What could be more festive than spending a night locked in an art gallery with a dozen reindeer and a fridge full of psychedelic drugs?Soma, Carsten Höller‘s current installation in a former railway station in Berlin, purports to be offering exactly that. A pen running the length of the Hamburger Bahnhof, now the city’s contemparary art museum, contains 12 reindeer, 24 canaries, eight mice and two flies. Giant toadstool sculptures are planted on a mushroom clock that the reindeer can turn with their antlers, and at the centre is a mushroom-shaped “floating hotel” – a bed on a platform complete with minibar, yours for €1,000 a night. (There’s also a raffle giving away free places.)

The twist is that this is meant to be a scientific experiment, in which half the reindeer have been fed “fly agaric” mushrooms, which they consume naturally in the wilds of Siberia. It makes their urine hallucinogenic (some people believe that this is the origin of the story of Santa Claus’s sleigh being pulled by flying, red-nosed reindeers).

The urine is collected by handlers and stored in fridges by the walls, which also hold both dried and fresh fly agaric mushrooms. By day they’re locked, but at night the fridges are opened, allowing people staying over to sample the contents. However, because only half the reindeer are fed the mushrooms, it’s impossible to know which bottles, if any, contain hallucinogenic urine.

Tanja Klein, 28, won a competition to spend the night in the museum with her boyfriend, Sachar Kriwoj, 30. “I wasn’t going to go and drink six bottles of reindeer urine to find out,” says Klein. “I’m not into drugs, I’m into art.”

Höller hasn’t tried the urine, but he has tried the mushrooms. “They’re very unpleasant,” he says, speaking from his home in Stockholm. “And you throw up. The first four times I tried it, I became comatose. Then you wake up, throw up, and you don’t know where you are, or how long you’ve been asleep. The sixth time, I started to chant like a Tibetan monk.”

The title Soma comes from the name of the sacred libation drunk by the Indo-Persian followers of the Vedic religion, Hinduism’s 5,000-year-old parent. Its ancient text, the Rigveda, contains 114 hymns to “creative juice”, supposed to offer immortality. The recipe was lost, but in the 1960s researcher Robert Wasson hypo-thesised that soma was based on the fly agaric mushroom.

Höller’s installation sets out to test this hypothesis – and the possibility that art may change perceptions even more effectively than drugs. It takes the form of an experiment set in a playground: from that giant “double mushroom clock” the reindeer move with their antlers, to the “mice square”, based on an actual playground in Paris designed by sculptor Pierre Székely.

One side of the hall is the “test”, the other the “control”. Reindeer on the test side are fed the mushrooms. (“At least in principle,” says Höller, helpfully.) On each side, the reindeer urine is spread on the food of the other animals. From observation posts, visitors watch the behaviour of the canaries, mice and houseflies for signs of intoxication and form their own conclusions. “The experiment is completed in the minds of the visitors,” says Höller. “It’s very unscientific.” In other words, it’s an open question whether the reindeer are even fed the mushrooms at all: the power of suggestion makes you likely to observe something that may not take place.

Experimentation has been a part of Höller’s work since he began his career as an artist while still an agricultural research scientist in the early 1990s. He went on to install 2006′s Test Site, in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, which allowed gallery-goers to throw themselves down double-helix slides.

Overnight visitors to Soma have reported some strange events. Florian Wojnar, a friend of Höller’s, spent the night in the museum with his 11-year-old son. “He was really excited, because at some point, there were seven reindeer on one side and five on the other. In the morning, we counted again and there were six on each. I never saw them move.”

Dorothée Brill, the museum’s lead curator, says: “As far as we can tell, nobody’s done anything they shouldn’t have.” Staff at the restaurant, however, report that some guests “drink the minibar dry”.

It’s hard to resist the suspicion that the exhibition is intended as a microcosm of society, an allegory for democracy, with extra privileges and more fun for those able to pay. And, if this is an experiment, make no mistake: it’s you in the lab. Meanwhile, those tempted to make a Christmas visit should bear in mind that the Hamburger Bahnhof is closed on Christmas Eve. “The reindeer have somewhere else to be that day,” the museum explained.

• Soma is at the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, until 6 February. Details:somainberlin.org

Before she retired in 2007, Kiran Bedi was one of India’s top cops. As the first and highest-ranking female officer in the national police force, she earned a reputation for being tough yet innovative on the job. Her efforts to prevent crime, reform prisons, end drug abuse, and support women’s causes earned her a Roman Magsaysay Award, the Asian equivalent of the Nobel Prize. Bedi also served as a police adviser to the UN Secretary General.

