
Luminous: Your Brain on Shrooms
To The Best Of Our Knowledge
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The Evolution of Consciousness
There are some fascinating evolutionary questions here. One is just why would the human brain even respond to psychedelic substances? Let's say mushrooms, laced with psilocybin, we find in nature. I mean, did these co-evolve? The human brain with mushrooms was just as an accident that our ancient ancestors happened to eat these and they had these remarkable experiences. Yes, it likely is. At least there's an opportunity for rewiring. And there is this paradox around plasticity - you could use that window of malleability or plasticity for sort of ethically questionable ends. We could think of things like the history of military use of psychedelics around things like mind control
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