Marijuana and Music — Part 1
A presentation to Società Italiana per lo Studio degli Stati di Coscienza, Perinaldo 2002
Introduction
Although the medical uses of cannabis are finally enjoying some universal recognition, the extra-therapeutic uses of cannabis and other age-old psychoactive plants are currently ignored or dismissed not only by the usual suspects, but by the great majority of the academic community as well. Those wishing to experiment with such substances often do so at no small risk to reputation and even freedom, and as a result, potentially important research has been banished from mainstream science. As an example of such unofficial, unpublished, and underground research, I shall present to you today a speculative exploration on the cannabis-produced altered state of consciousness and its relation to the appreciation and production of music. I will offer some hypotheses for your consideration concerning the neurocognitive changes brought about by cannabis and how these changes might produce various useful effects of the drug. And finally I will show how the development of jazz music in the 20th century may well provide support for the hypotheses.
Uses of Cannabis
The ongoing public and scientific debate, and the political and law-enforcement conflicts concerning the proven and significant therapeutic uses of cannabis may be one of the more absurd spectacles of modern times. This debate, and indeed, the results of much recent research on marijuana — thought to be “scientific” by many — serve mainly to illustrate the pitfalls that have always confounded those who believe they can hold objective views on a controversial topic that do not fall prey to the political, moral, and religious prejudices of their times. As history plainly indicates, only a few gifted thinkers of any age seem immune to such self-deception.
A major result of such prejudice has of course been the denial of effective medicine to no small number of those in need. But perhaps more importantly, contemporary attitudes both public and scientific have completely ignored, or actively rejected age-old uses of natural psychoactive plants above and beyond the medicinal — uses that provide not a restoration, cure, or palliative, but rather an addition to, a valuable change or even augmentation of normal human capacities. The suggestion that any “drug of abuse” might be used as a tool to enlarge one’s experience and understanding, however, has attained the status of a religious heresy and taboo in the minds of many, and in the mainstream media and even among scientists who believe themselves beyond such irrationality. On the general principle that an agent which reliably alters a phenomenon must surely provide useful experimental possibilities, at the very least the study of cannabis-produced altered states of consciousness should prove worthwhile for understanding aspects of human psychology and cognition. The rarity of scientists who might entertain such a principle when applied to “illicit” psychoactive drugs provides a telling criticism of the widely-proclaimed objectivity of the modern scientific enterprise.
Although research on the extra-therapeutic uses of marijuana will not soon be undertaken in the hallowed institutions now too-often helping to prolong our ignorance on the subject, informal and private experimentation, seldom published, has been taking place. The results of such research is, as a rule, very speculative and provisional, and tends to be dismissed with a sniff by accredited academics, not to mention the officials and policy-makers clinging to prohibitionism as if to a life-raft in a storm. But it is not the first instance in the history of scientific exploration where some of the most interesting research has been driven underground.
Since I have lived in Europe for many years, where the use of cannabis has been in some countries decriminalized, I can without legal risk or moral disqualification admit that my personal experimentation with cannabis has provided a first line of evidence for the formulation of the following ideas, and this has occurred through “real time” introspection about the altered states of consciousness provided by cannabis as well as much follow-up and study analyzing the cannabis state from the perspective of what is today somewhat dubiously known as “normal consciousness.”
Music Appreciation
One of the more remarkable effects noticed in the state of consciousness brought on by marijuana use is a greatly enhanced appreciation of music. (Goode 1970, Tart 1971)
The effect seems to be almost universal, and does not seem to fade with experience in the use of marijuana as do certain other effects typically noticed by novice users. Curiously, such perception of enhancement does not seem to make excessive demands that the music to be appreciated be good, bad, or indifferent, although I have observed that many persons originally interested only in pop music, for example, have suddenly found during a marijuana session that more “serious” music has quite unexpectedly become interesting in a way both surprising and profound. Conversely, some who had previously rejected pop music as crude and trivial have come to appreciate it more through marijuana consciousness.
The resulting musical empathy is also quite durable, not requiring further marijuana sessions for its (at least partial) preservation. The magical and inspiring quality of a given piece, revealed under the effects of cannabis, remains magical and profound long into the future whether or not it is ever again experienced under the influence. And so the net effect seems to be one of “opening up” a person to something he had merely ignored or overlooked. The enhanced appreciation is thus legitimized as something essential and “real” and not merely a “drug effect,” something “artificial” that wears off with the cessation of the changed conscious state. Marijuana consciousness thus seems to be a state in which at least a few of one’s prejudices and predispositions may be temporarily suspended so that something long-ignored for whatever reason can be seen afresh, as if for the first time. And so it would seem that the marijuana experience can provide a kind of cognitive training that may subsequently help enlarge and enrich one’s outlook in desirable and entirely voluntary ways.
