LSD, P-300, and my interest in the Mind/Body question

I always take note of studies that draw connections between mental activity– aspects of consciousness—and the physical matter of the brain. I became interested in these connections a long time ago as an undergrad at Carroll College, when I wondered why eating dried-out mushrooms made the plant on the coffee table in my room in the fraternity house turn into a head that talked to me. I’m not trying to glorify drug use, but this was back in the 1970’s when everything was a bit different than it is now. I didn’t enjoy most of those experiences; the mushrooms in particular brought only frightening, painful experiences despite trying three times to find something pleasant about the psychosis that they induced. Supposedly the mushrooms contained psilocybin, but looking back I suspect that the material actually consisted of some benign organic matter laced with LSD, given the stimulant-activity that the material contained and the long duration of action.

The first time I tried them I went to a movie called ‘Heavy Metal’, an animated feature-length film that by my addled memory contained obscene images of violent sexuality. I sat in my seat and became more and more certain that humans had crossed some boundary into the world of Satan, where cartoons that were supposed to be filled with innocent images for children had been taken over by the forces of evil. I ran from the theater after about ten minutes, and waited in the car for my friend Kent to do the same. Interestingly he had the same thoughts and ran from the theater about five minutes after I did!

The second try was at Alpine Valley, an outdoor rock concert arena where on this particular occasion I went to see the Grateful Dead. I remember feeling as if I was being sucked toward the stage, which was down the hill from our seats, and I struggled against the crowd to climb to the back of the arena and exit—over a fence and into a cornfield. I made my way to the car and somehow got home that night; several friends were not as lucky. One ‘frat brother’ stumbled in at about 9 or 10 the next morning (we lived about 40 miles from the arena). Both of his eyes were swollen nearly shut, and he didn’t have any shoes; he told us that he had climbed the back fence as well and gotten lost in the cornfield, eventually coming across Interstate 43. He tried to hitch-hike back to the house, and got picked up… but instead of bringing him home, the two men who offered the ride drove him to a remote area and beat the heck out of him, stole his wallet, and also took his shoes—for reasons that were not explained to him. We still were missing one person, and later in the day we received a call from the East Troy Police Department, asking for someone to drive down and pick him up. At the end of the conversation the man on the phone added, ‘bring some clothes with you—he’s naked’. Our ‘brother’ apparently found the same cornfield but decided to be ‘one with nature’, before finding the same Interstate and trying to ‘hitch’ home. Apparently the police have concerns about a stark-naked college-aged man walking along the highway with his thumb extended!

The third try was the worst for me, and enough to convince me that there was no future in such ‘studies’. I did have some very interesting perceptual experiences, though—I already mentioned that the plant on my coffee table became a head that talked to me; I was the ‘social chairman’ of our fraternity and so I was supposed to police the party that night to keep out underaged students. In the ‘chapter room’, the large room with kegs lined up and garbage pails filled with Kool-Aid and grain alcohol, I saw a ‘circus strong-man’ wandering through the crowd of students. You know the guy I’m talking about– he had a shaved head, a big mustache, big biceps, and he was wearing a one-piece set of tights that had red and white horizontal stripes, that extended to his knees and hung from straps at the shoulders. I would catch the circus-guy staring at me, and then he would disappear—something that was a bit disconcerting. I became more and more worried about him—why would a circus strongman come to our party, particularly wearing his tights? And how did he keep disappearing? Moreover, nobody else was concerned about the circus man. I kept trying to drum up help to find him and kick him out of the party, but nobody would listen to me. After awhile it became clear that he knew I was trying to get rid of him, and he started to look more threatening toward me—and so I left the party. I remember walking down the middle of the street, and the old houses that lined each side were ‘friendly’, and comforting. They were alive, and I could feel their breath as they exhaled out their front doors, their warm breath blowing against me as I walked past them.

I was about 21 years old at this point, and this was the tail end of my experiences with psychotropics. I don’t feel guilty about the experiences, but I do feel lucky. I am grateful to have survived those experiences, and I hope that my own children can avoid taking the stupid risks that I took back then.

Several years later, during my neurology rotation in medical school, I listened as my attending talked about evoked responses and the ‘P-300’ wave that he thought may correlate with intelligence. To explain, impulses in neurons travel through electrical charges that propagate down the nerve fiber; if I hit your foot with a hammer, the pain signal will travel up nerves all the way to your brain, and theoretically we could detect the electrical impulse as it hits the brain. Theoretically, because the impulse is just one out of thousands of impulses, and so the impulse we would listen for would be drowned out by all the others. With ‘evoked potential testing’, electrical activity at the brain is measured while a number of identical stimuli are applied; over time, the non-measured electrical activity adds together and ‘averages itself out’, while the activity from the repeated identical stimuli adds together and becomes more evident.

My attending neurologist was discussing something called BAER, or ‘brainstem auditory evoked response’. The person being studied would wear headphones and hear a tone, over and over, and the electrical activity in the brainstem would be measured during and after each tone. After 100 tones, the background activity averages out and becomes flat, and a series of waves becomes evident on the screen where the electrical activity is displayed. Stick with me—my point is almost here! The first two waves, P-1 and P-2, were caused by the electrical impulse from the tone, passing through the nerves, and going through two major ‘switchboards’ in the brain that filter auditory material on the way to conscious recognition of the auditory material. Now, if instead of just passively listening I was told to evaluate the tone—and to decide if the tone is higher-pitched or lower-pitched, for example—a third wave appeared, the ‘P-3’ or ‘P-300’ wave (I think it came at about 300 msec). The fascinating thing at least in my opinion was that the third wave represented mental activity. It didn’t come from the tone; it came from the decision about the tone—the mental activity alone. People with high IQs supposedly had a shorter latency to the P-3 wave—or something like that.

These were a couple of the early experiences that got me interested in the mind/brain relationship. Almost every day I see another study that points out relationships between brain structure or function and mental activity or personality characteristics. I will try to point them out here as I come across them; consider this post to serve as a general introduction to the topic. I find it fascinating that the subjective ‘I’—the sense of ‘me-ness’ that we all have—is a product of neurons and other tissue. At the same time I have a hard time believing that neurons and tissue explain EVERYTHING. I can accept the notion of memories stored in synaptic connections, or sounds compared with other sounds through neural impulses in the association cortices; but I have a hard time believing—and don’t want to believe—that my hopes for the future, my longing for connection with a higher power, or my love for my family can be reduced to tissue and neurons. I would find it most comforting, and most logical, if THOSE things persist long after the tissue is gone.

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