Since ancient times, a strong and pervasive belief in the efficacy of prayer–for the living and the dead–reinforces the notion that consciousness is not limited to the physical body. Not only do traditions throughout the world share a belief that prayers may in some way help (or invoke help from) deceased ancestors, many cultures throughout history have believed that prayer can bring about changes in the physical circumstances of the living.

Noetic Sciences Review, Vol. 30, Summer 1994 page 4-9

If prayer affects things in the physical world, its effects should be measurable, and scienceshould be able to investigate it. There is a very scattered literature on this, but when you bring it all together as Larry Dossey has done in his recent book, Healing Words (HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), you see there is quite a large number of interesting experiments with challenging results. Out of 131 controlled experiments on prayer-based healing, more than half showed statistically significant benefits. One of the best known is a double blind study of 393 patients in the coronary unit at San Francisco General Hospital. In this experiment, 192 patients, chosen at random, were prayed for by home prayer groups, the others were not. The prayed-for patients recovered better than the controls, and fewer died.  In order to make sense of these data on the efficacy of prayer, science will have to change its underlying assumptions about the nature of causality. Currently, the standard view is still purely mechanistic–notwithstanding all the recent talk about chaos and complexity theory. When applied to the life sciences, chaos and complexity theory–even with the help of highly sophisticated computer modeling–still explain the world in terms of mechanical causes involving known physical and chemical processes.

The data from empirical studies of prayer, as well as from the large literature reporting psi research in telepathy, clairvoyance and psychokinesis, seriously challenge the mechanistic view. Some other causal agent besides the mechanics of electrochemical interactions is required to make sense of the observed phenomena.

Holistic thinkers generally divide into two main categories. The majority want to have holism on the cheap. They want a holism which doesn’t conflict with science as we know it. Instead of exploring the possibility of new causal factors, they prefer to explain holism in terms of complexity and self-organization of conventional mechanical forces, modeled with sophisticated mathematics and the latest computer techniques. Nothing essentially different from physical and chemical interactions is considered to account for the properties of living systems.

The other group of holists, a minority among which I include myself and Larry Dossey, think that there is more to it than just what we know about chemistry and physics and clever mathematical models. My view is that there are other causal factors in nature, processes that make actual differences–causes in nature which bring about new kinds of effects that we have to take into account in order to understand our experience and the world. These new causal factors are involved in things like paranormal phenomena, prayer and healing.

The whole thrust of my morphic resonance theory is to say there is more to nature than just the standard forces in physics. And what’s more these other agents are at the very heart of the way things are organized in chemistry, in life, and in consciousness.

Prayer and Mental Fields

How might prayer fit in with the scientific view of things? I shall focus on two broad categories of prayer: petitionary and intercessory. In petitionary prayer we ask for something for ourselves; in intercessory prayer we pray to a higher power for the benefit of other people (either living or dead).

In praying for other people and for ourselves we ask a higher power to bring about a particular result. For me, this is what distinguishes prayer from positive thinking. Positive thinking involves nothing more than one’s own mind, one’s own desires and wishes, but petitionary and intercessory prayer are put in the context of a higher power. For this reason positive thinking does not fit into the category of prayer–even though it is often confused with it.

Whether petitionary or intercessory, prayer clearly poses a challenge to the mechanistic view of the world. According to this view, there is no way that thoughts going on in your head, which at most create small electrochemical disturbances barely detectable a few inches from your head even by highly sensitive apparatus, could affect someone or something at a remote distance.

If you were practicing positive thinking or some of the more specifically directed forms of petitionary prayer, you could resort to explanations in terms of telepathy, or if it were a prayer affecting physical objects, you might say it was psychokinesis. But such explanations serve only to replace one set of explanations which lie outside the scope of modern mechanistic science with another set. There is nothing in mechanistic science that could allow mere thoughts inside my mind, whether cast in the form of prayer or as positive thinking, to affect things at a distance. It just can’t happen.

The key to understanding prayer as a scientific phenomenon requires, in my view, getting away from the idea of the mind as somehow inside the brain. If we think our minds are confined to our brains–the standard view–then since what goes on in our brain occurs in the privacy and isolation of our own skull it can’t affect anyone else. However, I see minds being field-like in nature (part of my general view of morphic fields), and I see mental fields as the basis for habitual patterns of thought. Mental fields go beyond, through, and interface with the electromagnetic patterns in the brain. In this way mental fields can affect our bodies through our brains. However, they are much more extensive than our brains, reaching out to great distances in some cases.

As soon as we have the idea that the mind can be extended through these mental fields, and over large distances, we have a medium of connection through which the power of prayer could work. We are no longer dealing with a purely mechanical system in the brain, with absolutely no way of connecting the brain and the observed effect–for if that were the case the phenomenon of effective prayer would have to be dismissed as delusion or coincidence. With a mental field, however, we have a medium for a whole series of connections between us and the people, animals and places we know and care about–with the rest of the world, in fact. When we pray, those extended mental fields would be the context in which prayer could work non-locally.

Non-Localized Mind

Clearly, this does not amount to a fully articulated scientific theory of prayer; it is highly speculative. But, I believe, it is also very clear that we need to have a much broader view of how the mind is extended beyond the brain. We need a theory of what I call the “extended mind” as opposed to the conventional scientific view of the “contracted mind” holed up inside the skull. This view of a contracted mind came from Descartes in the seventeenth century. It is a model of consciousness which separates our minds from the whole world around us into a small region in the brain–a model of the mind which plainly contradicts direct experience. For example, when you see this page in front of you, you experience it as being outside you, not inside your brain. To say that this and all your other perceptions are located in your brain is a theory, not an experience.

