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understandable model in this case. There is, after all, some
paradox in the using of mind to understand mind, and we
should expect some limitations.
Thus the argument that the normal brain causes normal
mind, or that psychedelics cause expanded mind or
consciousness, are both fallacious explanations.
Nevertheless, we can, and have found changes in neural
signaling in the brain which are caused, in the classical
sense, by the psychedelic drugs. If we can combine the facts
of these changes with the vastly improved (yet still very
rudimentary) knowledge we now have of the sequential,
parallel, and cybernetic cognitive processes that occur in
the various brain systems under a wide range of conditions,
and test the resulting overall model of neural signaling
against an improved cognitive or psychological model of the
psychedelic state of mind, a new theory may be in the
making. To restate some of the essentials of this theory: it
will have to be a theory of processes, parallel processes
that are complimentary ways of understanding an overall
aspect of reality, of processes of cybernetic control and
feedback, of processes in which classical cause and effect
may be at best a blurred and uncertain property. If it is
objected that inapplicability of cause and effect seems
unreasonable, remember that physics had to confront the same
kind of paradoxes earlier in this century, and succeeded
admirably. There is good reason to believe that theories of
the ultimate structure of mind and consciousness will be no
less and probably more mired in apparent paradox than
theories of the ultimate structure of matter and energy.
But I am getting ahead of myself. As for my theory, or
any theory, being a good explanation of consciousness or
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mind, no author should dare such a claim today. A woven web
of guesses with a very imprecise weave would be a big claim.
I shall deal with the implications of my theory for mind, or
Mind, only near the end of this exposition, and only as
sheer speculation. Let me first deal with the cognitive and
psychological models of the psychedelic experience, for
these were the aspects that I first explored, and it was
through the construction and testing of these models that I
was able to devise models of neurological functioning which
could explain the cognitive processes that I had observed.
Now the cognitive model I am going to describe will be for
the moment a "naked model" having no structure to support
it, and since the model will be a radical departure, in some
ways, from the way we currently believe our cognitive
processes to operate, it will be easy for the reader to
dismiss it. Bear with me as the pieces of the puzzle fall
into place around the chosen starting point.
Remember that above I asked that the first consideration
should be: "let us think of the effect of a psychedelic drug
as eliminative, rather than additive: the drug functions as
a facilitator of inherent processes, a substance which by
its neurological action allows or assists certain processes
to occur which might otherwise be rare or improbable." I
also mentioned above that the psychedelic experience seems
to provide a certain freedom from habits of thinking, it
almost ensures that one is more sensitive to one's own
prejudicial ways of seeing, hearing, perceiving, acting, and
most importantly, feeling, reasoning and deciding. So far I
have used the term "thinking" (as in habits of thinking),
rather imprecisely, including within its domain all sorts of
mental processes. I will presently re-define thinking to
denote two distinct categories of mental processes, the
first pre-conscious and largely automatic, the second
comprising the processes we normally think of (!) as
thinking: reasoning and deciding, for example. The necessity
to provide some careful definitions is evident simply from
the number of ways I have used "think" in this introductory
paragraph, as well as the obvious overlapping of meaning
with other terms. Starting with the common usage and
understanding of such terms therefore, I will try to provide
more precise and functional meanings as I go along.
Considering the power of psychedelic experience to
repress in some way, or at least make one more aware of
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habits of thinking as they happen, I am unavoidably led to
the idea that such habits are a far more important factor in
the normal operation of the brain/mind then has been
supposed. But for a long time, something (perhaps the
Behaviorist legacy that I mentioned previously), seems to
have stifled not only the study of consciousness but also
the pursuit of any technical understanding of what a habit
is, psychologically and neurologically. The word "habit" is
used only non-technically in the literature, with few
exceptions, since the time of William James. But it seems to
me that a habit, and there is no denying that we "have"
habits galore, must consist of something more definable,
more describable technically, the concept must have a more
heuristic value than merely leaving the term to fend for
itself in popular use. (16) A habit, or as I will now call
them, Habit Routines, must be something very much like a
memory, (17) but different from a memory in that it is
routinely and automatically retrieved and employed without
any awareness of its presence or effect.
In looking for a possible site for the storage of habit
routines, analogous to the idea of memory storage, it
occurred to me that probably the "data" (18) of memory and
the data of habit routine was the same data, but that it was
accessed in different ways, perhaps by different systems in
the brain. When a memory is accessed, either intentionally
or by some random cue, what pops into awareness is a scene,
a representation in the various sense domains of a specific
and time-delimited event or series of events. We have a
memory of some specific and bounded fragment of the past,
although one memory may then cue another representing
another period of time altogether. I call this access of
memory, Logical Memory Access, or LMA. It is logical in that
the specific characteristics of the memory, the various
informational fragments from each sensory modality which are
accessed, are related in time and place and represent a [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]