BOOK
The Gist: The Biological Basis Of Higher Consciousness
$24.95
The exploration of altered states, as author Ciaran Regan reminds us, is a "unique characteristic of human life and society," one known to all cultures. For example: The exchange rate among Siberia's Finno-Ugrian tribes for one fly agaric mushroom is three or four reindeer.
A professor of pharmacology at University College in Dublin, Regan provides a relatively accessible overview of psychoactives, their development, and the way they reconfigure brain chemistry. Prozac prevents seratonin transmitters from being conserved by the presynapse, thus enhancing their action and lifting our mood. LSD affects the raphe nucleus, which, among other things, regulates the dreaming phases of sleep and allows the hallucinations to begin. Regan suggests that, altered or not, consciousness itself is a chemical process.
Bringing anthropology and history into the discussion, the author argues with some force that mind-altering agents have had on impact on "the evolution of societies." He writes, for example, that "one cannot overstate the historical significance of the introduction to Europe of stimulants such as coffee, tea, chocolate, and nicotine, by the enterprising merchants of the 17th century" - a move that evidently helped drive Europeans out of their alcohol-induced haze and into the Age of Enlightenment. It's no coincidence, in other words, that thousands of coffeehouses sprang up during one of the most industrious periods of history. (Sound familiar?) "The use of stimulants achieved chemically what Rationalism and the Protestant ethic sought to fulfill spiritually and ideologically," Regan says.
But the influence of drugs on human beings may be even more profound. Noting that many such substances are derived from plants, fungi, or micro-organisms, Regan suggests that the ingestion of certain biomaterials since prehistory may have had an effect on our development - actually reconfiguring the chemistry of the body and brain. "In many respects," he writes, "the evolution of our genome has been drug driven." And now that the human genome has been described, so will the attempt to alter ourselves once again.
Columbia University Press: www.columbia.edu/cu/cup.
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