In retirement, Bedi has become one of the most trusted and admired community leaders in India. She advocates for social change and civic responsibility through her books, columns, and a popular reality-TV show. She reaches out to more than 10,000 people daily through her two NGOs, Navjyoti and India Vision Foundation, which provide education, training, counseling and health care to the urban and rural poor. Her latest initiative, Mission Safer India, aims to ensure that police log and address citizen complaints. Her life is the subject of the 2008 documentary Yes, Madam Sir, narrated by Helen Mirren.

By the end of planning her new exhibition, Caroline Fisher had come to an interesting conclusion. “It’s even harder to exhibit rats than drugs,” she says. The Home Office eventually granted her the necessary licences to exhibit a bottle of heroin, a ball of opium, some morphine, a selection of magic mushrooms, a peyote cactus, some hallucinogenic snuff and a variety of Victorian high-street pharmacy favourites including cocaine mouth lozenges and tincture of Indian cannabis – “as many drugs as we could get our hands on”. But Health and Safety weren’t having the rats. “We wanted to recreate a 7m-long Rat Park,” Fisher sighs, referring to the classic 1970s Canadian experiment that showed opiate addiction in rodents was determined not by the drugs they took, but the living conditions they took them in.

By Johnny Davis for the Guardian

Fisher is the co-curator of High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture at the Wellcome Collection in London, and offers a history of narcotics that feels fresh. After all, we hardly need another account of the Romantic poets getting carried away with hashish, or more woolly recollections from acid house revellers who outwitted the police on the M25 while going to Sunrise.

“I don’t think anything similar has been done before,” says Mike Jay, the exhibition’s co-curator and author of an accompanying book. “There’s always been two different discourses, the ‘drug culture underground’ one and a rather more straight-lens way of looking at it, from a medical or political view. It’s the middle ground that feels interesting.”

High Society strives to cover as much of this middle ground as possible. It spans from pre-2000 BC chillum-style pipes fashioned from puma bones, to mephedrone and other internet-distributed synthetic stimulants of the 21st century. Along the way it takes in kava drinking in the South Pacific, betel chewing in Papua New Guinea and cocaine snorting in Weimar Germany. Tea, coffee and sugar also feature (albeit in supporting roles) and there’s plenty on the rise and fall of tobacco.

As such the exhibition is able to make its central premise: very few people live their lives without resorting to some sort of mind-altering substance. Taking drugs, it suggests, is “a universal impulse”. “Drug cultures are endlessly varied, but drugs in general are more or less ubiquitous among our species,” writes Jay. Later he quotes American anthropologist Donald Brown’s celebrated work Human Universals, which lists “mood- or consciousness-altering techniques and/or substances” as one of the essential components of human culture, along with “music, conflict resolution, language and play”. “The public perception is that drugs are this terrible thing that appeared with hippies in the 60s; that they’re a modern disease,” Jay says. “The historicality has been lost.”

The curators are at pains to underline the mutability of culture and society, and how a drug’s definition is determined by non-chemical factors such as intent behind its use, its method of administration and the social class of the user. (Nitrous oxide is a medicine when used by doctors, a drug when used for pleasure.) Even so a pattern soon establishes itself: a new mind-altering substance arrives accompanied by extravagant medical claims and counter-claims, gets enthusiastically taken up by sections of the public (usually the idle rich); then addiction and side-effects make themselves apparent over time.

“It was hard to designate drugs themselves as the problem when they were also being promoted to the public at large as the solution,” writes Jay of the nurses, doctors and military officers who were treating local infections with morphine injections in the 1880s, ushering in the first “morphinomaniacs” in the process. Elsewhere the 18th-century botanist and pioneering drug cataloguer Carl Linnaeus frowned upon coffee – he felt it sapped vitality and brought on early senility – but endorsed tobacco as a means of fighting infection. In a tract published in Leipzig in 1707, we see early adopters of tea being reprimanded for “drinking themselves to death” in the mindless pursuit of fashion. Around the same time the British literary intelligentsia waxed lyrical on the benefits of rounding an evening off with a few pipes of opium, something they believed helped digestion, fortified against fever and improved performance in the bedroom. Only alcohol seems to have maintained a constant reputation, viewed as the boorish vice of the corrupt elite in Roman times, banned across much of the Islamic world and the subject of US prohibition in the 1920s.

