Michael Pollan: evaluation

Transcript context

…You cite the work of psychologist Alison Gopnik, who compares being on LSD to the consciousness of children. Do you agree with her view? If you do, how does it fit into there being this not-so-fun, sublime yet somewhat terrible aspect of psychedelics? I found her argument compelling. I thought it was a good way to understand what’s happening. She doesn’t use a loaded word like regression. Other psychedelic researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris says that we regress to what Freud called a primary consciousness, which is less sophisticated, has more magical thinking — and kids certainly have more magical thinking than adults do. Her distinction between spotlight consciousness and lantern consciousness, with adults having this amazing ability to train their attention on something and block out everything else and get a lot of stuff done, versus the kid who doesn’t really stay focused, partly because he or she is taking in information from all directions and is not prioritizing, and there is a strength and a weakness in that. My own gut is there is something childlike about the consciousness at certain stages in the trip. Just judging from the experience of having had a kid, that there are levels of sensitivity to environment that children have that we lose as adults because of our desire to focus. We shut things out. Also, I’m sure there are physiological reasons that kids taste with a lot more and smell with a lot more acuity. You recover some of that sometimes. You recover some of that sensory sensitivity. I think so much of growing up is about blocking out too much sensory information so we can focus and we can use our intellects. We pay less attention to the physical senses than kids do. So yeah, I find her argument compelling. Gopnik says it’s like having tea with a four-year-old. I have a sense that a tea party with a four-year-old, the four-year-old will insist on all kinds of rules. The four-year-old will be a quicker learner than the adult. It seems fundamentally like a very different thing to me.…

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