Reawakening the Stoned Ape
On the possible psychedelic origins of language, and why there might be better options than attending a ‘once every 17 years’ hypersexual psychedelic zombie orgy swarm party
While still wildly speculative and virtually impossible to prove - like many of his enticingly orated ideas - Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory is one that keeps throwing banana skins at the slippery and complex origins of human cognitive evolution and encephalization - the process of rapid brain growth.
It’s still a somewhat open and puzzling question as to how humans surpassed their primate cousins and became so ‘smart’; developed language and ‘culture’, used tools and ultimately got us into the hot fat mess of advancing technology and declining politics that currently threaten the survival of most species on the planet, even us.
In a feature article this week Mattha Busby revisited the psychedelic bard’s lyrical tale of humans’ cognitive leapfrog over other primates though the mouth of Terence’s living brother, Dennis McKenna, expert on the mouth-filling subject of ethnopsychopharmacology, who exhumed and revitalised the theory at last year’s Telluride Mushroom Festival.
Dennis, both downplaying some aspects and bigging up others, noted that the science has progressed in the thirty-odd years since Terence first proposed the idea that our ancient ancestors’ consumption of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in Africa led to the rapid evolution of advanced cognition, sociality and creativity, indicative of humanity. Resisting the negative connotations of being ‘stoned’, even in the Stone Age, Dennis reframes it as the ‘Awakened’ Ape Theory and points to recent advances in psychedelic science, noting the increasingly feasible looking additions to the argument via epigenetic changes and enhanced neuroplasticity, leading to greater cognitive flexibility in our supposed mushroom munching hominins. It’s here that some of my own observations were included in Mattha’s article.
While the stoned ape theory is too simplistic it does pose some curious research angles that have been neglected, such as the possible co-evolution of advanced human cognition and psychedelic use. A recent study (in preprint) of human gene expression in response to psychedelics indicates that, “psychedelic-responsive genes are overrepresented among human accelerated genes,” suggesting a “potential link between psychedelic drug action, cortical circuits underlying higher cognition, and genes shaped by recent evolution.”
Others too, such as José Manuel Rodríguez Arce and Michael Winkleman, have proposed that while the origins of human cognitive advancement include multiple factors - such as tool use, diet changes, climate variation and social complexity - psychedelic use may have ‘supported’ rather than led cognitive upgrades. More psychedelic-human coevolution through ‘instrumentalization’ shaping cultural progression, than initiating it. In support, Arce and Winkelman point to the facility of ‘magic mushrooms’ and other psychedelics to enhance emotional modulation, social bonding and empathy, and stimulate the imagination, storytelling, and symbolic thinking, as well as facilitating group cohesion and triggering ritual behaviour.
Can you see what our ancestors were saying?
But in returning to the bold claims of the Stoned Ape, I note that the evolution of language itself remains an open question. Indeed, like Terence McKenna, some theories posit synaesthetic language origins, such that sensory overlaps could have contributed to visual or conceptual information corresponding with auditory sensation, such that sounds convey new meaning.
“Through the act of speaking vividly, we enter into a flirtation with the domain of the imagination. The ability to associate sounds, or the small mouth noises of language, with meaningful internal images is a synesthesic activity.” - Food of the Gods (T. McKenna, 1992)
Spanning a decade, my own research with Devin Terhune, when he was at the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, has shown that psychedelics quite reliably induce transient synaesthesia, primarily the visual-auditory type, and which can occasionally be permanent, and this might have helped in the formation of concrete nouns or verbs and provide part of the mechanism for such cognitive adaptation. Currently about 2-5% of the population have congenital synaesthesia but it might once have been more prevalent, or served as an adaptive trait, at least on the population level, and our research indicates that serotonergic psychedelics, like psilocybin, undeniably help understand the neurobiological mechanisms of congenital synaesthesia.
There are also some curiously odd cultural quirks in language that hint at a synaesthetic influence to their origins, such as the seemingly arbitrary and unnecessary existence of grammatically gendered nouns in about a quarter of all languages. I had a friend proposed this idea on account of her own somewhat obscure form of synaesthesia that automatically applies both gender and personality to objects. Who else would bother to fixedly consider a chair to be feminine otherwise?
That some of the oldest languages (such as ǃXóõ) also have the greatest number of phonemes also fits with McKenna’s idea that psilocybin-induced glossalia could have also contributed to language evolution, because languages seem to prune out phonemes in favour of grammar as they evolve. Tell that to psychedelic influencers on social media espousing light language! I could go on, but ultimately though, there are far too many unanswered questions, and yet there are features of the Theory that have been further supported by science since the 1990s, albeit indirectly.