Still, High Society remains morally neutral. There won’t be any disclaimers. “We’re not doing, ‘Hey kids, drugs are good’, so ultimately we don’t need to do, ‘Hey kids, drugs are bad,’” reasons Jay. “Since that’s basically the entire popular discourse about drugs, it seems nice to get rid of both of them and take the subject on its own merit.”

High Society has commissioned some interactive artworks to help convey the quixotic effects of drugs on mind and body in the sober medium of an exhibition space. Joshua White was the resident artist at New York’s Fillmore East theatre during the late 60s. Using bottles of coloured liquids, hand-painted slides, lightbulbs on the end of sticks and clock faces, he projected his psychedelic “liquid light shows” on to live performances by Frank Zappa, Janis Joplin and Jefferson Airplane, among others. “Was my work best experienced on drugs? I would say so, yes,” says White, who’ll travel to the UK to install his new show at the Wellcome Collection. “Everybody had a different relationship with drugs back then, just as everybody in my parents’ generation had a different relationship with alcohol. Some people had a nice buzz; some people threw up. We would hire speed freaks for our special projects – get them to stay up all night gluing jewels on to a ball.”

There will also be a recreation of the “dreamachine”, the light-emitting cylinder built by artist Brion Gysin and William Burroughs’s “systems adviser” Ian Sommerville. “You look at it with your eyes shut in a dark room, and it supposedly recreates the hallucinatory experience,” explains Fisher.

Other contemporary artwork includes the video piece Cannabis In the UK, of artist Mark Harris reading Baudelaire’s Les Paradis Artificiels and Walter Benjamin’s Hashish in Marseilles to cannabis plants (“I hope it won’t be taken too seriously,” says Harris. “I just thought, ‘If you’re going to read to plants to make them grow, what better than to read to cannabis plants something about the effects of the drug?’”), and photographer Mark Leffingwell’s “collective intoxication” picture depicting 10,000 people gathered at the University of Colorado for a “smoke-in” to commemorate “420″, an event observed across America every 20 April to promote the legalisation of marijuana.

If none of those do the trick, there are plenty of accounts from the history of self-experimentation. There’s the study on nitrous oxide performed by 18th-century chemist Humphry Davy, who got fed up with testing the gas on rabbits, kittens and fish and took heroic quantities himself, reaching the less than empirical conclusion that “nothing exists but thoughts”. There’s the story of the family who discovered the liberty cap mushroom by accident: cooking some up for a morning broth they developed vertigo, visions and the overwhelming sensation they were dying, only to leave the house for help and forget why they had done so a few hundred metres later. (When a doctor did eventually reach them, the situation was scarcely improved by the family’s eight-year-old, whose symptoms proved unique: bursting into raucous laughter every time his terrified parents opened their mouths.) And there’s French psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau, who suggested that the low prevalence of insanity in the Arab world was down to a preference for cannabis over alcohol: testing his theory he swallowed three grams before dinner and found himself preparing to fight a duel with a bowl of candied fruit.

From more recent times there’s a photograph of “father of MDMA” and sometime US Drug Enforcement Agency employee Alexander Shulgin. Shulgin’s popularisation of ecstasy eventually gave rise to acid house, the last significant drug-led subculture. High Society largely steers clear of examining the hows and whys of such moments; in fact there’s little on why we might be drawn towards illicit drugs in the first place. “I just think it’s self-evident that people wouldn’t take drugs if they didn’t enjoy them,” Jay shrugs.

The most recent UN figures put the illegal drug trade at $320bn (£200bn) a year – the third biggest international market on the planet, after arms and oil. “2011 is the 50th anniversary of the United Nations Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs,” Jay says. “That’s the 50th anniversary of global prohibition; they’ve been trying for 50 years to achieve that. What’s so ironic is that 1961 was precisely the time when the drug counterculture formed; the point where policing started to fall apart with the surge in demand that was coming. Today our culture has become even more experimental: we regard it as a good thing to try something exotic and different, in a way that it just wasn’t 50 years ago. So it’s very hard to say, ‘That’s the way we are in culture. Oh – except for drugs, which have to be hived off.’”

