A Really Good Day(19)

It is its elusive nature, I believe, that makes flow so compelling. I remember learning about operant conditioning as a college freshman in my Intro to Psychology class. If a rat pushes a lever and gets kibble every time, it will soon grow sated. But if the kibble drops only occasionally, and on no discernible schedule, the rat will keep pushing the lever long after she otherwise might have stopped. Creative flow is the artist’s kibble. Having experienced it once, you want it again, and the fact that it doesn’t always happen makes it all the more precious and tantalizing. You keep coming back to the desk (or the easel or the instrument), day after day, in the hope that the gift might suddenly reappear.

I am hardly the first person to find a psychedelic drug useful in inspiring flow. Since prehistory, people have ingested mind-altering substances as creative inspiration. These substances, from peyote to iboga to soma and ayahuasca, have inspired works of art that attempt to describe both the mystical and the mundane—though, in the case of ayahuasca, I am told the state of creative flow usually alternates with less welcome flow at either end of the digestive tract.*1 Aldous Huxley, the English writer and philosopher and author of Brave New World, deserves the credit for instigating or at least popularizing the use of psychedelic substances as part of the creative endeavor in the Western world. In his book The Doors of Perception, a profoundly influential work of psychedelic literature, Huxley narrates his experience of taking mescaline. About the potential creative value of psychedelics, he writes, “To be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by Mind at Large—this is an experience of inestimable value to everyone and especially to the intellectual.” Huxley used LSD, even going so far as to have his wife inject him with the drug on his deathbed. He did not, however, believe that LSD and other psychedelics should be widely available. Their use, he felt, should be limited to those engaged in artistic, intellectual, or mystical endeavors.

Most of us are well aware of the legacy of psychedelic experimentation in music and art. We know Lucy’s in the sky with diamonds and the piper’s at the gates of dawn. What’s less well known is that a variety of scientists and technologists have used LSD as a catalyst for innovation. For example, Francis Crick, co-winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the discovery of the structure of the DNA molecule, reportedly experimented with LSD while working on the problem. Though he never confirmed the rumors, friends insist that he told them he actually conceived of the double-helix shape during an LSD trip.*2

The biochemist Kary Mullis, co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1993 for his work on the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) technique, was, unlike Crick, frank both about his use of LSD and about how using the drug helped him in his work. He is widely quoted as having said, “Back in the 1960s and early ’70s I took plenty of LSD. A lot of people were doing that in Berkeley back then. And I found it to be a mind-opening experience. It was certainly much more important than any courses I ever took.” In a BBC documentary, Mullis further stated, “What if I had not taken LSD ever; would I have still invented PCR? I don’t know. I doubt it. I seriously doubt it.” Steve Jobs attributed his creative genius in part to LSD, considering his experience using the drug to be, according to the journalist John Markoff, who interviewed Jobs for his book What the Dormouse Said: How the 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry, “one of the two or three most important things he had done in his life.”

In an interview with CNN, a Cisco engineer named Kevin Herbert comfortably discussed his use of LSD as an aid in solving intractable engineering problems. He told the reporter, “There was a case where I had been working on a problem for over a month, and I took LSD and I just realized, ‘Wait, the problem is in the hardware. It’s not a software issue at all.’?”

Jim Fadiman was himself one of the early researchers into the link between psychedelic drugs and creativity. As an undergraduate at Harvard, he studied with Richard Alpert, a young, charismatic psychology professor who, along with Timothy Leary, was an early proponent of both the study and the use of psychedelic drugs in the United States. After he graduated from college, Fadiman met up with his professor on a balmy spring evening in Paris, at an outdoor café. Alpert shook a small pill from a glass bottle into the palm of Fadiman’s hand and changed the course of his life.

The drug was psilocybin, and it caused Fadiman to realize that “there was something about human interaction that [he] had been missing.” Fadiman had what he describes as a classic mystical experience. “I realized I was more than myself, more than Jim Fadiman. My personality was only one part of who I am.” When Fadiman and I had a chance to sit down and discuss the ramifications of this mystical experience on the course of his life, he smiled and said, “How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?”

In the wake of that experience and others that followed, and inspired by a letter from the draft board delineating the courses of action available to young men of military age during the Vietnam War, Fadiman enrolled as a graduate student in psychology at Stanford. He was, he told me, unhappy about getting a degree in a subject that no longer interested him just to avoid the war. While leafing through the course catalogue in search of classes more inspiring than those in his own department, he came upon a course called Human Potential, taught by a professor of electrical engineering named Willis Harman. His interest piqued, Fadiman tracked Harman down in his office. He asked if he could take the class, but was informed that it was already oversubscribed.