As far as I know there has as yet been no formal direct attempts to test some of the suppositions of the Stoned Ape. This led me to supervise a visiting researcher, Tyrone Briscoe, from the University of Neuchâtel, with a background in psycholinguistics and neuroscience, and we devised a very basic exploration by surveying the overlap between psychedelic use, synaesthesia experiences and lexical fluency. The study had an unfortunately small sample size due to time limitations, but we did find a weak positive correlation with psychedelic use frequency and lexical fluency scores, with those with the highest scores reporting psychedelic-induced audio-visual synaesthesia.
My own experiences with psychedelic-induced synaesthesia include the mind boggling experience of not only seeing sounds, but tasting them, feeling them, and, well, actually just becoming sound the first time I tried 5-MeO-DMT some 25 years ago. It felt like every cell in my body had demolecularized and transmuted into pure sound, pure vibration, along with all my senses. This type of complex synaesthesia induced by psychedelics, unlike that in congenital cases, is something that psychologist Heinrich Klüver noted in his pioneering research with mescaline precisely 100 years ago, noting the simultaneous occurrence of combinations as complex as conceptual-visual-gustatory-olfactory-entoptic synaesthesia. As yet this has never been formally studied since.
Are we too late for the psychedelic evolution party?
There are, of course, still massive holes in the Stoned or perhaps Awakened Ape Theory, such as the lack of archeological evidence, unsurprisingly, and the problems of consistent psilocybin use, or clear evidence for biological pathways to genetic changes (though see above), and how exactly ‘mushroom eating behaviour’ drives adaptive fitness. For the latter, McKenna proposed that, aside from stimulating language, psychedelics increased sexual activity and led to greater reproductive success, an idea that in the 1990s had little evidential support, but might seem more plausible now.
Aside from one clinical trial of psilocybin, and Canada’s first, that recently noted the adverse reaction in a participant of persistent genital arousal and spontaneous orgasms that lasted at least 6 months, there is a growing body of research indicating enhanced sexual functioning and satisfaction following psilocybin for depression, especially relative to SSRI anti-depressants which can have the opposite effects. Similarly a naturalistic study published last week indicates that ‘couples that trip together, stick together’ leading to improved physical intimacy, emotional closeness, and relationship satisfaction.
It is also worth bearing in mind that some fungi seemingly utilise psilocybin to facilitate behavioural control over the sexual behaviours of other organisms. Such as the Massospora cicadina fungus which infects periodical cicadas - devouring their genitals and replacing them with spores, and making them hypersexual and bisexual, and driving them to frantically dry hump other cicadas, of any sex, during their 13 or 17 year cycle mating swarms - thereby continuing the fungi’s parasitic survival.
So while Dennis McKenna back-peddled on Terence’s alien-origin theory of psilocybin mushrooms, he still notes that Psilocybe species seem to have a message for humanity when eaten, “wake up you monkeys”, you’re trashing the planet!
In pseudonymously publishing Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide in the 1970s, the first such book, Dennis and Terence McKenna probably did more than anyone in stimulating a flex towards greater symbiosis between our human and older fungal species. But the concern here is that psilocybin-producing fungi might not always be seeking symbiosis; as mutual aid, as Kropotkin called it, is all well and good if both sides benefit. But if the fungi are genuinely speaking on behalf of the planet, as Dennis McKenna and mycologist Paul Stamets and others believe, we might be at a critical juncture in this relationship, and if we don’t collectively Awaken as responsible Apes soon we may be lurching towards greater ecological disaster. Or we might even be looking at a similar fate to the hypersexual eunuch zombie cicadas. Symbiosis or parasitism? It’s a bit like asking “cake, or death?” Just a thought to end on…
..But there is always hope, if hope is a verb of action. In providing some chewy ‘Food of the Gods’ for thought, some scholars are positing that the only real way out of the current manmade 6th mass extinction on planet Earth, in the Anthropocene era, is to quickly move towards what environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht hopefully calls the “Symbiocene.” A new geological era based on symbiosis between humans and the rest of nature. More on this later..
“Whenever I have ingested psychoactive.. mushrooms, there is one message.. that comes to me loudly and clearly every time.. that we are part of an ‘ecology of consciousness,’ that the Earth is in peril, that time is short, and that we’re part of a huge, universal bio-system. And I am far from alone. Many people who have taken these substances report receiving the same message” - Paul Stamets (in Harpignies (Ed) ‘Visionary Plant Consciousness’, 2007)
Interesting dive into synaesthesia as a ground for language. To your last point, this holistic ‘we are one’ ecocritical frame in ways extrapolates to the Stoned Ape theory, inasmuch as the difference between our senses is perhaps more normative than it is biological (given we cannot isolate senses).
If absorption of stimuli became muddied in the crossed-wires of our senses, it is not impossible (but perhaps implausible) to imagine new way of Being catalysed by melting the hard borders of our frames with psychedelics.
Even if this breeds little scientific merit, it does create an incredibly interesting grounds for imagination, if nothing else.
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