Given that more people take more drugs than at any other time in history, you might wonder if they’ll ever be part of a counterculture again. At a time when Keith Richards is a bestselling author off the back of his national treasure status as a chemical dustbin, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has taken steps to decriminalise marijuana possession in California and Prince Harry is found inhaling “hippy crack”, it’s difficult to see how drugs could be more mainstream. “I wouldn’t be surprised if in five years, marijuana wasn’t fully legalised all over the US,” says Leffingwell. “Most people don’t see it as any more harmful than having a beer.”

Others suggest that the seeds of a new, drug-led counterculture are all around us. “I think smart drugs, things that boost your IQ such as Modafinil, could lend themselves to certain music,” says Jay. “Very techy electronica.”

To return to High Society’s premise, then: the drugs we consume may change – from over-the-counter laudanum in Victorian times, to over-the-internet mephedrone today – but the human relationship with them remains strangely constant. “Nothing’s changed,” says White. “The form changes, the fickleness changes – but our cravings stay the same.”

High Society: Mind-Altering Drugs in History and Culture is at the Wellcome Collection, 183 Euston Road, London NW1 2BE from 11 Nov to 27 Feb. wellcomecollection.org

THE GIST

• Acoustic archaeology is an emerging field that melds acoustical analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting.
• Ancient people created fun house-like temples that featured scary sound effects.
• Some of the sites were likely built by people who took sensory-altering drugs.

Researchers are uncovering the secrets of ancient civilizations who built fun house-like temples that may have scared the pants off worshipers with scary sound effects, light shows and perhaps drug-induced psychedelic trips.
By Eric Niiler for Discovery News

The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is a new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control.

Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research and Acoustics, has been studying the 3,000 year-old Chavin culture in the high plains of Peru. Kolar and her colleagues have been mapping a maze of underground tunnels, drains and hallways in which echoes don’t sound like echoes.

“The structures could be physically disorienting and the acoustic environment is very different than the natural world,” Kolar said. Ancient drawings from the Chavin culture show a people who were fascinated with sensory experiences — ancient hippies if you will.

“The iconography shows people mixed with animal features in altered states of being,” said Kolar, who is presenting her recent work at a conference in Cancun, Mexico this week. “There is peyote and mucus trails out of the nose indicative of people using psychoactive plant substances. They were taking drugs and having a hallucinogenic experience.”

If that wasn’t enough, the mazes at Chavin de Huantar also include air ducts that use sunlight to produce distorted shadows of the maze’s human participants. And sound waves from giant marine shells found in the maze in 2001 may have produced a frequency that actually rattled the eyeballs of those San Pedro cactus-using ancients, Kolar said.

“We consider sound to be important,” said Kolar. “We’ve gathered a lot of data and we’re finally starting to publish it.”

The Chavin de Huantar site in Peru isn’t the only place where sound played an important role. The Mayan rulers at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan also figured out how to use sound for crowd control. David Lubman, an acoustic engineer who has spent the past 12 years studying the Mayan site, says a strange bird-like echo from the Kukulkan temple was actually constructed on purpose.

“It’s sort of spooky,” Lubman said from Irvine, Calif. “It’s not an ordinary echo.”

Lubman’s analysis compared the acoustic soundprint of the quetzal bird, which was revered by Mayans, to the sound of the echo at Chichen Itza. The two sounds matched.

Lublin said the secret is in the acoustic properties of the steep staircase on the temple’s front.

Other new research presented at this week’s Acoustical Society of America conference in Cancun shows that Mayan rulers figured out how to build a public address system in the site’s giant ball court. That allowed kings to address hundreds of warriors and subjects without screaming.

In England, British researchers are using modern tools of acoustics to figure out what drumming noises may have sounded like to ancient visitors to Stonehenge.

In the course of history many more people have died for their drink and their dope than have died for their religion or their country. The craving for ethyl alcohol and the opiates has been stronger, in these millions, than the love of God, of home, of children; even of life. Their cry was not for liberty or death; it was for death preceded by enslavement. There is a paradox here, and a mystery. Why should such multitudes of men and women be so ready to sacrifice themselves for a cause so utterly hopeless and in ways so painful and so profoundly humiliating?

To this riddle there is, of course, no simple or single answer. Human beings are immensely complicated creatures, living simultaneously in a half dozen different worlds. Each individual is unique and, in a number of respects, unlike all the other members of the species. None of our motives is unmixed, none of our actions can be traced back to a single source and, in any group we care to study, behavior patterns that are observably similar may be the result of many constellations of dissimilar causes.