It is important, however, not to envisage the extended mind as some amorphous field, a kind of undifferentiated Universal Mind. I don’t think we should make a large leap from the concept of a contracted mind to a boundless universal mind. Such a jump isn’t helpful scientifically. My idea of morphic fields is that even though they are extended and non-local in their effects, they are still part of our individual and collective mind, but not to be equated with some ultimate Universal Mind. The morphic fields are not God. They are non-local in the sense that they can spread out over immense distances (as, for instance, gravitational fields do), so that if I were praying about somebody in Australia from my home in London the morphic field would carry the information and the prayer could work. But my mental field wouldn’t usually spread out to Mars, for example, because there is nothing connecting me to someone on that planet. If someone I knew had traveled there on a spaceship, then there would be a link. For morphic fields to have a mental connection I believe there has to be something that links you to the other person. Even if you have never met the other person, I believe just knowing their name or something about them seems to be enough to establish a connection, though this connection is likely to be weaker than that between people who know each other well.

You could picture it something like this: When two people come into contact and establish some mental connection (perhaps experienced as affection, love, even hate) their morphic fields in effect become part of a larger, inclusive field. Then, if they separate from each other it is as if their particular portions of the morphic field are stretched elastically, so that there remains a “mental tension” or link between them. There has to be something like this that relates the two people.

Nested Sets of Morphic Fields

Morphic fields are organized in nested hierarchies (see below) . For example, there are morphic fields surrounding the atoms in our bodies, which are within the higher level morphic fields of molecules, organelles, cells, organs and limbs, all of which exist within the morphic field associated with the entire body. The body field, in turn, would be within the field of relationships that constitute a family, within a larger social group. Societies, in turn, are embedded within ecosystems, and ecosystems within the planetary system, “Gaia”. And by extrapolation, we could extend the series of nested morphic fields until we reach out beyond planetary, solar system and galactic limits to encompass the entire universe.

Even Einstein’s space-time field of gravitation is a universal, cosmic field holding everything together and linking the entire universe, in fact, making it a uni-verse. It does the same thing as the World Soul or Anima Mundi of neo-Platonic philosophy. It embraces the whole cosmos. There are levels upon levels of morphic fields within fields, within which we are embedded. Human life is embedded in vastly larger fields of organization. To what degree they are conscious still remains in the realm of speculation. But I would assume that higher-level fields are not less, and probably more, conscious than we are. I would think they are more conscious than we are not simply because they are larger in size, but because they are more inclusive, contain more complexity, and encompass more possibilities.

I think that is one way of interpreting traditional doctrines about super-human intelligences, or cosmic intelligences, usually thought of in Christianity as the hierarchy of the angels. The word “angel” normally conveys the image of a good-looking youth with wings; but that’s simply a pictorial representation. The traditional doctrine behind that image, however, is of a super- human intelligence. And if the solar system and galaxy have intelligence, then one might be an angel and the other an archangel. In some traditional Christian doctrines there are, for instance, nine hierarchies of angels or levels of intelligence. And I would see these as equivalent to intelligences, minds or organizing fields at different levels of complexity. The galactic angels, for instance, would embrace or include those of solar systems, which in turn would include those of planets.

This is a description of a cosmos which has intelligence at every level, not a view that sees consciousness as something that emerged from unconscious matter. Conscious intelligence was there to start with. The place to look for it is not going to be in atoms or quanta (although there may be some kind of consciousness there), but in solar systems and galaxies and in the whole cosmos. There may be all these different levels of imagination, intelligence, and mind throughout the whole of the cosmic organization. All traditional doctrines that I know of have recognized something of that kind.

Notes & References

1. For an extended discussion of these theories, see R. Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The

Hypothesis of Formative Causation (Tarcher, 1981), and The Presence of the Past: Morphic

Resonance and the Habits of Nature (Vintage, 1988).

Opening Up To The Numinous

As a scientist I wasn’t always interested in prayer. In fact, in earlier days I believed it was all

nonsense. I was an atheist; God had no room in my scientific education. After graduating from

Cambridge, I thought I had outgrown childish belief structures like religion, and that rational

science was the way forward. I had a typical secular-humanist atheistic worldview for a long

time, well into my thirties. And this, of course, is the worldview that most of my scientific

colleagues still have. They regard religion as a relic from a superstitious age. In that context,

prayer is completely meaningless, except insofar as people believe in it they may derive some

psychological benefit–a kind of “placebo effect”.

Then in 1968 I visited India, and all the materialist assumptions I took for granted just didn’t

seem to work any more. What struck me most was the experience of being immersed in a

culture that worked in an entirely different way to what I had been accustomed. In this exotic

culture, the idea of what we might call “other realms”–the supernatural or spiritual–was simply

taken for granted by practically everybody. There was a palpable sense of another dimension

to life, everywhere you looked, and everywhere you went.

As an atheist, of course, my initial reaction was to think they were deluded in their beliefs. Yet

on the other hand, these beliefs produced a fascinating culture. Even people living in the

extremes of poverty seemed to have more joy in their lives than most people I knew who lived

in the lap of plenty. I was touched deeply by the natural human warmth, and the quality of the

people and of their way of life. According to the materialist beliefs I had, poverty equaled

misery; wealth and good medical attention meant, if not happiness, then at least a much

better quality of life. In India I saw it wasn’t as simple as that. The people there were poor

beyond the comprehension of most Westerners, yet everywhere they walked about with the

most radiant smiles. Walk along a street in London, Paris or New York and you see mostly

harried, worried faces. That difference impressed me very deeply.

The contrast between the sense of inner joy and peace I experienced all around me in India

compared with the tense way of life in the West was so striking that I decided to investigate

meditation. For about four years I did various forms of Hindu practice. This didn’t conflict with

my scientific attitude because meditation didn’t challenge my whole scientific worldview. On

the contrary, I could approach my study of meditation in a truly scientific spirit. Its appeal is

that you do it and see if it works. It’s empirical. You sit, you calm your breath and you observe

what happens. I started with Transcendental Meditation which sounded scientific in that it was

supposed to lower lactose levels in the blood, have beneficial effects on the circulation, and

calm brain activity. I found that meditation did indeed work. I experienced within myself that

calm I was seeing all around me in India.

As a scientist I wasn’t troubled. I could understand meditation by explaining to myself that it

wasn’t opening me up to other realms of consciousness, but that it was simply changing the

physiological state of my brain. To say that breathing in a particular way and doing a particular

kind of mental activity could affect my mental and physical state did not challenge my

worldview.

