The Mystery

The role of biophotons in the brain is a growing area of research in neurobiology – and where there are photons there might be quantum mechanics. The light of the mind is blue, wrote the poet Sylvia Plath ('The Moon and the Yew Tree' 1961). But it seems it may actually be red. That’s because recent research suggests a link between intelligence and the frequency of biophotons in animals’ brains. In 2016 Zhuo Wang and colleagues at the South-Central University for Nationalities in China studied brain slices from various animals (bullfrog, mouse, chicken, pig, monkey and human) that had been excited by glutamate, an excitatory neurotransmitter. They found that increasing intelligence was associated with a shift in the biophoton’s frequency towards the red end of the spectrum. Admittedly, it is unclear what the measure of intelligence actually is, and the study has drawn criticism for its lack of an explanatory mechanism; correlation, as the mantra goes, does not mean causation. Ho

What is the neuroscience of consciousness, from which perspective not only trees but lizards, amoeba and even rocks can be said to think, but what is thought as a human experience? Our answer must include the observation that that thought involves a relationship between a felt sense of an inner reality and an outer one—an awareness of a difference between one who is aware and something of which that one is aware. Yet if the blunt sense of an inner and an outer is human, the way in which inner and outer are imagined is social and particular. These judgments are so intimate that we may not recognize that that they have a cultural dimension. But they do, and the way people define mind has real consequences for the way that we understand what is real. The Anthropology of Mind sets out to explore the way these cultural dimensions affect basic human experience. Tanya Marie Luhrmann is the Albert Ray Lang Professor of Anthropology at Stanford University, with a courtesy appointment in Psychol

I have left around a number of (what I would call) psychedelic books, which you will notice consist very largely of photographs of pattern in nature: crystal structures, shells, bone structures, leaf structures, animalcules, erosion patterns, patterns in marble, all kinds of pattern in nature. Because, for some reason or other, one of the strongest effects that I had from the use of psychedelics was a vastly renewed appreciation of this dimension of the natural world; a kind of perception that the whole world is pattern. This is a very strange feeling, because our common sense normally bases the world on substance. We think of primordial and more or less solid stuff, which is found in dense forms as in granite or a ball of steel, and found in very refined forms such as a gas. And we think that all the world is shapes of, forms of, this primordial stuff. But one of the extraordinary consequences of using psychedelics is that everything suddenly turns into transparency. I think that’s wh