Thus, there are some alcoholics who seem to have been biochemically predestined to alcoholism (Among rats, as Prof. Roger Williams, of the University of Texas, has shown, some are born drunkards; some are born teetotalers and will never touch the stuff.) Other alcoholics have been foredoomed not by some inherited defect in their biochemical make-up, but by their neurotic reactions to distressing events in their childhood or adolescence. Again, others embark upon their course of slow suicide as a result of mere imitation and good fellowship because they have made such an “excellent adjustment to their group” – a process which, if the group happens to be criminal, idiotic or merely ignorant, can bring only disaster to the well-adjusted individual. Nor must we forget that large class of addicts who have taken to drugs or drink in order to escape from physical pain. Aspirin, let us remember, is a very recent invention. Until late in the Victorian era, “poppy and mandragora,” along with henbane and ethyl alcohol, were the only pain relievers available to civilized man. Toothache, arthritis and neuralgia could, and frequently did, drive men and women to become opium addicts.

De Quincey, for example, first resorted to opium in order to relieve “excruciating rheumatic pains of the head.” He swallowed his poppy and, an hour later, “What a resurrection from the lowest depths of the inner spirit! What an apocalypse!” And it was not merely that he felt no more pain. “This negative effect was swallowed up in the immensity of those positive effects which had opened up before me, in the abyss of divine enjoyment thus suddenly revealed…. Here was the secret of happiness. about which the philosophers had disputed for so many ages, at once discovered.”

“Resurrection. apocalypse, divine enjoyment. happiness. . . .” De Quincey’s words lead us to the very heart of our paradoxical mystery. The problem of drug addiction and excessive drinking is not merely a matter of chemistry and psychopathology, of relief from pain and conformity with a bad society. It is also a problem in metaphysics – a problem, one might almost say, in theology. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James has touched on these metaphysical aspects of addiction:

The sway of alcohol over mankind is unquestionably due to its power to stimulate the mystical faculties in human nature, usually crushed to earth by the cold facts and dry criticisms of the sober hour. Sobriety diminishes, discriminates and says no. Drunkenness expands, unites and says yes. It is in fact the great exciter of the Yes function in man. It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things into the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth. Not through mere perversity do men run after it. To the poor and the unlettered it stands in the place of symphony concerts and literature; and it is part of the deeper mystery and tragedy of life that whiffs and gleams of something that we immediately recognize as excellent should be vouchsafed to so many of us only through the fleeting earlier phases of what, in its totality, is so degrading a poison. The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in Our opinion of that larger whole.

William James was not the first to detect a likeness between drunkenness and the mystical and premystical states. On the day of Pentecost there were people who explained the strange behavior of the disciples by saying, “These men are full of new wine.

Peter soon undeceived them: “These are not drunken, as ye suppose, seeing it is but the third hour of the day. But this is that which was spoken by the prophet Joel. And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh.”

And it is not only by “the dry critics of the sober hour” that the state of God-intoxication has been likened to drunkenness. In their efforts to express the inexpressible, the great mystics themselves have done the same. Thus, St. Theresa of Avila tells us that she “regards the centre of our soul as a cellar, into which God admits us as and when it pleases Him, so as to intoxicate us with the delicious wine of His grace.”

Every fully developed religion exists simultaneously on several different levels. It exists as a set of abstract concepts about the world and its governance. It exists as a set of rites and sacraments, as a traditional method for manipulating the symbols, by means of which beliefs about the cosmic order are expressed. It exists as the feelings of love, fear and devotion evoked by this manipulation of symbols.

And finally it exists as a special kind of feeling or intuition – a sense of the oneness of all things in their divine principle, a realization (to use the language of Hindu theology) that “thou art That,” a mystical experience of what seems self-evidently to be union with God.

The ordinary waking consciousness is a very useful and, on most occasions, an indispensable state of mind; but it is by no means the only form of consciousness, nor in all circumstances the best. Insofar as he transcends his ordinary self and his ordinary mode of awareness, the mystic is able to enlarge his vision, to look more deeply into the unfathomable miracle of existence.

The mystical experience is doubly valuable, it is valuable because it gives the experiencer a better understanding of himself and the world and because it may help him to lead a less self-centered and more creative life.

In hell, a great religious poet has written, the punishment of the lost is to be “their sweating selves, but worse.” On earth we are not worse than we are: we are merely our sweating selves, period.