Nevertheless, although I could follow Hindu practices, India was such a completely different

civilization and culture that there was no way I’d ever be an Indian. I began to have a sense

that I would need to recover my own tradition if I were to share in the deep perceptions and

peace that I saw in the people around me.

Furthermore, after living there a while, I also saw the shadow side of the Hindu tradition,

which I hadn’t seen in my earlier brief visit. There is a fatalistic lack of concern for other

people that was alien to me. That view was at variance with my more optimistic, progressivist

Christian culture.

In India I came face to face with the realization that rooted in the Christian tradition is the

sense that you can, and should, help other people; we can aim for some better state of affairs

on Earth, for the whole of society. When I talked with my Indian friends and colleagues, it

became very clear that I had this view deep within me. I realized that this sense didn’t come

from Hindu philosophy, nor from my atheistic outlook. Instead, I saw it came from a deeply

embedded Christian view of the world that I carried with me unwittingly. In fact, I realized this

partly because in conversation with my Indian friends they would frequently point out that so

much of what I was expressing was a Christian view. The repeated revelation of this, even to

an avowed atheist, was difficult to ignore.

I spent some time living in Father Bede Griffith’s ashram, and I found that coming back to a

Christian path made sense to me. I began praying and discovered that it was more helpful to

me than meditating. I would say that meditation involves a kind of separation between the

practice and the rest of one’s life; it is going into another space altogether. You could say that

contemplative prayer would have the same effect. But for me, ordinary petitionary and

intercessory prayer, such as the “Lord’s Prayer”, links the events of my daily life directly with

my practice. I pray about what I’ve done that day and what’s coming up the next day. It’s a

matter of bringing the very fabric of one’s life–relationships, work, and personal concerns–into

the context of the spiritual life.

How Do Mental Fields Work?

My hypothesis of morphic resonance and morphic fields has grown out of the notion in

developmental biology of “morphogenic fields”. This idea dates back to the 1920s in the work

of biologists A. Gurwitsch and Paul Weiss. In modern developmental biology these fields are

usually regarded as heuristic devices, or as mathematical abstractions with no causal effect. By

contrast, I interpret them to be causal fields with an inherent memory given by morphic

resonance; in other words I regard them as one kind of morphic field. Other kinds of morphic

fields include behavioral fields, responsible for coordinating instinctive or learned behavior,

mental fields, responsible for organizing mental activity, and social fields, responsible for

organizing social groups.

If fields are the medium of mind then what you have in the brain is an interface between one

kind of field and another kind of field. All organization in the body has morphic fields

underlying it. Morphic fields in the brain interact with electromagnetic (EM) fields in the brain.

However, the nature of this interaction is indirect. Rather than morphic fields working directly

through the electromagnetic field, they interact through both affecting the same thing–in this

case, physical activity within the brain.

I am not saying that there is a linear-type causal relationship between brain-electromagnetic-

morphic fields. I regard mental fields as one kind of morphic field that affects the brain,

shaping its activity, and this affects the EM field associated with the brain.

Here you’ve got fields acting on fields: morphic fields surrounding all the cells, tissues and

organs of the body, as well as in molecules and cell membranes, and indeed in quantum-

matter fields. This is contrasted with the more usual view of the spirit-matter dichotomy–

where mechanical matter and ineffable spirit interact in some kind of quasi-miraculous way. If

you say that the spirit acts on the EM field, you’ve got a problem of miraculous intervention.

On the other hand, if everything in nature is organized by fields, and if mental fields are a

more subtle kind of field, you’ve got no sharp dichotomy–you’ve got fields acting through fields

at all levels of reality. So the mind-body problem ceases to be a sharp dichotomy.

Part 4 is missing from the playlist, so here it is…

International Conference in Mexico City Provides Hope, Inspiration to a Budding Domestic Movement

Amanda originally wrote this piece for the Huffington Post

Cannabis is by far the most widely used illegal drug and therefore the mainstay of the ‘War on Drugs.’ It is used by an estimated 4% of the global adult population, that is, 166 million people out of an estimated population of 200 million illegal drug users’. It therefore constitutes roughly 80% of the ‘illegal drug market.’ However, cannabis has only ever held a relatively marginal position in international drug policy discussions. In response to its peripheral role in the global debate, I decided to convene a team of the world’s leading drug policy analysts to prepare an overview of the latest scientific evidence surrounding cannabis and the policies controlling its use. The report would both bring cannabis to the attention of policy-makers and also provide them with the relevant facts to better inform their future decisions, particularly in the context of the United Nations Strategic Drug Policy Review of 2009, and thereafter.

The historical context of the United Nations’ policy is critical here. In 1998, the international community agreed a 10-year program of activity for the control of illegal drug use and markets. These agreements were made at a United Nations General Assembly Special Session (UNGASS) held in New York in June of that year, and a commitment was made to reassess the situation at the end of the 10-year period. The nature of this program was epitomized by the slogan ‘A drug free world — we can do it!’ However, the reality is that since 1998 drugs have in general become cheaper and more readily available than ever before. We hope that this volume will help lead the way towards a more rational, effective and just approach to the control of cannabis.

Cannabis is, however, a complicated issue, with many seemingly contradictory facets. On the one hand, it has a history of spiritual and medicinal use that dates back millennia; this, together with the explosion in its use during the latter half of the twentieth century, indicates the many subjective benefits that users attribute to it. Moreover, it is one of the least toxic substances used recreationally, where the risk of overdose is negligible. On the other hand, recent years have seen growing concern about an association between cannabis use and a variety of possible harms, particularly mental health disorders. Only through extensive and rigorous research can we hope to clarify the contradictions between the perceived benefits of cannabis and the dangers it presents.

Some of the many questions on which we lack reliable evidence include: Why do people choose to use cannabis? What are the psychological and therapeutic needs it fulfils? What are the processes it might enhance? Why and when is cannabis harmful? Can this be understood in terms of differences in individual genetic and personality types, or in the type of cannabis consumed, or in the pattern of its consumption? By answering these and other questions we might minimize the harms caused by cannabis use and help to prevent its misuse, as well as better understanding the benefits many users reportedly derive from it, both in alleviating sickness and promoting well-being.