Performance and Creation of Music
Musicians (as well as other artists) have testified not only to enhanced appreciation of music and art in general through the use of marijuana, but in addition some have insisted that these altered states of consciousness are useful and valuable to augment their creativity. One such musician has stated,
Although research verifying such claims is hard to accomplish in any meaningful or decisive way, it should be noted that research on creativity is itself a long-neglected area, and standard psychological testing or methods of testing musical abilities seem crude tools to apply to the situation. We should therefore not be too dismissive of “anecdotal evidence” when our ability to amass “hard data” is so limited. Some of the attempts to amass such data have been laughable, although quoted time and again to dismiss claims of enhanced creativity. (Bloomquist 1971) 1 Although it may also be somewhat speculative to say, it would seem that creativity would surely be favored by an enhanced appreciation and a partial suspension of preconceptions, no matter what the stimulus.
Of course, as with so many things in life, practice makes perfect, or if not perfect, more nearly so. Thus it is with listening to music, and certainly with the making of music — a life-long process of practice — but more than a few puritanical minds will be bent out of shape by my suggestion that the principle applies to the use of marijuana as well!
(Michaux 1961)
It has long been obvious to me that many of the best minds of our time suffer from a ridiculous and self-imposed handicap by ignoring or even actively rejecting a great aid to thinking and creativity: the altered states of consciousness provided by marijuana and other age-old plant substances so revered by our forbears. When intelligently used they are tools both powerful and benign, both fickle and of great utility, and above all they require some considerable practice in order to use them in a way commensurate with their potential. Thus much of the research (on creativity, for example) which has used the substances on subjects who have not had long opportunity to practice with the resulting states of consciousness, is rendered of limited value, and it won’t be until these time-honored aids to thinking and perception become once again widely used that we will begin to know their true value. If they were universally revered by our tribal ancestors, and played an important role in the social and psychological evolution of our species as some researchers suspect (Wasson, Hofmann & Ruck 1978, Ott 1997), we may find them of even more value in a time when our technological powers have advanced maximally, but our moral sense of how to control great power for the common good has advanced little, if at all, since the bronze age.
Altered states of consciousness
Thanks to Prohibition, there has been insufficient serious research concerning the cognitive mechanisms and brain structures involved in the altered states of consciousness produced by marijuana and other such substances, and even research on the neurocognitive and psychological foundations of music, art and creativity has been frequently considered a study of the superfluous. Music and art for us moderns, unlike for our aboriginal ancestors, is seen as mere decoration, “entertainment,” an activity of leisure and play (indeed, music is played). Our scientific institutions seem to believe that the study of such phenomena are of less importance than more “serious” undertakings.
But from what limited scientific investigation as has been accomplished, it seems that both the performance and perception of music involve the use of areas in the right hemisphere of the brain analogous to the speech comprehension and production areas of the left hemisphere — notably the famous Broca and Wernicke brain areas — and that these analogous right-brain areas might function similarly to the language centres of the left in the production and perception if not appreciation of music. (Popper & Eccles 1983, Luria 1980) Indeed, music can be understood as a linear symbolization, comprised of sequential interrelated unitary elements representing a holistic or even holonomic 2 mental conception. This seems an analogous phenomenon to language and its production in many important ways.
Arguments for such a mental scenario involved with language and music, and that language and music are, in an important sense, parallel and analogous phenomena, can be derived from elementary observation. When I am thinking about some subject, for example, and suddenly “get an idea,” the mental nature of this idea is holistic, that is, the entire idea, which may well consist of several interrelated concepts, derivations, hypotheses and conclusions, exists as a unitary, all-at-once mental phenomenon. It “comes to me” in a flash — I know the idea completely in an instant. But when I seek to express this idea in words, the process is in the nature of a translation or transformation in which I must find an effective series of symbols that when read or listened to over a period of time, reproduce the original idea to a listener, a reader, or even to myself as I continue to think about the subject.
Albert Einstein felt similarly about the way the ideas he discovered were related to language:
I would argue that the same kind of processes are involved in music creation and appreciation. For example, when a concert musician sits down to play a long and complex work “by heart”, does he have in his head a conception or representation of each successive note he will play, along with dynamics, tempi, and a multitude of other discrete interpretative aspects of his performance? I think not. Rather, the entire piece must be mentally represented in his consciousness as a holistic, all-at-once unitary concept, which the musician then symbolizes or translates into a series of representative interpreted musical notes and phrases over the time of performance.
