Suetaz

Cannabis Insights

by Sebastian Schulz | Cannabis Health Journal | Issue #11

There is a famous claim about the effects of cannabis made by many consumers, a claim that has often been ridiculed as a legend. Critics say that the allegation has only been made up by “potheads” who tend to overestimate the relevance of their trip experiences and want to rationalize their smoking habit. Briefly, the claim is this: The use of cannabis can help a consumer to gain valid and important insights. Now, even before we look at the claim in detail, let us anticipate some reactions. The mere mentioning of this hypothesis instills terror in the camps of both proponents and opponents of the decriminalization of cannabis. It seems acceptable for many to say that cannabis can be used therapeutically for cancer patients to reduce nausea, or for AIDS patients to stimulate appetite and thus help them gain weight. But aren’t those psychedelic “side effects” just annoying and dangerous? Don’t they lead only to a distorted and false perception of reality? Even most proponents of medical cannabis or those who argue for other reasons for its legalization choose not to stress its psychedelic effects, let alone name them as a plus. Usually, the psychedelic effects of cannabis are seen as the “recreational” side of the drug and taking mind-bending drugs for fun is just not acceptable to a society whose members are supposed to function in a rational way. If at all, it is appropriate to mention the relaxing properties of cannabis that help a user to bring himself back to a functioning state through “intensified recreation”, just like Disneyland or a mainstream Hollywood movie. But the mere supposition that a “drug” like cannabis can lead an individual to important insights and thus, may have the potential to help him lead a more meaningful life sounds outrageous to most. Also , even if this were true, wouldn’t this be the wrong signal to give to our children – or even worse, to the general public?

I suggest being philosophical about it: let’s care about truth first, then about politics. If we want to evaluate the insight claim, we should first try to understand what it means. What, generally, do we call an insight? Here are two definitions found in dictionaries:

Insight n.

1. A sight or view of the
interior of anything; a deep inspection or view; introspection ,-- frequently used with into. i.e., He had an insight into almost all the secrets of state.

2. Power of acute observation and deduction; penetration; discernment; perception.

(Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary 1996, 1998, Micra , Inc.)

Insight:

“The immediate, spontaneous grasp of a fact or a context due to an imagination which re-structures the task or issue or which transfers problem- solving principles to new situations.”

(Meyer’s Dictionary/Germany)

Those definitions remain somehow neutral, but our everyday notion of an “insight” often seems to have an intrinsic mystical or religious connotation to it, probably even more so in the context of psychedelic experience with its age old history of shamanism and religious and mystical ritual uses. Nevertheless, I would suggest that even though insights may come to a subject like sudden quantum leaps in understanding, they should be considered the result of cognitive processes which are no more mysterious than other human cognitive skills. In the following I will try to briefly outline
how I think that a combination of psychotropic effects of cannabis may indeed enhance our capacity to gain insights.

Before we look at those effects, however, let me point to an important ambiguity in the notion of insight, which comes out in the definition of Webster’s dictionary. Generally, an insight is to be seen as a sudden, new understanding of a situation , fact or problem, but there is also a more restricted sense of insight, which is that of an enhanced capacity of introspection into one’s own mind. Insights can be of a more general kind, but often they come as a form of introspection into one’s own mental states, producing in particular insights about the individual consumer himself. I am firmly convinced that cannabis not only enhances our capacity to gain general insights, but also especially enhances “introspective” insights. Due to space restrictions, however, I cannot argue the case here. Instead, I will try to give you a rough impression of how a combination of the psychotropic effects of cannabis may generally enhance our ability to gain insights.

Let’s first look at a few of the well known psychotropic short-term effects of cannabis known from scientific psychological studies and from anecdotal evidence. Cannabis consumers often experience short-term effects such as a malfunction of short-term (or “workspace”) memory, an enhancement of
their ability to retrieve episodic memories, mind racing, hallucinations, a change in pattern recognition, and a change in their attention. These, to name only a few, are the short term effects of cannabis which I take to be relevant for the production of insights. The negative impact on short-term memory is visible in speakers who often lose the thread while they are speaking or listening to a story. In contrast to this, many users under the acute influence of cannabis have reported an enhancement of their ability to deliberately retrieve memories or to erratically produce memories about episodes in their life. Often, these memories are “re-lived” more vividly, accompanied sometimes by vivid imagery of remembered situations. It also seems that under the influence of cannabis, a consumer accesses memories which he usually cannot retrieve at all. A cannabis high also often produces mind racing, an accelerated stream of associative thoughts almost similar to dreaming. Further, it has been observed that the influence of cannabis leads to “increased perceptual organization” or in other words, a better pattern recognition, like a tendency to perceive faces in mountain or cloud formations.