When considering harms, it is also important to include the adverse effects of a criminal justice approach to cannabis control. This is particularly pertinent given the evidence that cannabis control policies, whether draconian or liberal, appear to have little or no impact on the prevalence or intensity of its consumption. Indeed, at the onset of international cannabis prohibition, use of the drug was confined to a scattering of countries and cultures, but since then it has spread around the world and is now widely used in most developed countries, to the extent that it has become a rite of passage for a majority of young people.

In the developed world, it is all too easy to overlook the unintended consequences of the War on Drugs, including the extensive violations of human rights, since in these countries the violations are most predominantly felt by drug-users themselves, particularly where discriminatory enforcement leads to significantly higher levels of arrests among the disadvantaged and minority groups. However, in producer/transit countries, such as in Latin America, the suffering caused by this war is vastly more widespread, affecting not only farmers but also whole populations by the destabilization of political and social systems through corruption, violence, and institutional collapse. While attention to these systemic effects has primarily been focused on other drugs, the war on cannabis also plays a significant role.

However, despite cannabis being responsible for the great majority of arrests for illicit drug-use — in the US alone approximately 750,000 arrests per annum – international drug policy discussions have tended to ignore cannabis, focusing instead on those substances that cause the most harms: opioids, cocaine, and amphetamines. As discussed in this volume, although cannabis has always been marginal to the main interests of the international drug control system, the upholders of the system have been extremely reluctant to consider reforms which would change its status within, or remove it from, that system.

Although this Report is specifically targeted at reviewing cannabis laws, it is worth noting that any change to the scheduling of cannabis under the international drug control system could lead to the questioning of the whole War on Drugs approach. Without cannabis within the system’s remit, the number of illegal drug-users in the world would total somewhere in the region of 40 million people – arguably too small a number to justify the vast costs, in money, human suffering, and political corruption, of the current efforts to enforce the ideals behind this unwinnable war. With a much narrower target the War on Drugs might turn instead into a more sensible campaign to relieve the problems caused by the dependence of a small number of users on more addictive and dangerous drugs.

The present volume reviews the issues which need to be considered by policy-makers in developing more effective cannabis policies that minimize the harms associated with its use and control. We hope that this Report will prove useful in policy discussions concerning cannabis, not only in the context of the 2009 international review, but also as a guide for governments seeking to reform their cannabis policies thereafter, and that it will further promote a wider discussion of these important issues amongst the general public.

NEANDERTHALS as innovators? That the concept seems amusing goes to show how our sister species has become the butt of our jokes. Yet in the Middle Palaeolithic, some 300,000 years ago, innovation is what the Neanderthals were up to.

From NewScientist, by Rowan Hooper

This period is usually regarded as undramatic in cultural and evolutionary terms, with little in the way of technological or cognitive development. Palaeoanthropologists get more excited about the changes in tools found later, as the Middle Palaeolithic gave way to the Upper, and as modern humans replaced Neanderthals, some 40,000 years ago.

Terry Hopkinson of the University of Leicester, UK, has now challenged this view, showing that Neanderthals were far from behaviourally static. They incorporated different forms of tool construction into a single technique, and learned to cope with the ecological challenges posed by habitats in eastern Europe.

“There has been a consensus that the modern human mind turned on like a light switch about 50,000 years ago, only in Africa,” says Hopkinson. But the putatively modern traits accompanying the change, such as abstract art, the use of grindstones and elongated stone blades, and big game hunting began to accumulate in Africa from 300,000 years ago, he says. “It was the same in Europe with Neanderthals, there was a gradual accumulation of technology.” If Homo sapiens developed human traits gradually, then why not Neanderthals?

As with Homo sapiens in Africa, Neanderthals gradually accumulated technology and developed human traits

Archaeological finds from across Europe show that the Neanderthals fused two forms of toolmaking, the façonnage and the débitage techniques. In the former a stone core is shaped by chipping off flakes of flint, the latter involves producing sharp-edged flakes from a core. In the Lower Palaeolithic, more than 300,000 years ago, the two techniques were practised separately, but Hopkinson argues that during the Middle Palaeolithic they were fused into a single method, the Levallois reduction technique (Antiquity, vol 81, p 294).

At the same time as this was occurring, excavations show that Neanderthals spread into central and eastern Europe, regions where they and their forebears, Homo heidelbergensis, had hitherto been unable to settle. In western Europe, the influence of the Atlantic ameliorates the extreme seasonality of the continent, but away from this, the environment was too harsh for them to cope. “The eastern expansion shows that the Neanderthals became capable of managing their lives and their landscapes in strongly seasonal environments,” says Hopkinson.

This period is commonly thought to be characterised by long periods of little change in technological and perhaps also cognitive development, says Katerina Harvati of the department of human evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. “This analysis highlights important aspects of Neanderthal cultural and cognitive evolution which are not always emphasised,” she says.

Neanderthals have typically been thought of as incapable of innovation, as it was assumed to be something unique to Homo sapiens, says Hopkinson. “With this evidence of innovation it becomes difficult to exclude Neanderthals from the concept of humanity.”

When I was growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, painkillers were kept in a glass bottle in the bathroom medicine cabinet. When you had a headache, you would wait until you got home and then open the dusty bottle and shake out two pills: round, powdery discs with bevelled edges and a bisect line – a groove cut into the pill so that you could snap it in half for a reduced dose. You’d swallow the pills, either aspirin or paracetamol, with a glass of water. They felt uncomfortably large in the throat and had a bitter taste. The bottle, which contained 50 pills, hung around for months, even years.

Now, when I feel a headache coming on, I pat my pockets to see if I have any painkillers on me. The time between pain and treatment has shrunk to almost nothing. These days, the pills do not come in bottles, but in blister-packs in bright, shiny boxes. When I leave the house, I sometimes run through a checklist – keys, wallet, phone, painkillers. The packets, some of which are plastic and shaped like mobile phones, are cheerful and glossy; elegant enough to put on a table in a restaurant, they look like lifestyle accessories. You take them with you when you leave the house, partly for convenience and partly because you know that, if you leave them lying around, someone else will pocket them.