Alas, that is quite bad enough. We love ourselves to the point of idolatry, but we also intensely dislike ourselves – we find ourselves unutterably boring. Correlated with this distaste for the idolatrously worshiped self, there is in all of us a desire, sometimes latent, sometimes conscious and passionately expressed, to escape from the prison of our individuality, an urge to self-transcendence. It is to this urge that we owe mystical theology, spiritual exercises and yoga – to this, too, that we owe alcoholism and drug addiction.

Modern pharmacology has given us a host of new synthetics, but in the field of the naturally occurring mind changers it has made psychological methods of self-control preferable from every point of view to complacency imposed from without by the methods of chemical control.

And now let us consider the case – not, alas, a hypothetical case – of two societies competing with each other. In Society A, tranquilizers are available by prescription and at a rather stiff price which means, in practice, that their use is confined to that rich and influential minority which provides the society with its leadership. This minority of leading citizens consumes several billions of the complacency – producing pills every year. In Society B, on the other hand, the tranquilizers are not so freely available, and the members of the influential minority do not resort, on the slightest provocation, to the chemical control of what may be necessary and productive tension. Which of these two competing societies is likely to win the race? A society whose leaders make an excessive use of soothing syrups is in danger of failing behind a society whose leaders are not over-tranquilized.

Now let us consider another kind of drug – still undiscovered, but probably just around the corner – a drug capable of making people feel happy in situations where they would normally feel miserable. Such a drug would be a blessing, but a blessing fraught with grave political dangers. By making harmless chemical euphoria freely available, a dictator could reconcile an entire population to a state of affairs to which self-respecting human beings ought not to be reconciled. Despots have always found it necessary to supplement force by political or religious propaganda. In this sense the pen is mightier than the sword. But mightier than either the pen or the sword is the pill. In mental hospitals it has been found that chemical restraint is far more effective than strait jackets or psychiatry. The dictatorships of tomorrow will deprive men of their freedom, but will give them in exchange a happiness none the less real, as a subjective experience, for being chemically induced. The pursuit of happiness is one of the traditional rights of man; unfortunately, the achievement of happiness may turn out to be incompatible with another of man’s rights – liberty.

It is quite possible, however, that pharmacology will restore with one hand what it takes away with the other. Chemically induced euphoria could easily become a threat to individual liberty:, but chemically induced vigor and chemically heightened intelligence could easily be liberty’s strongest bulwark. Most of us function at about 15 per cent of capacity. How can we step up our lamentably low efficiency?

Two methods are available – the educational and the biochemical. We can take adults and children as they are and give them a much better training than we are giving them now. Or, by appropriate biochemical methods, we can transform them into superior individuals. If these superior individuals are given a superior education, the results will be revolutionary. They will be startling even if we continue to subject them to the rather poor educational methods at present in vogue.

Will it in fact be possible to produce superior individuals by biochemical means? The Russians certainly believe it. They are now halfway through a Five Year Plan to produce “pharmacological substances that normalize higher nervous activity and heighten human capacity for work.” Precursors of these future mind improvers are already being experimented with. It has been found, for example, that when given in massive doses some of the vitamins – nicotinic acid and ascorbic acid for example – sometimes produce a certain heightening of psychic energy. A combination of two enzymes – ethylene disulphonate and adenosine triphosphate, which, when injected together, improve carbohydrate metabolism in nervous tissue – may also turn out to be effective.

Meanwhile good results are being claimed for various new synthetic, nearly harmless stimulants. There is iproniazid, which, according to some authorities, “appears to increase the total amount of psychic energy.” Unfortunately, iproniazid in large doses has side effects which in some cases may be extremely serious! Another psychic energizer is an amino alcohol which is thought to increase the body’s production of acetylcholine, a substance of prime importance in the functioning of the nervous system. In view of what has already been achieved, it seems quite possible that, within a few years, we may be able to lift ourselves up by our own biochemical bootstraps.

in the meantime let us all fervently wish the Russians every success in their current pharmacological venture. The discovery of a drug capable of increasing the average individual’s psychic energy, and its wide distribution throughout the U.S.S.R., would probably mean the end of Russia’s present form of government. Generalized intelligence and mental alertness are the most powerful enemies of dictatorship and at the same time the basic conditions of effective democracy. Even in the democratic West we could do with a bit of psychic energizing. Between them, education and pharmacology may do something to offset the effects of that deterioration of our biological material to which geneticists have frequently called attention.