The same principles apply to much music composition as well. A famous composer, after a concert of one of his works, was asked by a music lover, “Where in God’s creation did you get the inspiration for that absolutely divine melody at the end of the third movement? The composer immediately replied, “ It was a beautiful summer’s day, so I decided to take my lunch in the park. I sat down, and just as I was unwrapping the greasy paper around my sandwich, that damn tune just popped into my head.” The “divine tune” came to him in a flash, as a holistic entity, and not because of any long patient meditations about beauty or God, or whatever.
The parallels between music and language are obvious to some musicians, listen to what jazz saxophonist Archie Shepp has to say:
[video shown at presentation: Archie Shepp]
“Pour moi la musique est aussi une langue”
Here is another example of the natural connection between music and language. In jazz, musicians sometimes sing completely-invented and improvised words to a tune, also improvised, showing that their improvisation must be simultaneously using the language-producing centers of the left-brain and the musical analogues of the right-brain:
[video shown at presentation: scat singing – Dee-Dee Bridgewater & Daniel Huck]
Now another of the most noticed effects of marijuana consciousness, and this effect is pronounced and very typical, is some change in the way we use short-term memory. (Zimmer & Morgan 1997) Prohibitionists and others who mistrust not only marijuana consciousness, but apparently even the idea that changed consciousness is something worthy of scientific study, have seized on the short-term memory effect in their attempts to discredit marijuana use. Their implication is that some kind of “permanent damage” must surely be happening when, in the middle of a sentence for instance, one forgets entirely what one was saying! But as all experienced marijuana users know, if at this point one simply relaxes a bit, sure enough, the memory soon is re-established. This of course indicates that what has happened is not a loss of short-term memory or a damaging of the brain structures mediating it, but a different manner of using it.
It appears that one’s stream of consciousness merely loses track of trains of ideas that are quite normally being registered in short-term memory, perhaps because our perceptions require far more attention than normally, that is, our consciousness is heavily involved with other matters than mere utilitarian attention to continuity of logical or linguistic thought processes. Our experience is so interesting and attention-consuming that we ignore, not lose, short-term memories. Additionally, the kind of short-term memory which scientists now study may be essentially a linguistic one, and other types of short-term memory, as yet unrecognized, may exist: they may be concerned with a more holonomic, rather than serially organised, linguistic way of contacting recent experience. The reality of the short-term memory effect, and the subsequent research that has tried to imply that some kind of detrimental memory loss results from cannabis use, might thus be to some extent an artifact of current cognitive models and certain methods of psychological testing. It certainly should not be taken as evidence that cannabis produces some permanent deficit or damage.
Some further hypotheses
A hypothesis for the primary cognitive effect of cannabis might thus take these factors into account. If underlying or pre-conscious thinking processes are thought of as holonomic, all-at-once, in the nature of a Gestalt or unified whole, and language — and by analogous extension, music — is a secondary and sequential representation of these pre-conscious Gestalten, we might hypothesize that cannabis effects a desynchronization or de-linking of the pre-conscious holonomic entities with the processes which translate them into symbolizations. The process seems cyclic or repetitive, the evolution of underlying Gestalten and subsequent production of symbolizations proceeding with frequent breaks of the normal continuity of the process, and on several time scales simultaneously: a sort of cyclic forgetting of the pre-conscious by the conscious. We should not ignore the fact that the pre-conscious Gestalten consist not only of our ideas and current cognitive explorations, but also the sum total of our prejudices. The symbolization process — of forming a linguistic expression for example — might under the influence of cannabis “run away with itself” and become decoupled from the underlying holonomic Gestalt which it represents. Thus we tend to “forget what we are talking about” or even reading or thinking about — making reading a notoriously difficult task. This effect might well explain another of the peculiarities of cannabis consciousness noticed particularly by novices: The character and meaningfulness of what is scribbled down while under the influence, although perhaps seeming profound at the time, is the next day notoriously rather silly and obvious. The symbolization has run away with itself and is no longer grounded or anchored to the holonomic patterns it represents.
