How to Change Your Mind

As Stamets carried the heavy stones, one by one, from their cabinet to
the coffee table, where he arranged them with great care, he looked like
an altar boy, handling them with the sobriety appropriate to irreplaceable
sacred objects. It occurred to me Paul Stamets is R. Gordon Wasson’s
rightful heir. (Wasson, too, collected mushroom stones, some of which I
saw at Harvard.) He shares his radically mycocentric cosmology and sees
evidence wherever he looks for the centrality of psychoactive mushrooms
in culture, religion, and nature. Stamets’s laptop is crammed with images
of Psilocybes taken not only from nature (he’s a superb photographer)
but also from cave paintings, North African petroglyphs, medieval church
architecture, and Islamic designs, some of which recall the forms of
mushrooms or, with their fractal geometric patternings, mushroom
experiences. I confess that try as I might, I often failed to find the
mushrooms lurking in the pictures. No doubt the mushrooms themselves
could help.
This brings us to Terence McKenna’s stoned ape theory, the epitome of
all mycocentric speculation, which Stamets had wanted to make sure we
discussed. Though reading is no substitute for hearing McKenna expound
his thesis (you can find him on YouTube), he summarizes it in Food of the
Gods (1992): Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors “access to realms of
supernatural power,” “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,”
and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated
speech and imagination.” This last hypothesis about the invention of
language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the senses
that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin,
numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on.
Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which
otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts. Hence, the
stoned ape: by giving us the gifts of language and self-reflection
psilocybin mushrooms made us who we are, transforming our primate
ancestors into Homo sapiens.
The stoned ape theory is not really susceptible to proof or disproof.
The consumption of mushrooms by early hominids would be unlikely to
leave any trace in the fossil record, because the mushrooms are soft tissue
and can be eaten fresh, requiring no special tools or processing methods
that might have survived. McKenna never really explains how the
consumption of psychoactive mushrooms could have influenced