From these political and ethical considerations let us now pass to the strictly religious problems that will be posed by some of the new mind changers. We can foresee the nature of these future problems by studying the effects of a natural mind changer, which has been used for centuries past in religious worship; I refer to the peyote cactus of Northern Mexico and the Southwestern United States. Peyote contains mescaline – which can now be produced synthetically – and mescaline in William James’ phrase, “stimulates the mystical faculties in human nature” far more powerfully and in a far more enlightening way than alcohol and, what is more, it does so at a physiological and social cost that is negligibly low. Peyote produces self-transcendence in two ways – it introduces the taker into the Other World of visionary experience, and it gives him a sense of solidarity with his fellow worshipers, with human beings at large and with the divine nature of things.

The effects of peyote can be duplicated by synthetic mescaline and by LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), a derivative of ergot. Effective in incredibly small doses, LSD is now being used experimentally by psychotherapists in Europe, in South America, in Canada and the United States. It lowers the barrier between conscious and subconscious and permits the patient to look more deeply and understandingly into the recesses of his own mind. The deepening of self-knowledge takes place against a background of visionary and even mystical experience.

When administered in the right kind of psychological environment, these chemical mind changers make possible a genuine religious experience. Thus a person who takes LSD or mescaline may suddenly understand not only intellectually but organically, experientially the meaning of such tremendous religious affirmations as “God is love,” or “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

It goes without saying that this kind of temporary self-transcendence is no guarantee of permanent enlightenment or a lasting improvement of conduct. It is a “gratuitous grace,” which is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation, but which if properly used, can be enormously helpful to those who have received it. And this is true of all such experiences, whether occurring spontaneously, or as the result of swallowing the right kind of chemical mind changer, or after undertaking a course of “spiritual exercises” or bodily mortification.

Those who are offended by the idea that the swallowing of a pill may contribute to a genuinely religious experience should remember that all the standard mortifications – fasting, voluntary sleeplessness and self-torture – inflicted upon themselves by the ascetics of every religion for the purpose of acquiring merit, are also, like the mind-changing drugs, powerful devices for altering the chemistry of the body in general and the nervous system in particular. Or consider the procedures generally known as spiritual exercises. The breathing techniques taught by the yogi of India result in prolonged suspensions of respiration. These in turn result in an increased concentration of carbon dioxide in the blood; and the psychological consequence of this is a change in the quality of consciousness. Again, meditations involving long, intense concentration upon it single idea or image may also result – for neurological reasons which I do not profess to understand – in a slowing down of respiration and even in prolonged suspensions of breathing.

Many ascetics and mystics have practiced their chemistry-changing mortifications and spiritual exercises while living, for longer or shorter periods, as hermits. Now, the life of a hermit, such as Saint Anthony, is a life in which there are very few external stimuli. But as Hebb, John Lilly and other experimental psychologists have recently shown in the laboratory, a person in a limited environment, which provides very few external stimuli, soon undergoes a change in the quality of his consciousness and may transcend his normal self to the point of hearing voices or seeing visions, often extremely unpleasant, like so many of Saint Anthony’s visions, but sometimes beatific.

That men and women can, by physical and chemical means, transcend themselves in a genuinely spiritual way is something which, to the squeamish idealist, seems rather shocking. But, after all, the drug or the physical exercise is not the cause of the spiritual experience; it is only its occasion.

Writing of William James’ experiments with nitrous oxide, Bergson has summed up the whole matter in a few lucid sentences. “The psychic disposition was there, potentially, only waiting a signal to express itself in action. It might have been evoked spiritually by an effort made on its own spiritual level. But it could just as well be brought about materially, by an inhibition of what inhibited it, by the removing of an obstacle; and this effect was the wholly negative one produced by the drug.” Where, for any reason, physical or moral, the psychological dispositions are unsatisfactory, the removal of obstacles by a drug or by ascetic practices will result in a negative rather than a positive spiritual experience. Such an infernal experience is extremely distressing, but may also be extremely salutary. There are plenty of people to whom a few hours in hell – the hell that they themselves have done so much to create – could do a world of good.

