Ideas from Ronald K. Siegel and Susan Blackmore are spotlighted in the feature article in last week’s The Scientist — "The Intoxication Instinct" by Helen Phillips and Graham Lawton.
Siegel, an old friend of mine from those wilder days of the Seventies and Eighties came up with the notion back then that intoxication was a native human drive. He called intoxication, "the forth drive" placing it after hunger, thirst and sex.
I visited these ideas a decade ago when I wrote Why We Get High. The New Scientist article does furnish some new data. Especially interesting is Siegel’s work teaching monkey’s to like DMT. However the article goes a bit overboard in ascribing monkey motivations to people.
Susan Blackmore, the memetics expert who has recently demonstrated an interest in psychedelics is given a sidebar section called Windows to the Mind. It is included in the link at the beginning of this post to map.org’s republication of the New Scientist article. There also is an extended version on her website that you can read here.
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