be the most parsimonious hypothesis. Yet it is a long way from being
proven, and a number of neuroscientists question whether it ever will be:
whether something as elusive as subjective experience—what it feels like
to be you—will ever yield to the reductions of science. These scientists
and philosophers are sometimes called mysterians, which is not meant as
a compliment. Some scientists have raised the possibility that
consciousness may pervade the universe, suggesting we think of it the
same way we do electromagnetism or gravity, as one of the fundamental
building blocks of reality.
The idea that psychedelic drugs might shed some light on the
problems of consciousness makes a certain sense. A psychedelic drug is
powerful enough to disrupt the system we call normal waking
consciousness in ways that may force some of its fundamental properties
into view. True, anesthetics disrupt consciousness too, yet because such
drugs shut it down, this kind of disturbance yields relatively little data. In
contrast, someone on a psychedelic remains awake and able to report on
what he or she is experiencing in real time. Nowadays, these subjective
reports can be correlated with various measures of brain activity, using
several different modes of imaging—tools unavailable to researchers
during the first wave of psychedelic research in the 1950s and 1960s.
By deploying these technologies in combination with LSD and
psilocybin, a handful of scientists working in both Europe and the United
States are opening a new window onto consciousness, and what they are
glimpsing through it promises to change our understanding of the links
between our brains and our minds.
• • •
PERHAPS THE MOST AMBITIOUS neuroscientific expedition using psychedelics
to map the terrain of human consciousness is taking place in a laboratory
at the Centre for Psychiatry on the Hammersmith campus of Imperial
College in West London. Recently completed, the campus consists of a
futuristic but oddly depressing network of buildings, linked by glass-
walled aerial walkways and glass doors that slide open silently at the
detection of the proper identification. It is here in the lab of David Nutt, a
prominent English psychopharmacologist, that a team led by a