Painkillers are no longer hard to swallow; the pills have smooth edges, and some have a glossy coating of hard sugar, like Smarties or M&M’s. Some of them are mint- or lemon-flavoured. If your throat objects to tablets, you can take caplets, which are longer and thinner, or “liquid capsules”, which are soft and gelatinous, like vitamin pills, or powder, which is poured from a sachet into a glass of water. You could conceivably take a painkiller while you were out jogging, or running for the bus.

Painkillers are also more widely available than they used to be. We have been able to buy aspirin and paracetamol over the counter for some time now, but in 1996 restrictions on the sale of ibuprofen – the newest, raciest painkiller – were relaxed, making it available in supermarkets, newsagents and corner shops, as well as from the pharmacist. This was part of an NHS drive to save money by taking pressure off doctors and pharmacists; as citizens, we have been taught to be self-medicating when it comes to pain. The change came about after Galpharm, a British pharmaceutical company, made a successful application to the Medicines Control Agency for a licence to have ibuprofen moved from the pharmacy to the “general sales list”. After that, painkiller advertising, marketing and packaging moved into a different league.

Inevitably, we are also spending more on painkillers than ever. I’d buy them as a matter of course, with my groceries. I found myself wanting to buy smart painkillers, in the same way that I might buy smart jeans or decent coffee. For me, and for many people I spoke to, the temptation is to catch headaches early, nip them in the bud. We have become enthusiastic self-medicators. In 1997, according to the market research firm Euromonitor, the British painkiller market was worth £309m. In 2001, it was worth £398m. In other words, it grew by almost 30% in just four years, probably the biggest hike since the German company Bayer opened the first US aspirin factory in 1903. Euromonitor predicts more growth: by 2006, it estimates that the market will be worth £483m.

Recently, I found myself in someone’s house with a slight headache. No problem, he said. He had stocked up on painkillers – he thought he had four packets, a total of 48 pills. But he couldn’t find them; the packets had all gone. Three people were living in the house. “I just bought them a couple of days ago,” he said. That was the moment I decided to write this article.

How do you decide what type of headache you have? Is it an Anadin Extra headache, or an Anadin Ultra headache? Is it a Nurofen headache, or a Nurofen Plus headache? Can you cure it with tablets, or do you need liquid capsules?

In an ordinary shop, you can buy three basic types of painkiller – aspirin, which has been around for a century; paracetamol, which emerged as a popular alternative after the war; or ibuprofen, which was invented in the early 1960s and has been a pharmacy medicine since 1983. Ibuprofen is slightly gentler on your stomach than aspirin, but it does not thin your blood to the same extent.

Aspirin and ibuprofen reduce pain, fever and inflammation, while paracetamol reduces only pain and fever. Paracetamol is gentle on the stomach, but can damage the liver if you take too many. Paracetamol is also the suicide drug; you can die a painful death by knocking back as few as 25. (For this reason, the government has taken steps to reduce packet sizes; since 1998, you have been able to buy packets of no more than 16 in supermarkets, or 32 in pharmacies – though there is nothing to stop you from going to more than one shop. The multibillion-dollar paracetamol industry in the US has thus far resisted all attempts by the Food and Drug Administration to reduce packet size.) Aspirin and ibuprofen are potentially less harmful: most people would survive a cry-for-help dose of around 50 aspirins, or even 100 ibuprofen tablets.

When it comes to headaches, ibuprofen is my drug of choice. (I’m not alone: according to Euromonitor, ibuprofen now has 31% of the market, and is growing exponentially. Aspirin has a 7% share, and paracetamol 13%; the rest of the market is made up of combination painkillers.) I also, I have noticed, have strong brand loyalty. When I go to the supermarket, my eye is drawn to the row of shiny silver packs with a chevron and a target design – Nurofen. Nurofen claims to be “targeted pain relief”.

Targeting a headache costs me around 20p a shot. On one level, I am aware that the active ingredient in a single Nurofen tablet, 200mg of ibuprofen, is exactly the same as that in a single Anadin ibuprofen tablet, or an Anadin Ultra, a Hedex ibuprofen, a Cuprofen or, for that matter, a generic own-brand ibuprofen tablet from Safeway, Sainsbury’s or Tesco. On another level, Nurofen’s targeting promise appeals to me. It feels hi-tech, almost environmentally sound. It makes me think of stealth bombers dropping smart bombs down the chimney of the building they want to destroy, with minimum collateral damage.

Are our headaches getting worse, or do we just think they are? I went to see Dr Raj Munglani, a consultant in pain management, in his office at Nuffield hospital in Cambridge, to find out what he thought. Munglani is a pleasant-looking man in middle age who drives a top-of-the-range Volvo between his home in a village outside Cambridge and the various hospitals in East Anglia where he practises.

Munglani believes that our society tolerates less pain than ever before. Modern life requires you to be pain-free; there just isn’t time to lie around waiting for a headache to go. Young people are more impatient than older people; when they feel pain, they want something done about it, immediately. Generally speaking, the younger the consumer, the stronger the painkiller they are marketed: Anadin Original is pitched at people over 45, Anadin Extra at people between 25 and 55, and Anadin Ultra at people between 19 and 32. Of course, there is a limit to this sliding scale: Nurofen for Children (six months and over) contains 100mg of Nurofen, half the adult dose.

Is any of this surprising? We live in an age of quick fixes. These days, we expect everything to get faster – cars, lifts, food. When we suffer psychological distress, we take Prozac and Seroxat. More people are having their wisdom teeth extracted under general anaesthetic. Caesarean section is on the increase. Half a century of the NHS has softened us up, and the sheer success of modern medicine has made pain something of an anomaly. We work out, we take vitamins: we can’t really be doing with headaches. We see pain not as a symptom – an alarm system to warn us of illness – but more as an illness in itself. When the alarm comes on, we just want it turned off.

Our parents and grandparents “worked through” their pain; they gritted it out. God, it was said, would never give you a pain you couldn’t bear. In those days, pain had a moral, even a religious dimension. Pope John Paul II has said “suffering contains, as it were, an appeal to man’s moral greatness and spiritual maturity” – but today few of us want to be martyrs. Look at the ads on TV, and on buses and trains in any major city: painkillers will get you back to work, help you keep your job, deal with the kids; with painkillers, you can cope.

