Week 7: Neuroscience and Art

Drugs have had a big role to play in the human experience for centuries, and man-made substances like cocaine and LSD, and a lower case but still relevant, nicotine in cigarettes, have their roots in the natural world, inducing chemical imbalances in our bodies that provokes different sensations. Iconic figures through history like Freud, The Beatles, and Barack Obama have each had their engagement with these drugs respectively and documented the effect it had in some form.

 

Freud started taking cocaine to relieve nasal lesions in the 1880s, and his documentation in the Cocaine Papers highlighted how it reduced his stress, but that the addiction was so strong he was blinded to its medical uses. He was convinced this addiction was just a moral defect and could be cured through routine and prayer. It ultimately made him anxious about the state of his personal relationships. Arguably, the use of the enhancement drug could have been the driving factor for his insights that today we revere.

 

LSD was initially legal for consumption and had shown peculiar results in how it altered the perception of reality by its users, both in the experience, and beyond. The Beatles famously used LSD for a similar purpose and expressed their experience in their base art form of music in the album “The Revolver”. Their interactions with visuals, new consciousness and self-exploration came to the fore in the music, that was drastically different from all their previous work.

 

Through history, these cases of drugs being used to intentionally create an imbalance to give the user a new field of view have yielded some wild results. The use of drugs without control or purpose is a means to a bad end, but as our understanding of neuroscience and control of chemicals increases, man could well be on the path to mastering self-manipulation to open new doors.

 

Sources;

 

1.    Vesna, Victoria. "Neuroscience pt3" Youtube, uploaded by UCOnline, 16 May 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5EX75xoBJ0&t=438s. Accessed 10 May, 2022.

2.    Markel, Howard. An Anatomy of Addiction: Sigmund Freud, William Halsted and the Miracle Drug, Cocaine. Vintage Books, 2012.

3.    Written by Michael Schaffer  | Published on November 12, 2020. “Report: Obama's Book Says He Continued to Smoke in the White House-A Lot.” Washingtonian, 13 Nov. 2020, https://www.washingtonian.com/2020/11/12/report-obamas-book-says-he-continued-to-smoke-in-the-white-house-a-lot/.

4.    Gilmore, Mikal. “Beatles' Acid Test: How LSD Opened the Door to 'Revolver'.” Rolling Stone, Rolling Stone, 26 Dec. 2019, https://www.rollingstone.com/feature/beatles-acid-test-how-lsd-opened-the-door-to-revolver-251417/.

5.    “Drugs and the Brain.” National Institutes of Health, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 22 Mar. 2022, https://nida.nih.gov/publications/drugs-brains-behavior-science-addiction/drugs-brain.