The persistence of the subjective in neuropsychopharmacology: observations of contemporary hallucinogen research

This ethnographic case study of psychedelic research examines the role of first-person subjective experience for researchers and how it influences their paradigm in theory and practice. Langlitz found that while researchers maintain an objectivist façade that maintains the primacy of psychopharmacological techniques such as neuroimaging, most researchers believe that psychedelics can not be explained in pharmacological terms alone, but also depends on set and setting. Therefore, the author urges reconciliation between the fields of psychopharmacology and the human sciences.

Abstract

“The elimination of subjectivity through brain research and the replacement of so-called ‘folk psychology’ by a neuroscientifically enlightened worldview and self-conception has been both hoped for and feared. But this cultural revolution is still pending. Based on nine months of fieldwork on the revival of hallucinogen research since the ‘Decade of the Brain,’ this paper examines how subjective experience appears as epistemic object and practical problem in a psychopharmacological laboratory. In the quest for neural correlates of (drug-induced altered states of) consciousness, introspective accounts of test subjects play a crucial role in neuroimaging studies. Firsthand knowledge of the drugs’ flamboyant effects provides researchers with a personal knowledge not communicated in scientific publications, but key to the conduct of their experiments. In many cases, the ‘psychedelic experience’ draws scientists into the field and continues to inspire their self-image and way of life. By exploring these domains the paper points to a persistence of the subjective in contemporary neuropsychopharmacology.”

Author: Nicolas Langlitz

Summary

ABSTRACT

This paper examines how subjective experience appears as epistemic object and practical problem in a psychopharmacological laboratory, and how firsthand knowledge of the drugs’ flamboyant effects draws scientists into the field and continues to inspire their self-image and way of life.

When I arrive in the electroencephalogram (EEG) laboratory, the experiment has already started. A shaven-headed Zen master sits bolt upright in the leather armchair with a tangled mass of wires coming out of his head. Jan, a meditation teacher in his 50s, was administered psilocybin to examine how it affects his ability to meditate. His brainwaves were particularly calm. Jan looked serene and happy after the measurement, and told the researcher that he had experienced a ‘higher state of consciousness’ culminating in an experience of oneness with the universe. He had been striving for this state during three decades of meditation exercises.

During my anthropological fieldwork in Franz Vollenweider’s laboratory at the Psychiatric University Hospital, Zurich in 2005 – 6, I presented some preliminary findings that suggested that the use of hallucinogens as a model of psychosis was primarily pragmatic and did not necessarily imply an ontological identity of intoxication and psychosis.

Vollenweider has experienced states of ecstasy, but interprets these experiences as pipe dreams rather than revelations of a higher spiritual realm.

Two ethnographic vignettes illustrate how subjective experience and neurophysiological accounts are related to each other. The eliminativist position, which maintains that the neurosciences explain away subjective experience, has become paradigmatic in the public debate over the impact of brain research on our image of humankind.

Neuroscientists say that the brain plays its neuronal game, in which the self doesn’t have a say, and that the self is even taken in by the illusions.

In the course of my fieldwork in Vollenweider’s laboratory, I came to realize that the prevalent objectivist image of cognitive neuroscience had to be qualified to apply to this particular case – and possibly not only to this case.

This article presents findings that are neither universal nor particular, but significant. It argues that hallucinogen research is a somewhat exotic and marginal terrain within neuropsychopharmacology, and that the methods applied are conventional and widely employed in cognitive neuroscience.

I suddenly felt an urge to lie down in the lab, and then my perception changed abruptly and totally. I was gliding through bizarre geometric spaces, mostly cubic and intensively red, and could read at least half of the questions on a page at the same time.

The report conveys a graphic description of the rich, at times grotesque, experience of hallucinogen inebriation. The self-rating scale APZ was developed by the German psychologist Adolf Dittrich (1985, 1994) and measures three statistically constructed dimensions of altered states of consciousness.

The APZ questionnaire, which measures changes in sense perception, was used by the test subject quoted at the beginning of this section. It comprises items such as ‘I could see images from my memory or imagination with exceeding clarity’, ‘I saw regular patterns in complete darkness or with closed eyes’, etc. It’s extremely difficult to capture this inner truth or subjective reality with rating scales and neuropsychological experiments.

The questionnaires filled in after the fact provide a summary of the drug experience. This summary can be related to the instrumental recordings.

Functional neuroimaging is often misconceived as being primarily about the colorful images it produces. However, neuroscientists are more concerned with making measurements of the brain than with obtaining images of it.

Vollenweider’s PET study of psilocybin and ketamine as a model of psychosis correlated the changes of absolute metabolic rates of glucose or metabolic ratios in different brain areas.

The Spearman correlation coefficient was developed in 1904 from the practice of correlation, and it can be used to differentiate between brain activity and human consciousness, but it does not require a causal relationship.

Vollenweider’s correlation of PET measurements and psychometric self-rating scales shows that neuroimaging did not lead to a marginalization of introspection. Instead, it led to a rehabilitation of introspection as the royal road to conscious experience.

In the 1990s, Switzerland had a revival of hallucinogen research, which involved Rudolf Brenneisen, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences. The administrator Paul J. Dietschy was responsible for research with controlled substances. In the mid-90s, RB and Felix Hasler served as test subjects for a psychotropic experiment. The ethics committee required that neither medical students nor people from the street took part in this trial. When I heard about this study, I thought it wasn’t a good idea at all, but we agreed to conduct it at a high security level instead of taking anyone, maybe even paid test subjects or medical students who might end up enjoying it.

Dietschy’s concern about Brenneisen serving as a test subject in a study that he supervised can be attributed to an ideal that emerged within science, namely objectivity. This ideal was preceded by the prevalence of ‘truth-to-nature’, an attitude toward the objects of science aiming at extraction of the typical.

