“I’ve taken psilocybin three times,” Fadiman said.
Harman stood up, walked across the office, and closed the door.
Harman could not, in the context of Stanford, be open about his psychedelic experiences, but Fadiman could. Harman hired him as his teaching assistant.
Fadiman’s dissertation was titled “Behavior Change Following (LSD) Psychedelic Therapy,” but its true topic was much more far-ranging. He was interested in understanding the nature of creativity itself, and whether psychedelic drugs could inspire and enhance it. Fadiman became a fellow at the International Foundation for Advanced Study, run by Harman, a privately funded research facility. The “facility” was no more than a suite of offices above a beauty parlor, but it had a USDA permit to perform clinical studies of psychedelic drugs. Stanford and its surrounding areas were then, as now, home to innovators in aeronautics, engineering, and the nascent field of computers, and Harman, Fadiman, and their colleagues wanted to see if psychedelics could enhance creative problem-solving in professionals in those highly technical fields.
They recruited senior research scientists from different local companies as subjects, and asked them to bring with them to the sessions at least two different problems on which they had been working without success for at least three months. These subjects were executives at Hewlett-Packard, fellows at the Stanford Research Institute, architects, and designers. Among them were the people who would design the first silicon chips, create word processing, and invent the computer mouse.
Fadiman and his colleagues administered one-hundred-microgram doses of LSD to the subjects and guided them through the next hours as they puzzled over their intractable problems.*3 The subjects worked on their problems and took a variety of psychometric tests. The results were striking. Many of the subjects experienced flashes of intellectual intuition. Their performance on the psychometric tests improved, but, more important, they solved their thorny equations and problems. According to Fadiman, “A number of patents, products, and publications emerged out of that study.”
In the spring of 1966, Fadiman had just given a dose of LSD to four participants in his seventh research group when he, like other researchers around the country, received a letter from the Food and Drug Administration notifying him that the status of his LSD experimental drug exemption had been changed. This change in status resulted in the immediate termination of his research permit. Fadiman read the letter, and then glanced at his colleagues. “I think we got this letter tomorrow,” he said. Their research subjects had started to trip, and they had better things to do than worry about the FDA.
All together, twenty-eight scientists, artists, and innovators participated in these guided LSD experiences at the International Foundation for Advanced Study. What Fadiman finds most fascinating about the study is something that he realized only in retrospect. Though the participants went on to do groundbreaking work throughout Silicon Valley and farther afield, making critical discoveries, founding major corporations, and fundamentally changing the world, none underwent any profound mystical experience during the experiment that caused them to change their lives. Fadiman theorizes that this is because of the way LSD operates on the brain. The drug provides a remarkable clarity of focus. It inspires transformation not globally but in the object of your intention. If, for example, you take the drug in a psychotherapeutic set and setting, you will focus on personal issues and may gain insights relevant to your emotional life. If you take the drug anticipating a spiritual experience and in a spiritually encouraging environment, you may have a transcendent mystical experience that causes you to re-evaluate your place in the universe. If, however, you focus on a specific intellectual problem, it is there that your insights will reside. This theory is fascinating, and deserving of further research, but though Fadiman and Harman published the results of the study, their officially sanctioned research ended that day.
Authorized experimentation with LSD and other psychedelics by scientists, engineers, inventors, and artists ended when the drug was criminalized in the late sixties, but underground experimentation continued, albeit on a lesser scale. Similarly, recreational use of the drug continued. According to U.S. government surveys, between four and five hundred thousand new users of LSD self-report every year, even though the drug has been illegal for decades. Certainly, use continued in some form in Silicon Valley; it has surged in popularity in recent years.
I discussed the use of psychedelics in Silicon Valley as a tool to enhance creativity and problem solving with Tim Ferriss, investor, entrepreneur, and best-selling author of The 4-Hour Workweek. When I asked Ferriss why he thinks psychedelics continue to be used by tech entrepreneurs, he attributed it to an obsessive focus on innovation, combined with a drive to achieve. Silicon Valley is, he said, “an ecosystem that rewards achievement incredibly well, but it is oftentimes devoid of appreciation on a personal level.” He described sitting at dinner with half a dozen company founders, each worth hundreds of millions of dollars, “and they’re more miserable than anyone you’ve met.”
People in tech are researchers and problem solvers, Ferriss said. They search for solutions to their problems, both professional and personal. It makes sense that, when trying to resolve both their personal unhappiness and their periodic creative impasses, they would notice the early research on psychedelics and the anecdotal evidence of current users. They are all hackers at heart, trying to expand the computing capabilities of their own gray, lumpy wetware so that they can be the next Steve Jobs.
There is also, Ferriss told me, a third driver to this experimentation. “You have in general a very socially liberal agnostic or atheistic community. For those people, there’s still an innate or intellectual drive to find something bigger, greater. Psychedelics are a tool to explore the mystical or religious in private.”
I’m not looking for anything big or great. I just want to take greater pleasure in my life. I want to work better, be a more patient and supportive mother and wife. I have so very little interest in mysticism and religion. God’s got enough on Her plate without having to meddle in my hallucinations.
* * *
*1 ?You might not consider any work of art worth that particular price of admission, but I’ve been known to risk diarrhea for a dish of ice cream.
*2 ?Presti, whom I trust implicitly, doubts this story. But it’s such a good one! Couldn’t we just pretend it’s true?
*3 ?Incidentally, Harman, Fadiman, and their two colleagues designed the protocol for the experiment while themselves on an LSD trip.
Day 8
Transition Day