Making Sense of Why Mushroom Trips Make No Sense

Some new research makes sense of why magic mushroom trips make no sense. We just reported on it – prime yourself here. Essentially, a new study involved putting dozens of lucky participants in a brain scanner, gave them psilocybin injections, and watched their brains. They saw a decrease in activity, during mushroom trips, of regions of the prefrontal cortex, in addition to other cortices that help to connect parts of the brain and create its internal logic, including the cingulate cortex and the thalamus. (And while it is known that these regions of the cortex contribute to behaviors like reasoning, planning, and consciousness, it is not clear exactly how they do that.)

Let’s pick this apart a little bit.

The brain is constantly at work, from keeping you breathing, eating, and sexing, to helping you avoid busting your ass on snowy sidewalks. But one of the hardest jobs for the human brain is the organization of thought. Think of how much information comes into the brain – externally from the senses and internally from its own churnings – in a given moment. It's a lot. Now imagine what needs to be done to organize those thoughts and create a single stream of consciousness (or the illusion thereof). Add to that the fact that cognition evolved partly to mold internal representations (thoughts and memories) so they roughly match actual realities about the environment, and you're left with a big job.

Organization at this level is one of the many tasks of the cerebral cortex, specifically the prefrontal cortex (which the aforementioned study showed to decrease during mushroom funtime), which in humans is particularly fat.

These “cognitive” parts of your brain, that connect certain behaviors and perceptions with certain environmental objects, tell you things like "that person's face important, look at face and speak language at it, but ignore big brown tree next to person." Shut down the connectors, and you might end up with "that person's face weird, negligible, look at large friendly tree next to person and speak language at it."

Cognition evolved to differentially categorize and value specific objects in the environment in a manner that is evolutionarily adaptive. Other people are a central part of our survival and success, and that's why we spend a lot of time looking at them, talking to them, and remembering details about them. But when you're tripping most of them are some kind of weird, wandering ghost gremlins. On the flip side, in order to keep us focused and efficient, some cognitive adaptations divert our attention from, or filter out perception of, objects irrelevant to our survival, like clouds, which to those of us on mushrooms, are shape-shifting marshmallows of timeless mystery that demand serious focus and discussion.

Left to its own feral devices, the un-constrained stream of thought and lens of attention loses its evolved sense of logic and environmental relevance and becomes a true free-associator. The word "sense" is important – cognition is a sense; a sense that, when functioning properly, makes sense of things so we can navigate the changing world. Go on a trip without a navigator, and weird shit is going to happen.