Are you really thinking for yourself? Psychedelics like psilocybin can help you become aware of how cultural conditioning has influenced your thought life.
I learnt about the concept of “cognitive liberty” while interviewing a doctor for a story I was writing for DoubleBlind magazine. In a nutshell, having cognitive liberty means being free to control your own consciousness and mental processes. The degree to which we are cognitively liberated is the degree to which we can think for ourselves. According to Chat GPT, the term, coined in the late 1990s by neuroethicist Wrye Sententia and legal theorist Richard Glen Boire of the Center for Cognitive Liberty & Ethics (CCLE), refers to “the right to freedom of thought, mental autonomy, and the control over one’s own consciousness, including the right to alter or protect one's mental state through means such as psychoactive substances or neurotechnology.” The fact that, in the previous sentence, I have repeated, verbatim, an AI-generated description of cognitive liberty is in itself a violation of our cognitive liberty because what I have done is adopted, through agreement, a technologically-generation description, which originated as a theoretical construct by Sententia and Glen Boire, which came into my consciousness via the promptings of a doctor, which was then transmitted to your awareness as you read these words. To be completely cognitively liberated, you would need to be making decisions about your own mental state without any external interference whatsoever. This, let’s face it, is impossible. As long as we exist in the material world and interact with our environment and other people, our consciousness and mental life will be influenced by extraneous factors. Absolute cognitive liberty is a fantasy. However, by becoming more aware of the mind-controlling mechanisms around us, we’ll be able to increase our cognitive liberty and better discern what’s best for us. Psychedelics can help us increase this awareness.
Culture as threat to cognitive liberty
If the human mind is a computer hard drive, then the infant mind can be likened to a brand-new desktop or iPhone that’s just been unboxed. It’s a clean slate, free from the imprints of the machine’s user or users. As the infant grows up, the beliefs, stories, and moods of his caregivers, family and friends, along with the rules and expectations of his world gets written into his hard drive. The infant takes on all the messages of its culture, which in turn determines the way he see himself and reacts to life.
Defined as “the customary beliefs, social forms, and material traits of a racial, religious, or social group”, and “the set of values, conventions, or social practices associated with a particular field, activity, or societal characteristic”, the tools of culture include religion, education, politics, media, family, profession, technology, and where one exists in space (the country and city you live in) and time (what generation you were born into). In one way of other, all of these apparatuses aim to shape our thought-life, commanding or subtly chiding us to choose one belief or way of being over another.
Derived from the Latin word “colere”, which means “to tend”, “to worship”, “to protect”, “to grow or cultivate”, the etymology of the word “culture” is fitting since culture is what the human mind so often turns to as a compass for right living. Wars and civil unrest for example demonstrate the lengths to which we go in order to “tend to” or “protect” our political ideologies. And who among us hasn’t been given some idea of “the perfect body”, or some template of “god” or “the divine” to “worship”, or to “cultivate” in ourselves or our children? While the tools of culture exist to create a sense of order in the world, and to help us find our place among our fellows, there comes a point where blindly following “the accepted ways” does us more harm than good. Many mental disorders, prejudices, discrimination and oppression arise from the unquestioning and unbalanced adoption of cultural values. Individuals whose natures are not aligned with their culture frequently experience confusion, self-doubt, isolation, depression and anxiety in an attempt to reconcile the differences between who they are and who they think they’re supposed to be.
Does this mean culture ought to be vilified? Absolutely not. As creatures who crave meaning and connection, culture is the glue that holds us together, providing us with a sense of collective purpose. So how then can we be non-judgmentally present to the messages from our culture without being brainwashed or overly affected by them?
Cultural conditioning creates closed mental loops
The results of this year’s US presidential election sent many democrats reeling. If I identify as a democrat, and I choose to tune into the news, I could start feeling pretty angry and down. If I identify as a Republican, and I chose to tune into the news, I could get pretty pumped. If, however, I identify as neither democrat nor republican and I understand that politics is theater and the news is created with agendas, then I’ll be able to allow information from all sides to enter and exit my mind without making a dent. A common symptom of clinical depression, anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder is rumination. Rumination happens when a thought or idea, usually an unpleasant or unwanted one, gets repeated played out in the mind until it creates a powerful shift in mood and even changes in physiology. Ruminations are also referred to as thought loops because they run in a circuit. Imagine an oval, man-made running track. Run as fast as you can, but as long as you stay on the track, you will end up where you started. There is no escape because the ground you’re running on is part of the track. This is a closed loop, which means that – as long as you’re using the man-made track – you are not free to step outside of it. In the same way, the constructs of culture exist as running tracks in our minds that have us running around in circles. Once we’ve made the decision to step off the track, or to free ourselves from cultural conditioning, then we can run across the field in the middle of the track, we can run outside the track, or we can choose not to run at all. Liberated from the rubber track under our soles, we are free to decide which direction we’ll take and how we’ll run our own race.
How psychedelics increase cognitive liberty
Research has shown that an interconnected group of brain regions known as the Default Mode Network (DNM) is responsible for maintaining our sense of self, which includes our cultural conditioning. As we mature, we develop habitual ways of responding to life based on our conditioning, and this leads to the development of established pathways of communication between the different regions of the DMN. Over time, these well-worn pathways of the DMN limit our thought life and lead to a “default mode” of perceiving ourselves, others, and the world. When a person uses a psychedelic like psilocybin in a therapeutic setting, DMN activity is disrupted creating entropy in the brain. This enables brain regions that previously never communicate to interact for the first time. According to “entropic brain theory”, the state of consciousness associated with psychedelics is akin to the mind state of early childhood, open and fresh. Momentarily freed from our “default mode” of perceiving the world, we get the chance to see our cultural beliefs as separate from ourselves, as if we were looking down at the running track of our lives or negative thoughts from a helicopter. As DMN activity gets disrupted, deeply entrenched cultural messages can get dislodged. We get the chance to observe and rid ourselves of unhelpful storylines and beliefs, so we have more space and freedom to think for ourselves.
By Michele Koh Morollo, NUMEN NoSC Therapies
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