Here we venture out onto highly speculative, slightly squishy ground,
guided by an Italian ethnobotanist named Giorgio Samorini. In a book
called Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to
Alter Consciousness, Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid
environmental change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a
few of its members abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and
experiment with some radically new and different behaviors. Much like
genetic mutations, most of these novelties will prove disastrous and be
discarded by natural selection. But the laws of probability suggest that a
few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the
individual, the group, and possibly the species to adapt to rapid changes
in their environment.
Samorini calls this a “depatterning factor.” There are times in the
evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the
radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that
psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation.
Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a
population.
It is difficult to read about Samorini’s lovely theory without thinking
about our own species and the challenging circumstances in which we
find ourselves today. Homo sapiens might have arrived at one of those
periods of crisis that calls for some mental and behavioral depatterning.
Could that be why nature has sent us these psychedelic molecules now?
• • •
SUCH A NOTION would not strike Paul Stamets as the least bit far-fetched.
As we stood around the fire pit, the warm light flickering across our faces
while our dinner sizzled in its pan, Stamets talked about what
mushrooms have taught him about nature. He was expansive, eloquent,
grandiose, and, at times, in acute danger of slipping the surly bonds of
plausibility. We had had a few beers, and while we hadn’t touched our
tiny stash of azzies, we had smoked a little pot. Stamets dilated on the
idea of psilocybin as a chemical messenger sent from Earth, and how we
had been elected, by virtue of the gift of consciousness and language, to
hear its call and act before it’s too late.