huxley had described it in The Doors of Perception, and as I myself had experienced with mescaline and LSD? Would there be waves of delicious, voluptuous feeling? Would there be anxiety, disorganization, paranoia? I was prepared for all of these, but none of them occurred. I had a dry mouth, large pupils, and found it difficult to read, but that was all. There were no psychic effects whatever — most disappointing. I did not know exactly what I had expected, but I had expected something.