Accelerated Evolution

Rewiring Your Neural Pathways for Fun and Profit

One of the most famous researchers in the study of psychedelics was Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist from Berkeley. Terence came up with a theory called the Stoned Ape hypothesis. Essentially the hypothesis states that the human brain is a predictive machine - in other words, the only evolutionary purpose that intelligence serves is to allow you to predict the future more accurately, thus allowing you to more easily reach your goals. Our sense of self - our consciousness if you will - arose because having a sense of self helps us to empathize with others, to predict what they are going to do by projecting ourselves into their shoes. It may sound cold and callous to suggest that the only reason empathy developed was to enable our brains to make better predictions, but sanctimonious moralizing rarely results in good science. The crux of Terence McKenna’s hypothesis is that this sense of self (which we refer to as human consciousness) arose from primitive apes eating psychedelic mushrooms, which kick-started more advanced evolutionary processes in their brain. In short, Terence McKenna believed that psychedelic mushrooms were an evolutionary accelerator.

Two decades after McKenna’s death, modern science seems to bear out many of his hypotheses. Although McKenna lacked the terminology to express his concepts in terms that a neuroscientist today might understand, we know today that psychedelic mushrooms have the unique quality of increasing the brain’s neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is a term that is typically used to describe both the number of neural connections in your brain as well as the number of neurons themselves. In other words, increasing neuroplasticity literally gives your brain more processing power as well as the ability to transmit thoughts faster. If we were to describe the human brain as an organic computer, this would be the equivalent of upgrading you to a bigger hard drive and giving you a couple of extra sticks of RAM memory. It’s easy to understand how doing this to monkeys could conceivably result in their evolution from simians to homo sapiens.

Of course, being a stoner hippy from Berkeley, McKenna didn’t phrase things quite so elegantly or in a way that would have been generally accepted by the scientific community. Instead, he talked about “extraplanar entities seeking to elevate consciousness,” (as you may have guessed from that phrase, Terence believed in not only studying psychedelics but using them as well) so it’s unsurprising that a lot of his theories were unfairly dismissed instead of being given the study that they deserved. A surprising number of people have no inner monologue. Could it really be said that they have consciousness? Or are they simply not evolved enough to experience qualia in the same way that the rest of us do? Perhaps the "extraplanar entity” that McKenna communicated with was simply a creation of his own mind as his intelligence increased enough to develop an inner monologue. Or perhaps he already had an inner monologue, and the added brainpower that he developed to be able to analyze his own behavior better manifested as an inner dialogue, which he perceived as coming from an external source. We could speculate and debate endlessly about such questions, which is why I decided to cut through the philosophical navel-gazing and experience the mushroom trip myself… and accidentally overdosed myself with a live sprouting mushroom, resulting in an ego-annihilating mushroom trip that lasted for two years. It was not fun at all. Regardless, I feel like it qualified me to speak upon McKenna’s psychedelic experiences with more authority. So, pushing aside the philosophical ramifications of the psychedelic experience, what are some verifiable facts that I can report?

Fact 1) I became a lot better at predicting the stock market. While I have always been better than average at investing, my success at picking stocks easily tripled. In fact, my success at superforecasting the stock market made me enough money to buy a second home.

Fact 2) I became much better at optimizing my behavior to achieve my goals. Whereas I had previously had difficulty following through on my long-term goals, I wrote a book about memetics and superforecasting, and immediately began executing multiple complex plans to demonstrate their validity.

Fact 3) I became much more self-disciplined in terms of exercise, losing at least 30 pounds. I also quit drinking alcohol and smoking cannabis with no particular effort on my part.

These are not subjective impressions open to interpretation: they are all quantifiable objective facts. Although most people under the influence of a psychedelic tend to have a very distorted view of reality, I have more money in my bank account, have a book published on Amazon, and am 30 pounds lighter and much more good-looking than I used to be. I am also much more self-confident, am physically stronger than I used to be, and have the willpower to punch a tree or a brick wall until my knuckles bleed. (I have already done this a couple of times out of pure scientific curiosity.) If being smarter, faster, stronger, and more disciplined doesn’t count as accelerated evolution, what does?

Of course, all these improvements are just the outcome of the change process, the culmination of two years of intense personal growth. The change process itself was not fun at all. For example, while the book I published during my two year mushroom trip contains a reasonably accurate explanation of memetics and superforecasting, why is it published in a font so painful to read that it could only be charitably described as insane? Why do I occasionally have this nagging feeling that I was unknowingly (and illegally) signed up for a reality TV show, or that popular celebrities are stalking me to find out everything that they can about my life?

From a results-driven perspective, the outcome may have looked uniformly positive, but from the inside, this two year mushroom trip was a harrowing and terrifying experience that left me emotionally scarred. In my next few blog posts, I’ll describe what it feels like to have the subjective experience of a mushroom-induced mental breakdown from an inside point of view, as well as the coping measures I took to deal with it.