26 November 2021. Mushrooms | Story
Mushrooms might save our species—one microdose at a time. Storylistening as a form of policy evidence. [#215]
Welcome to Just Two Things, which I try to publish daily, five days a week. Some links may also appear on my blog from time to time. Links to the main articles are in cross-heads as well as the story.
#1: Mushrooms might save the species—one microdose at the time
There’s a short and fascinating piece at Big Think on a recent study on the impact of psilocybin on our views of the world. In short, they seem to change our metaphysics, and for the better—at least if you’re worried about material consumption and climate change. The study set out to test the idea that psychedelics changed our worldview:
While many anecdotes suggest that psychedelics cause people to adopt a non-materialist view of the cosmos, hard data was lacking. After all, it could just be that those already predisposed to idealism — the notion that fundamental reality is mental rather than physical — are also more likely to try these drugs.
The research was led by Christopher Timmerman at the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College in London, and came in two stages. In stage 1, 900 volunteers attended a ceremony at which psilocybin was used, and completed questionnaires before hand and afterwards:
In general, users reported moving away from belief in materialism or physicalism — that is, the idea that the universe is primarily physical rather than mental or spiritual — and toward other views such as transcendentalism, non-naturalism, or idealism. Effects were seen at both four weeks and six months, and the effects were largest for those who were taking the drug for the first time. Another important change was the drift from hardline stances of any kind toward more mixed or moderate views.
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(Psychedelic use is associated with less belief in materialism and more belief in transcendentalism. (Credit: Christopher Timmermann et al., PsyArXiv, 2021))
The second stage involved a clinical trial with 60 respondents. A control group were given anti-depressants; the other half were given psilocybin. The results were similar: the psilocybin group experienced “a shift away from hard materialism toward more transcendental, idealistic, and supernatural conceptions of the universe.”
Overall, the experience both moved people away from “hard materialist” views of the world, and also tended to moderate their views.
Dr. Timmerman sent Big Think a summary of the findings, which are due to be published formally shortly:
Specifically, we found that people rejected the notion of physicalism (the idea that the world is made up of material, as opposed to mental or spiritual things) after a single psychedelic experience, endorsed the notion of fate more, and also the idea that all things in the universe are conscious, what we call panpsychism. Importantly, we found that these changes were related to improvements in mental health.”
He also suggested—and this is an interesting ethics question—that future studies on psilocybin may need to warn people that taking part may change their worldview. I’m trying to work out how this might be phrased: ‘participation in this study may make you a nicer human being’?
But it also seems that in a world where we’re desperately trying to curb our material consumption, for reasons of both climate change and the sixth great extinction, that mushrooms might change the world—as long as we consume them in the right way.
#2: ‘Storylistening’ as a form of policy evidence
I had hoped to watch the launch event yesterday for Storylistening, the new book from Sarah Dillon and Claire Craig, but some misleading joining instructions from Eventbrite put paid to that. However, I found a conversation between the two authors at INGSA2021 that covered the same ground (46 minutes).
Sarah Dillon is an English professor and also a part-time broadcaster, so she did most of the interviewing—except when she was put on the spot from time to time.
The first thing to say is that Storylistening is clearly a serious attempt to change the way that policy-makers think about stories and narratives in policy making. Claire Craig, now working in academe, is a former head of the UK Foresight department and of GO-Science. She has a science background. So when she co-authors a book on the importance of stories, it represents a change in the discourse about evidence.
The second thing to say is that although “storylistening” seems like something of a construct, it has a serious intent behind it. It’s not “storytelling.” It is about using stories—including fiction—as a way to broaden the evidence base that policy makers draw on. Hence the sub-title: ‘Narrative Evidence and Public Reasoning’.
One of the reasons for wanting to do this was touched on early in the conversation. Apparently Naomi Oreske and Eric Conway’s book The Collapse of Western Civilization, written as it were from the future, posits that one of the reasons for this collapse is the division between the physical and natural sciences on the hand and the humanities on the other.
The choice of ‘storylistening’ as a title was a deliberate choice. At one level, it was a refusal of the convention that the word ‘story’, especially in policy circles, is often used to denigate, while ‘narrative’ signals seriousness. But gathering narrative evidence is a serious process that requires listening for the evidence within the narrative. In short: “you can be rigorous and critical in thinking about stories.”
There’s four elements to this.
- Using stories is about new points of view—different types of framing, if you like.
- It’s about creating new networks—more diverse, more inter-disciplinary.
- Modelling—it’s possible to model narratives as well as other types of data.
- Anticipation—there are futures clues in narratives.
There were a couple of examples in the conversation. The first was about the UK advice on the ebola crisis, where anthropologists and historians worked with epidemiologists, creating different forms of knowledge about the epidemic.
The second was from a close reading of Terminator in the book by Sarah Dillon, designed to inform thinking about artificial intelligence. There are two types of artificial intelligence in the film: humanoid intelligence, in the shape of Arnie, and distributed intelligence, in the shape of Skynet.
The second one is more likely to be more immediately challenging, but it also gets overlooked because of our visceral response to killer robots. So this kind of textual reading brings neglected futures back into sight.
They emphasised in the conversation that storylistening was also more like the processes that scientists used to explore the natural world. You’re listening for what is there, and for what is being told in this story. Stories are the objects of study.
This reminded me of the recent story about the discovery of the second ship from Franklin’s doomed 19th century attempt to find the North West Passage. The researchers had listened very carefully to the stories that the Inuit told about the expedition, which pretty much led them to where the boat had sunk. The Inuit stories had been ignored previously, for the usual colonial reasons.
In missing the book’s launch event, I unfortunately missed the perspectives on the book by Diane Coyle, who would certainly have had something to say about some of the policy issues involved, and by my sometimes colleague Genevieve Lively, who is a leader in the area of narrative practice. Perhaps there will be a recording.
There’s a short piece by Claire Craig and Sarah Dillon at the LSE blog where they summarise their argument.
And for the moment, at least at time of writing, there’s a sizeable discount on the paperback edition on the Routledge website if you buy direct. Listening to the interview persuaded me that I needed to read the book.
Notes from readers: In response to my piece earlier this week on the metaverse, Nick Wray sent me a link to his Living Garden project. Let me quote: “The Living Garden is a kind of banking system, but one which instead of trading in Pounds, Dollars or Yen deals in the currency of human memories. The Living Garden is, literally, a memory bank… The garden provides the means and the place to obtain access to these messages and memories.”
j2t#215
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