But what happens when the effect is practiced with? Might it be put to some positive use? What if the person is talented with the mode of symbolization, i.e., is a poet, or novelist, or a musician? Must the output be silly? Might not a talent express itself under such circumstances in ways less attached to preconceptions and prejudices, yet be still mature and worthwhile? Extending these ideas further, perhaps the cyclic forgetting and decoupling of ongoing symbolization might be a factor in other important uses for cannabis. Might not the relief of some types of pain provided by cannabis occur because of a constant forgetting of its insult? If this be the case, research aimed at producing analgesic cannabinoid preparations devoid of psychic effects may be a blind alley.
If this ignoring, or losing track of the mostly linguistic aspect of short-term memory is so universal, and the theory of music making and recognition being mediated by right-hemisphere areas analogous to those language-mediating areas of the left is valid, what happens to a musician when he plays music while under the influence of marijuana? Does he likewise forget what tune he is playing? Presumably if marijuana affects the language centers of the left hemisphere, even indirectly, it must similarly affect morphologically analogous structures of the right hemisphere. If marijuana consciousness does indeed affect a musician’s perceptions and performance in some such way, how might that affect his music? And if a group or class of musicians who made a practice of using marijuana were so affected, how might that alter their collective concept of music and the way their music form developed? These might seem questions for research that in such a utilitarian age as our own will never be addressed. Yet perhaps the history of music already provides some hints.
~~~~~~~~~~~ to be continued
References
Bloomquist, Edward R. 1971. Marijuana The Second Trip, revised edition. Beverly Hills, California: Glencoe Press, p369.
Goode, Erich. 1970. The Marijuana Smokers, New York: Basic Books, p. 74.
Grinspoon Lester and Bakalar, James B. 1993. Marijuana: The Forbidden Medicine, New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, pp. 171-172.
Harrison, Max. 1980. In The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Stanley Sadie, ed., London: MacMillan Publishers, Vol. 9, p. 561.
Luria, Aleksandr Romanovich. 1980. Higher Cortical Functions in Man, Second Edition, New York: Consultants Bureau, originally published in Russian by Moscow University Press, p 378.
Mezzrow, Milton “Mezz” and Wolfe, Bernard. 1946. Really the Blues, New York: Random House.
Michaux, Henri. 1961. Light Through Darkness, New York: The Orion Press, 1993, p. 63, translated from the French by Haakon Chevalier from the original, Connaissance par les gouffres.
Mingus, Charles. 1972. Let My Children Hear Music, Columbia KC 31039 LP record, from the liner notes.
Ott, Jonathan. 1997. Pharmacophilia or The Natural Paradises, Kennewick, Washington: Natural Products Co.
Popper, Karl R. and Eccles, John C. 1983. The Self and its Brain, London and New York: Routledge, 1983 edition of original 1977 edition published by Springer-Verlag, pp. 336-338.
Tart, Charles T. 1971. On Being Stoned: A Psychological Study of Marijuana Intoxication, Palo Alto, California: Science and Behavior Books, p. 74.
Wasson, R. Gordon, Albert Hofmann and Carl A.P. Ruck. 1978. The Road to Eleusis, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Zimmer, Lynn and Morgan, John P. 1997. Marijuana Myths, Marijuana Facts, New York and San Francisco: The Lindesmith Center, chapter 9.
Bloomquist recounts as his primary example the experiment of Dr. C. Knight Aldrich of the U.S. Public Health Service, as if it were a definitive dismissal of the hypothesis of enhanced creativity. But the experiment is quite absurd, not even using natural cannabis but “parahexyl compound, a synthetic marijuana-like substance.” (C. Knight Aldrich, “The Effect of a Synthetic Marijuana-like Compound on Musical Talent as Measured by the Seashore Test,” Pub. Health Report, 59(13), pp. 431-433.)
Holonomic is a term introduced by George Leonard to refer to entities having the nature of a hologram (The Silent Pulse, Dutton, New York 1978). The term has subsequently been utilized by neuroscientist Karl Pribram, notably in his Brain and Perception: Holonomy and Structure in Figural Processing (1991, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates). Pribram states, “It is important to realize that holography is a mathematical invention and that its realization in optical systems...is only one product of this branch of mathematics.” In other words, optical holography is merely a special case of a wider and more fundamental process for the encoding and reconstitution of information. For this reason it was suggested that the term holonomic be used in reference to brain/mind functions and properties for which the known properties of holographic representation provide useful heuristic models. The term holonomic as used in physics, also indicates that the process is not a static, frozen-in-time representation as is a hologram, but a dynamic, continuous one.
Some brain candy here on what language and writing did to our perception
https://robnitro.substack.com/p/alphabet-vs-the-goddess