I had a slight hangover the day I visited Munglani, which seemed to be getting worse. I’d nearly missed my train, and found myself repeatedly clenching my jaw in the taxi. I’d planned to buy some Nurofen before I got on the train, but had run out of time.

Munglani explained the anatomy of my headache. The alcohol I had drunk had dehydrated the inside of my skull. Consequently, the dura, the Cellophane-like membrane that encases my brain, was no longer fully supported. Cells inside my skull were being traumatised, and had responded by releasing tiny amounts of arachidonic acid; this acid, having seeped out of my cells, had turned into a set of chemical compounds called prostaglandins. And these prostaglandins were hurting me; they were telling nerve endings in my head to tell my brain that my cells were traumatised. My brain, in turn, was trying to get my attention, and succeeding. I was in pain. It felt as if something inside my head was being gently pulled away from my skull, which it was.

When you take aspirin, or paracetamol, or ibuprofen, the drug works by deactivating a chemical called prostaglandin H synthetase, the catalyst that turns arachidonic acid into prostaglandins. So even though your cells are still traumatised, your brain is no longer aware of the trauma. Your brain is being fooled. This process was discovered in aspirin in the 1970s by John Vane, a scientist working at the Wellcome Foundation, who went on to win the Nobel Prize in 1982. (Aspirin was first synthesised in Germany in 1899, and so had been on the market for more than 70 years before anybody knew how it worked.)

“Pain,” said Munglani, “is what the patient says it is.” All sorts of things can make you feel headachey, including muscle contractions on the scalp or the back of the neck, dehydration from drinking too much alcohol or caffeine, staring at your computer screen for too long, looking at bright lights, colds and flu, grinding your teeth, anxiety at the prospect of getting a headache. Sometimes, prostaglandins are produced when there is no apparent trauma. You might feel pain because something has subtly altered the balance of your brain chemistry, or simply because your mood has changed; you might be producing an uneven amount of serotonin or dopamine.

You might, most worryingly, have a headache because you take too many painkillers, a condition known as “medication overuse headache”. A study published in the British Medical Journal last October found that “daily or near-daily headache is at epidemic levels, affecting up to 5% of some populations, and chronic overuse of headache drugs may account for half of this phenomenon”. Low doses daily appeared to carry greater risks than larger doses weekly.

Of course, most pharmaceutical research is sponsored by pharmaceutical companies, which are understandably reluctant to explore the negatives. But what research there is suggests that analgesics, when used frequently, chronically reduce levels of serotonin, and increase levels of pain-signalling molecules. Earlier this year, the New York Times reported that a German study had found that even a two-week course of Tylenol (an American brand of paracetamol) “causes a drop in serotonin-receptor density in rat brains”, an effect that is reversed when the rats are taken off the painkillers. If you keep fooling your brain into not feeling pain, your body will eventually fight back and make you feel more pain. And then you’ll want more painkillers; it’s a vicious circle.

Imagine this as a business proposition. You buy a cardboard tub of fluffy white powder for around £100. Then you turn the powder into a quarter of a million pills, which you sell at 10p per pill. Every cardboard tub you buy makes you a profit of £24,900. The powder is pure ibuprofen. The pills are painkillers. The company is Boots, which owns a subsidiary called Crookes Healthcare, which manufactures Nurofen. Sounds good, doesn’t it? Of course, there are overheads – you have to invent the drug, spend years on expensive clinical trials, build a factory, and hire people to make the pills, tell the public about the pills, and design the packs so they look attractive on the shelves. “It takes 10 years and £200m to get a new drug accepted,” said Dr James Walmsley, a senior medical adviser to Boots. Even so, it’s clearly worth it. (I asked two Boots employees how much the company would pay for a 50kg tub of ibuprofen. “About £100,” they agreed. Later, a press officer emailed me to say she couldn’t officially comment on the cost.)

Boots’ head office, and the factory that makes many of its painkillers, are on a campus that lies a few miles outside Nottingham. Every day, trucks full of raw ingredients arrive at one end of the factory, and trucks leave the other end with the finished product – tens of thousands of cardboard packs, destined for 90 countries. This is D-95, one of the biggest painkiller factories in Britain, working 24 hours a day. If you’ve ever popped a Nurofen tablet, or a Nurofen caplet, or a Nurofen Plus, or a Nurofen liquid capsule, or a Boots own-brand generic ibuprofen tablet (the active ingredient is the same), or a Boots own-brand aspirin or paracetamol tablet, the pill you swallowed will have been made here. This is Headache Central.

“Six hundred people work here,” said Catherine McGrath, who described herself as “shift manager, analgesics”. She explained that the factory works seasonally, making cold remedies in the autumn to meet winter demand, and hayfever remedies in the spring. Headaches are a year-round phenomenon. “There’s a constant demand for painkillers,” McGrath told me.

Before the fluffy white powder becomes a hard, glossy pill, it must go through many different stages. First, it is mixed with “excipients”, ingredients that have no painkilling role. Each Nurofen pill, for instance, contains 200mg of ibuprofen, but also maize starch, sucrose, calcium sulphate, stearic acid and shellac. These things hold it together, bulk it out, make it taste nice and help it disintegrate when it reaches the stomach.

If you swallow a Nurofen tablet, Boots’ employees will have mixed it, granulated it, sieved it in a colander the size of a dining table, dried it using a contraption like a hand-drier in a public loo, but 20ft tall, blown it upwards into a series of giant “socks”, milled it in a vast grinding machine, “pinched” it to remove excess air, punched it into the shape of a pill, weighed it, checked it for metal deposits, coated it in sugar 16 times until the edges are smooth, printed it with a logo on an old-fashioned printing press, blister-packed it and boxed it in an attractive box.

