Psychedelics were helpful, important in the evolution of technology, professor says

Psychedelics were helpful, important in the evolution of technology, professor says

BY PATRICK KURP
Special to the Rice News

Although psychedelics have been considered religious sacraments, recreational drugs and illegal substances, for Richard Doyle they remain essentially a form of information technology.

“These technologies have long been integrated into human culture,” said Doyle, professor of English at Pennsylvania State University. “Psychedelics are helpful in the invention of information technology because they are information technology.”

The lecture, “Just Say Yes to the Noösphere: Psychedelics and the Evolution of Information Technologies,” was part of the Technology, Cognition and Culture Lecture Series sponsored by the Computer and Information Technology Institute, the Humanities Research Center and the Vice Provost and University Librarian.

Doyle described the experience of Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut on the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971. On the return flight, seeing Earth from space, Mitchell experienced “a sense of universal connectedness.” Mitchell went on to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, dedicated to researching human consciousness.

“NASA wasn’t sending the poets right away, but Mitchell had a classical mystical moment, an experience that has always been associated with the use of psychedelics. The science and technology guys weren’t immune to this stuff either,” Doyle said.

The 1950s saw an increase in the number of Americans using mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, LSD-25 and other psychoactive substances. They were still legal and some experimentation was even sponsored by the federal government, including the CIA.

Some corporations, including Ampex (developer of the first commercial tape recorder), used the drugs to increase creativity and productivity, especially among engineers. Such technological innovators as Lotus spreadsheet designer Mitchell Kapor, virtual reality modeling language developer Mark Pesce, and Nobel Prize-winning chemist Kary Mullis have credited LSD with inspiring their work.

“LSD has been called the problem-solving psychedelic,” said Doyle, who is working on a scholarly book tentatively titled “LSDNA.”

Several in the audience asked about the future of LSD research, since the substance has been criminalized in the United States for 40 years. Doyle said various psychedelics are available in other countries, and he urged one audience member to visit Switzerland if he was interested in pursuing it.

“LSD was the victim of mass consumerization. It was profoundly ill-timed. It took a real political hit,” he said.