Psychedelics may allow adults to access a state of consciousness that resebles that of a child
By now, it may be lost to memory, but all of us, even the psychedelically naive, have had direct personal experience of a high-entropy state and the novel type of consciousness it sponsors—as a young child. Baby consciousness is so different from adult consciousness as to constitute a mental country of its own, one from which we are expelled sometime early in adolescence. Is there a way back in? The closest we can come to visiting that foreign land as adults may be during the psychedelic journey. In much the same way psychedelics have given Dr. Robert Carhart-Harris an oblique angle from which to approach the phenomena of normal consciousness by exploring an altered state of it, Dr. Alison Gopnik proposes we regard the mind of the young child as another kind of “altered state,” and in a number of respects it is a strikingly similar one.
She cautions that our thinking about the subject is usually constrained by our own restricted experience of consciousness, which we naturally take to be the whole of it. In this case, most of the theories and generalizations about consciousness have been made by people who share a fairly limited subtype of it she calls “professor consciousness,” which she defines as “the phenomenology of your average middle-aged professor.” “As academics, either we’re incredibly focused on a particular problem,” Gopnik told the audience of philosophers and neuroscientists in Tucson, “or we’re sitting there saying to ourselves, ‘Why can’t I focus on this problem I’m supposed to be focused on, and why instead am I daydreaming?’” “If you thought, as people often have thought, that this was all there was to consciousness … you might very well find yourself thinking that young children were actually less conscious than we were,” because both focused attention and self-reflection are absent in young children. Gopnik asks us to think about child consciousness in terms of not what’s missing from it or undeveloped but rather what is uniquely and wonderfully present—qualities that she believes psychedelics can help us to better appreciate and, possibly, reexperience. In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik draws a useful distinction between the “spotlight consciousness” of adults and the “lantern consciousness” of young children.
References
- Pollan, Micheal. (2018). How to Change Your Mind Chapter 5. The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Psychedelics (Location 4393). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
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Type:🔴 Tags: Psychology / Biology / Neuroscience / Biochemistry / Neurochemistry / Pharmacology Status:☀️