The factory is large and sterile, like a setting in a JG Ballard novel – big, barn-like spaces, dull, neutral colours, large rooms full of vats. The thing that gets you is the scale. This is about making millions and millions of pills – to cure tension headaches in France, migraines in Germany, hangovers in Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden. Naturally, after a few hours in this environment, a headache started creeping up on me. I patted my pockets. Nothing. It is not possible to take a pill in the factory itself.

McGrath and I watched hundreds of ibuprofen caplets pouring down chutes. “Lovely and slinky,” she said, “nice to go down your throat.”

Stewart Adams, the inventor of ibuprofen, lives modestly in a compact modern house on the outskirts of Nottingham. On the sideboard in his living room there is a silver Nurofen pack, cast in metal, with the names of the first Nurofen advertisers on the back. He won an OBE for services to science in 1987, and his name is on the ibuprofen patent. But Adams has derived no great material reward from his invention – no house in the country, not even a lifetime supply of painkillers. When he gets a headache, he goes to the corner shop just like the rest of us.

A sprightly, talkative 79, Adams came upon ibuprofen when he was working as a research scientist for Boots in the late 1950s, looking for a drug to reduce inflammation in patients with rheumatoid arthritis. Looking back on his career, he says he was “very disappointed”. He had found a headache remedy that was more potent than aspirin, with fewer side-effects – but he hadn’t found a cure for rheumatoid arthritis.

His operation was very small – “a man and a boy”. Typically, his research budget was between £4,000 and £5,000 a year. Adams discovered that aspirin reduced the swelling caused by ultraviolet light on the skin. Working with an organic chemist called John Nicholson, he began looking for aspirin-like compounds that might have fewer side-effects on arthritic patients. “It was a bit hit and miss,” he told me. (This was long before John Vane had discovered how aspirin worked.)

“We weren’t as clearcut in our thinking as we might have been,” said Adams. He and Nicholson looked at hundreds of chemical compounds. They put several drugs through clinical trials, testing them on arthritic patients. One drug produced a nasty rash in a large percentage of the patients; another produced a rash in a smaller, but still significant, percentage. A third, ibufenac, an acetic acid, caused jaundice. “We had to sit back and have another rethink,” said Adams.

During this long process of trial and error, Adams synthesised a version of ibufenac that was not an acetic acid but a proprionic acid – ie, related to propane rather than vinegar. He assumed it would be toxic but, surprisingly, it wasn’t: it had a short half-life in the tissues. It was like aspirin, only you could take more of it. Adams and his colleagues began taking the compound, ibuprofen, when they got headaches. “We knew it was analgesic, because we were taking it well before it got on the market,” he says. He remembers making a speech at a conference after a few drinks the night before, having dealt with his hangover by taking 600mg of this new drug he had invented.

When Boots patented ibuprofen in 1962, Adams could have had little idea what he had invented – an analgesic that would compete with aspirin; a drug that, once its control had passed into the hands of the marketing men, would change the way we consume painkillers for ever. For the rest of his career, Adams continued with his efforts to find a cure for rheumatoid arthritis, without success (although ibuprofen has important uses in its treatment). Holding the original patent in his hands, Adams said, laughing, “We didn’t get anything. I think, in fact, we were supposed to be given a pound for signing away our signatures, but we didn’t even get that.”

Now that painkillers exist in a no man’s land between medicine and product, they don’t need someone to prescribe them – they need someone to market them. Don Williams, the man currently responsible for the design of the Nurofen pack, works in Notting Hill, west London. His office is just what you’d expect – minimal furnishings, varnished, blond-wood floors. In the upstairs lobby there is a shopping trolley full of products designed by his company, Packaging Innovations Global: Double Velvet loo paper, Head & Shoulders shampoo, Pot Noodle – and Nurofen. A former session guitarist from Middlesbrough, Williams is tall and slim, with wonderfully tasteful casual clothes and a fashionably shaved head. “That’s our philosophy,” Williams said, looking at the trolley. “That’s what we believe in. Getting things in trolleys. At the end of the day, that’s what we’re paid for.”

Packaging Innovations began designing Nurofen packs about five years ago. “There are very few brand icons that visually communicate what they actually do,” Williams said. The target design is “directly related to the brand promise”. Two years ago, the Brand Council, an advertising industry panel, named Nurofen as one of 100 British “superbrands”, one that “offers consumers significant emotional and/or physical advantage over its competitors that (consciously or subconsciously) customers want, recognise and are willing to pay a premium for”.

One of Williams’ innovations was to place the target in the centre of the pack, with a chevron radiating out to the sides. He also wanted more of the silver foil on the packs to be visible. Consumers, he told me, are visually literate – they see the pack design before they read the words. When he took over the design of Benson & Hedges’ cigarette packs, Williams made sure that every pack was gold, even the packs containing low-tar cigarettes, which had previously been silver. “We believe that brand identities should be recognised at a distance,” he said, “even through half-closed eyes, or sub-optimal conditions, or in peripheral vision.” In supermarkets, says Williams, “We want a blocking effect on the shelf. The chevron links all the packs together, so you get a wave effect.” As I left, he said, “I get more kicks out of seeing a pack in a bin than on a shelf.”

Are we taking more painkillers than we should? Dr Timothy Steiner, a dry, precise man and consultant physiologist at Charing Cross hospital in London, thinks so. He believes that one in 30 people suffer chronic daily headaches as a result of painkiller overuse. So what constitutes overuse? In a paper on headaches published in the British Medical Journal last year, Steiner wrote that it was hard to generalise, although “the regular intake of three or more analgesic tablets daily on more than two days a week are suggested arbitrary limits”. He won’t quite say that “medication overuse headache” is something the pharmaceutical industry is reluctant to explore. What he does say is that when the Proprietary Association of Great Britain (PAGB), which represents the pharmaceutical companies that make over-the-counter medicines, set up a working party to investigate the possibility that painkillers might be causing headaches, the working party was disbanded. That was in July 2000. Steiner looks at me as if to say: this is a fact; you can make of it what you will.

I later spoke to Sheila Kelly, executive director of the PAGB, to get the industry perspective. Does she think the market is growing too fast? Kelly said she had figures only up to 1997. She doesn’t say so, but that is the year when the market really began to take off, the beginning of the big painkiller push. Kelly believes that “medication overuse headache” has been confused with some cases of migraine. “It’s not the analgesics that cause the headaches,” she said. “These people have a propensity towards migraine. It’s a coincidence. It’s become a non-issue, I think.”