It seems obvious to me that in particular cases a combination of these effects can lead to altered patterns of cognition and, consequently, to insights. Here is a report of one type of insight:

I remember saying to [my husband], ‘Sam, do you have a sense of
what your daughters will be rebelling against in the next few years?’ And he replied, ‘Why do you think they will rebel against anything?’ And this struck me, and made me realize that Sam had never rebelled against anything or anyone in his life! The next day, this insight seemed pretty ordinary, but I notice that I have always remembered it, and ever since then I think I have understood Sam a little bit better”

(personal report cited in High Culture: Marijuana in the Lives of Americans, by William Novak[1980])

Now, as the insights' originator herself noted, in a way, this insight doesn't seem to be spectacular from an intellectual point of view, however, remarkably, it is a new perception that will stay with the woman and have a significant impact on her thinking about her husband for the rest of her life. I suspect that her judgement about her husband strongly depends on a rapid retrieval of a long list of distinct episodic memories concerning her husband with reference to the question whether he ever rebelled against anything, or told a story of rebelling against anything.

There seem to be at least two basic short-term effects of cannabis involved here: mindracing and the enhancement of episodical memory retrieval. The latter effect made it possible for her to access episodical memories which are usually not that easily accessible to her, whereas the former effect(mindracing) enabled her to retrieve them in a rapid manner, allowing her to form a new generalization about her husband despite her cannabis-induced shortened workspace memory . Note also, that what made this insight possible was what we could call a “shift-and-zoom” effect of attention. The couple was focussed on the issue of the children’s future, but then the woman’s thinking shifted to a focus extensively on a character disposition of her husband. Presumably, this “shift-and-zoom” effect also has to do with the negative effects of cannabis on our workspace memory. In the conversation cited above, the woman probably did not quite stick to the original topic (the children) because her memory of the original topic of the discussion had quickly faded away. Her attention then slipped to another topic, where she tarried reminiscing about her husband (zoom effect). Certainly, this insight is nothing that couldn’t have happened to her in a sober state of mind. But we can see how and why the use of marijuana enhanced her readiness to come to that perception of a fact about her husband through certain types of the short-term higher cognitive effects of cannabis.

The example above is only one example of one of the typical insights reported by consumers, where the insights have a rough and as yet hypothetical genealogy.

Let me cite just one slightly more complex insight. I remember how I was watching television, smoking marijuana and suddenly realized that my trust concerning video and photo coverage shown in the news had already started to fade as a result of my knowledge of modern post-production manipulation techniques. For an instant, I felt I was able to put myself subjectively into the position of a viewer in a possible future where we watch the news with the same disbelieving attitude as most of us now watch a digitally created movie effect, like in the science- fiction movie “Godzilla”. It really felt strange to watch the news this way. It then struck me that most of us now perceive a large part of our external reality by looking at representations on television and on the internet – representations which will more and more lose their integrity for us. I also thought at the movie “The Matrix” was an excellent example of this loss of integrity.

Just a comment on another aspect of insight: Cannabis seems especially to enable us to “feel from within” as if we were in a different situation, or as if we were a different person. As a matter of fact , this underlying capacity of mental perception has come to be recognized as one of the basic mental capacities of human thinking and become a focus of modern cognitive science. Based on my experience and my study of reports, I believe that cannabis can enhance intuition and sometimes even dramatically affect our capacity to “feel from within”.

Generally, I would argue that we can distinguish between several specific types of typical insight which are traceable to various basic short-term psychotropic effects of cannabis. Of course, cannabis will not ‘deliver’ the contents for those insights; it will only help to “ catalyse ” thoughts and
memories and alter our cognition in various typical ways such that we come to new perceptions, ideas and conclusions based on our individual intelligence and knowledge.

If we want to understand better how cannabis produces these types of insight, we will have to work from two ends. First, we have to gather and classify reports about certain types of cognitive effects and insights reported by users of cannabis. Second, in order to better understand the various basic effects of cannabis on the human brain, we have to combine a lower-level scientific approach inspired by neuropsychopharmacology with other neuroscientific disciplines, including in particular, the new knowledge of the endocannabinoid system. This would then allow us to understand the more complex patterns of short-term cognitive effects of cannabis which can trigger the production of various types of insight.

We have only just begun to understand the basic psychotropic effects of cannabis, and what is required is a more in-depth and complex inquiry, an exploration of the combined impact of cannabis on higher human cognition. The result of such an investigation could produce significant knowledge on both an individual and a cultural level. On the individual level, we could understand more how cannabis, as well as other psychedelic substances, contribute to helping us obtain significant insights about ourselves and about the world in general. This interdisciplinary “ neuropsychedelonautic ” research will not only produce significant knowledge about the psychotropic effects of cannabis, but can reveal important facts about the most fascinating aspects of human cognition itself, like creative thinking, pattern recognition, or the architecture of our memory. It will enable us to better evaluate possible use of cannabis for specific medical treatments, conceivably even something like insight therapies. On the cultural level, we will probably have to re-evaluate the impact that drugs like cannabis have had, not only on individuals, but also on societies in general, through the new thought patterns cannabis has generated in thinkers, artists and musicians who influenced and inspired their cultures.

Hopefully, as we would learn more about the historical, religious and traditional inspirational uses of cannabis and about the motivation of consumers today, cannabis consumers will focus more on the inspirational potential and less on the recreational or “party” uses of cannabis.

Dr. Sebastian Schulz holds a P.H.D. in philosophy and specializes in the philosophy of mind. He is currently writing a book about the subject and is looking for additional grants to fund the research.

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