Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘The child psychologist Alison Gopnik — and I probably wouldn’t have brought this into conversation except that we’ve already been circling psychedelics a couple of times — has made this point. She’s at UC Berkeley. There’s been a lot of psychedelic research there. And so there’s been this interesting cross-pollination in those departments. And she’s made this point that the child’s brain looks a lot like the brain of an adult on psychedelics…

You have a lot more disorganization in the way the neurons are connecting a lot more. We learn, as we get older, to filter the world, right? And that’s not just a conceptual skill. That’s actually how our brains are organized.

Psychedelics disorganizes the brain, which is why people make a lot of unusual connections, and they’re absorbing an overwhelming amount of experience because they’re not filtering it out. There are other ways to get there, too. I remember when I came back from a silent meditation retreat, I was so unable to filter out visual information that I felt like I wasn’t safe to drive because just trees were too overwhelming.

But what was making me think about — the reason I bring it up here is that both in my own experience and people I’ve known, it’s like people, when they’ve had a psychedelic experience, when they turn on the TV at the end of it to kind of come to rest, if they decide to do that, they tend to watch cartoons. They watch Pixar. They don’t go for thoughtful adult movies.

And I think there’s some interesting analogy to that in this conversation about a children’s show, is, like, if a child’s brain is more psychedelic, more disorganized, more open, then in the same way that adults who have gone through those experiences want something more colorful, beautiful, safe, et cetera, that their orientation may be in that direction, too.

Maybe there’s something valuable in it, right? At the end of that experience, I don’t want something highly educational. And in the experience a two-year-old is having, wide-eyed in this completely overwhelming world, maybe they don’t and shouldn’t.’ (from the New York Times)

Notwithstanding all the commenters clutching pearls at two adults discussing psychedelics, this interview with Jia Tolentino was absorbing, and I shall probably post another excerpt soon.