Sitting behind his desk in his neat office, Steiner disagrees: he thinks that “medication overuse headache” is a “huge public health issue”. He explains the cycle: “Over-consumption of painkillers leads to aggravation of the headache condition. Headaches and analgesic use become more frequent, one driving the other. Patients, instead of taking painkillers for the headache they’ve got, take painkillers for the headache they fear they’re going to get.

“If painkillers reduce the sensitivity of pain pathways, there is likely to be, over time, a physiological compensation for that, which results in those pathways becoming more sensitive, leading to the requirement for more analgesia. Pain pathways are there for a good reason. They’re there to protect us from causing injury to ourselves.”

Once these compensating mechanisms come into effect, says Steiner, “people begin to look for something stronger”. They might go for codeine, an opioid drug related to morphine that can be bought over the counter in pharmacies, though not in supermarkets. Nurofen Plus contains codeine, as do Solpadeine, Panadeine and Co-codamol. “Once codeine is there as well,” says Steiner, “not only are you taking something that will cause chronic daily headache, but something that can be addictive.”

Steiner, by the way, says he finds the notion that Nurofen “targets” pain “an interesting claim”. If there is targeting, he says, “It’s not a process that the drug is responsible for. It’s a process that the body is responsible for.”

Robert, a 34-year-old writer, has been addicted to painkillers for 10 years. Typically, he takes 24 Solpadeine tablets – a mixture of paracetamol, codeine and caffeine – a day. Yesterday, he tells me, he took three packets: 36 pills. This is, of course, an extreme case of overuse, and Robert’s doctors have warned him that he risks permanent damage to his liver. Without painkillers, he feels “just awful. You just feel terrible. You go cold turkey. You feel like crap.”

Taking painkillers, he says, “has become ingrained in my day, my routine”. He remembers how it started. He had bad headaches, and his mother suggested Solpadeine. You might remember an ad for Solpadeine in which a man puts two cartridges into a shotgun, one representing paracetamol and one representing codeine, and blasts a clay pigeon, which represents the pain. “Bang! Instant relief!” says Robert. “It worked. I also noticed a slight chemical shift in my body. I wasn’t high, but it felt very calming, very good. I can’t say I rushed out and robbed some grannies. But I kept taking the tablets.” When his headaches came back, they were worse than ever. That was when he began to take the tablets pre-emptively.

For years, says Robert, he felt desperate and alone. He felt like a “freak”. A couple of years ago, he started surfing the internet, desperate for help, and found, to his surprise, that hundreds of people were posting messages on websites, such as over-count.org.uk. They make salutary reading. Every story is almost exactly the same. People take painkillers because they feel pain. At first, they feel better. But then they start to feel more pain than they felt before. Sometimes, they start by taking ibuprofen, or aspirin, or paracetamol. But the real problem is almost always that they are addicted to codeine.

“Even as I write this, I have tears streaming down my face,” writes one addict. “I am willing to try anything to get rid of these tablets,” says another. “All my veins are hot and rushing,” writes a third. “It’s lush. But it’s not worth it. I don’t want this addiction any more. I don’t want to spend all my money on analgesia. ”

As Steiner says, “There is a lack of education about what painkillers are. They are medicines, which have effects that are wanted, and a variety of unwanted effects.” These unwanted effects can include gastrointestinal bleeding, stomach ulcers, kidney and liver failure. Taking a painkiller might also encourage you to exercise when you shouldn’t, aggravating existing injuries. In 2000, a report published by scientists working in Oxford and Geneva estimated that 2,000 people a year were dying in Britain as a consequence of long-term painkiller misuse; Andrew Moore of the Oxford chronic pain clinic, who co-authored the report, estimated that side-effects and treatment arising from long-term prescription aspirin and ibuprofen use were costing the NHS between £170m and £250m a year.

Steiner believes that, while the medical establishment is beginning to understand the problems of painkiller overuse, there is a lack of awareness among GPs. “That’s right,” says Robert. “The medical establishment doesn’t have a proper system to deal with painkiller addiction. It’s not like heroin -if you’re addicted to an illegal drug, you can enter a detox programme. But if you’re addicted to a legal drug, it’s different. It’s harder for them to admit that a legal drug can be so addictive.”

The only method, says Steiner, is withdrawal. If you want to check into a detox clinic, as former painkiller addicts Matthew Perry and Winona Ryder did, you’ll almost certainly have to pay for it yourself. Cold turkey is the only answer. “My experience,” says Steiner, “is that people who try to taper off usually fail.”

Before I started researching this article, I took several painkillers a day – sometimes four, sometimes six. Sometimes eight or 10. This was before I stopped drinking. I would knock back three or four first thing in the morning, to deal with my hangover, which had not been entirely knocked out by the two or three I had taken the night before. I remember the fuzzy, headachey dash to the corner shop when I woke up with no painkillers, and the painkillers I took in the evening before going to the pub, when I was beginning to feel better.

Was I harming myself? Probably. Might I have ended up like Robert? It’s difficult to say. With painkillers, as with other drugs, everybody is affected differently. Why did I take so many painkillers? Partly, of course, because they reduced pain – but, more worryingly, I took them because I liked them. I take them only occasionally now.

This is what happens when a medicine becomes a product. It begins to seem more attractive, more desirable. It comes, almost literally, with a spoonful of sugar. In a sense, the marketing man becomes the doctor. As the late pain expert Patrick Wall wrote, “A crucial component in all analgesics, no matter how they work, is the patient’s belief that it works.” Nurofen works for me partly because I believe it does.

What does the future hold? More painkillers. More pain pathways becoming desensitised. Packaging that looks more and more attractive. New pill shapes. Faster-acting pills. And then what? A big marketing push in the developing world, domestic advertising restrictions, health warnings appearing on packets. There may come a time when people will be wearing patches to wean themselves off painkillers, or chewing low-dose ibuprofen gum – and what a marketing opportunity that would be.