Objectivity was a new scientific norm that called for the effacement of the scientific self. Self-experimentation was now suspect as it was regarded as prone to distortion by the scientist’s will.

The bias inherent to studies examining a select population of pharmacologists and psychiatrists might be particularly pronounced when investigating psychedelics, because hallucinogen effects were found to be highly dependent on a subject’s personality, mood and expectations as well as on her or his social and physical environment.

Leary was not the first to describe the context-dependence of hallucinogen action. The anthropologist Anthony Wallace (1959) also noted that other drugs’ effects also depended in part on mind-set and milieu, but hallucinogens were said to amplify the impact of these non-pharmacological factors on human experience.

Professionally dealing with these substances, the subjects’ mind-sets are likely to be more uniform or at least more developed. Furthermore, a self-experimenting scientist’s expectations might affect the results.

Dietschy’s defense of objectivity against Brenneisen’s participation in the experiments of his doctoral student Felix Hasler was first and foremost a matter of principle. The positive reasons both Brenneisen and Dietschy provided for why Brenneisen eventually took part in the experiment were ethical invoking the heroic ethos of self-experimentation.

In the Vollenweider lab, ethics and epistemology are inextricably entwined. Anna, a biology student, has never taken psilocybin, but a PhD student suggests that she should try the drug herself before administering it to test subjects.

In the debate over self-experimentation, some people say that it jeopardizes scientific objectivity. I disagree, because it’s my ethical responsibility to know the effects of these substances firsthand.

Anna and Patrick set up a pilot study and take turns serving as subjects. Anna experiences some nausea, mild hallucinations, and inhibited and persevering thought processes. Patrick, who had already ingested psilocybin twice without encountering any difficulties, feels anxious during an EEG measurement and eventually wants to break off the experiment, but this makes him even more terrified that he is in big trouble.

I tried to stay in charge, but I was losing control. I got all worked up about this, and I needed to let go.

Anna decides to call Vollenweider for help, and he calms Patrick down, enabling Patrick to finish the trial. The researchers redecorate the EEG chamber to make it look friendlier, hoping to spare their test subjects such ‘bad trips’.

The Vollenweider lab recruits ‘people from the street’ to experience a hallucinogen trip in a supposedly safe setting. The pilot study does not generate publishable data, but helps the scientists familiarize themselves with the equipment and procedures and gain a better understanding of how their future test subjects might experience the situation.

Pilot studies are usually not published, but help to formulate a hypothesis or check whether an envisaged experiment has sufficient potential. After completion of the actual study, personal drug experiences acquired in pilot studies or in private help the researchers to interpret their data.

When under the acute influence of psychedelic drugs, performance on standard tests of intelligence, learning, memory and other cognitive functions generally shows impairment, and sometimes shows lack of change, and only rarely shows improvement. However, it is often difficult to get meaningful data from such measurements.

The subjective in scientific practice is indeed incompatible with the ideal of objectivity, but there are more and sometimes conflicting epistemic virtues at work in science than this historically rather recent norm. Researchers’ participation in pilot studies is not regarded as compromising the scientificity of psychopharmacology.

Objectivity was structurally relocated by the time Michael Polanyi put his finger on the importance of ‘personal knowledge’ in the sciences, reinstating the scientist’s subjectivity. However, the role of personal knowledge is systematically excluded from publications, despite its importance.

Hasler learned that the psyche is manipulable and that the smallest amounts of a chemical substance can change everything.

When hallucinogens shatter everyday consciousness, the identity of the mind and the brain presupposed by many neuroscientists seems to be transformed from an abstract philosophical postulate to an immediate experience. However, shamans do not ingest plant hallucinogens to identify themselves with their brains.

Hasler’s neurologized hallucinogen experience is strikingly different from the spirit quest of an Amazonian medicine man. It is the experience of a ‘cerebral subject’ as it has emerged in Euro-American science and philosophy since the 18th century.

Hacking attributes the investigation of human kinds to the human sciences, which are simultaneously the subject and object of human understanding. Foucault argues that this epistemic configuration has been haunted by a structural instability from the start.

Man became the basis upon which all knowledge could be constituted, and he justified the calling into question of all knowledge of man.

The neurosciences are trying to understand the neural basis of different states of consciousness, but they are entering the precarious space of the empirico-transcendental double.

The neurosciences do not reflect on the cognitive limits posed by the scientist’s ‘mind – brain’ to understanding the ‘mind – brain’, and instead use the standard approach of placebo-controlled trials to establish the psychophysiological effect of a drug.

Psychopharmacology is a human science, and studies of hallucinogen-induced alterations of consciousness are a striking example. However, the methodological armamentarium of psychopharmacology fails to provide the tools necessary to study it as such.

Anthony Wallace noted differences in experience reports provided by experimental subjects and members of indigenous peoples eating mescaline containing peyote cacti. Wallace suggested that placebo-controlled trials be supplemented by the ‘method of cultural and situational controls’.

Wallace proposed to conduct drug experiments in which the drug was held constant while varying physical experimental conditions and instructions to subjects and personnel. But, culture controls never really caught on in psychopharmacology.

This ethnographic case study of hallucinogen research has shown that the psychedelic experience is a human kind that requires investigation by way of approaches derived from human sciences such as anthropology.

The conclusions to be drawn from the observations presented in this article cannot simply be generalized, nor are they necessarily restricted to the particular case of contemporary hallucinogen research. The significance of the case of hallucinogen research depends on how strongly and in what ways exactly the cultural determinants mold drug action.

NICOLAS LANGLITZ is an assistant professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research. He has written several books.