Physiologically costless, or nearly costless, stimulators of the mystical faculties are now making their appearance, and many kinds of them will soon be on the market. We can be quite sure that, as and when they become available, they will be extensively used. The urge to self-transcendence is so strong and so general that it cannot be otherwise. In the past, very few people have had spontaneous experiences of a premystical or fully mystical nature; still fewer have been willing to undergo the psychophysical disciplines which prepare an insulated individual for this kind of self-transcendence. The powerful but nearly costless mind changers of the future will change all this completely. Instead of being rare, premystical and mystical experiences will become common. What was once the spiritual privilege of the few will be made available to the many. For the ministers of the world’s organized religions, this will raise a number of unprecedented problems. For most people, religion has always been a matter of traditional symbols and of their own emotional, intellectual and ethical response to those symbols. To men and women who have had direct experience of self-trascendence into the mind’s Other World of vision and union with the nature of things, a religion of mere symbols is not likely to be very staisfying. The perusal of a page from even the most beautifully written cookbook is no substitute for the eating of dinner. We are exhorted to “taste and see that the Lord is good.”

In one way or another, the world’s ecclesiastical authorities will have to come to terms with the new mind changers. They may come to terms with them negatively, by refusing to have anything to do with them. In that case, a psychological phenomenon, potentially of great spiritual value, will manifest itself outside the pale of organized religion. On the other hand, they may choose to come to terms with the mind changers in some positive way – exactly how, I am not prepared to guess.

My own belief is that, though they may start by being something of an embarrassment, these new mind changers will tend in the long run to deepen the spiritual life of the communities in which they are available. That famous “revival of religion,” about which so many people have been talking for so long, will not come about as the result of evangelistic mass meetings or the television appearances of photogenic clergymen. It will come about as the result of biochemical discoveries that will make it possible for large numbers of men and women to achieve a radical self-transcendence and a deeper understanding of the nature of things. And this revival of religion will be at the same time a revolution. From being an activity mainly concerned with symbols, religion will be transformed into an activity concerned mainly with experience and intuition – an everyday mysticism underlying and giving significance to everyday rationality, everyday tasks and duties, everyday human relationships.

“The social, psychological and cognitive sciences remain stuck with pre-scientific words and concepts. For many of us the word ‘soul’ is obsolete as ‘phlogiston,’ but scientists still use such imprecise words as ‘consciousness’, ‘personality’ and ‘ego,’ not to mention ‘mind.’

Perhaps it is time that, in science at least, ‘’imagination’ and ‘introspection’ are remodelled out, or preferably, retired. Artists can have fun with them, but the serious business of the world has moved on.”

It’s hard to know where to begin with a statement like this. Note first the implication that art is not ‘serious business,’ and that science is. The retirement of ‘mentalistic’ terminology has also been enthusiastically advocated by those who think it ‘obvious’ that the mind/consciousness can be easily reduced to the brain; see Pat Churchland’s Neurophilosophy for lengthy expositions of this point of view. Her husband, Paul, wants ‘folk psychological’ words like ‘mind’ retired in favour of more neurologically correct phrases. (The Churchlands are two well known philosophers of mind whose views are highly regarded in the field).

I find this sort of advocacy appalling. One reason is that it is not very clear at all to what extent private experiences, for instance, can be reduced to patterns of neural firing in the brain, even if the correlations are, at times, close. Alternative interpretations remain perfectly viable.

But the main issue here is the proposed abolition of language. Neither Watson nor the Churchlands seem to have read and/or absorbed George Orwell’s 1984. In this novel, the fictional totalitarian government was developing Newspeak, the primary aim of which was to ‘rationalize’ language. One of the reasons they wanted to do this was to control thought, and one of the characters points out that, once the words for rebellion are abolished, then people won’t be able to plot or even think rebellion.

Similarly, if we successfully abolish the language of ‘mind,’ then it is quite possible that alternative, mentalistic ways of looking will also be abolished, because we won’t have the language to talk about them. This has been an utterly standard method of cultural imperialism from the year dot. If you want to subjugate a people and destroy a culture, forbid them to speak their language. It’s a very efficient method of assimilation. And yet these well-intentioned people seem to be unaware that this is precisely what they are proposing.

The abolition of mentalistic terms is often proposed for the best of reasons – these writers honestly believe they’re wanting a desirable and ‘scientifically’ justified thing. But the path to hell is paved with good intentions. My great fear is that they may succeed; that we’ll eventually become so saturated with ‘neuro’ speak, we won’t be able to think in alternative ways — even if such a conversion camouflages and makes inaccessible ways of thinking that have significant benefits in people’s lives. And so an important way of looking at things will be at one with the dodo, like all the other cultures we’ve destroyed in the name of progress.

Finally — we have the subtle but persistent suspicion of the imagination, also evidenced in Richard Dawkins’ statements about fantasies like Harry Potter possibly degrading children’s abilities to reason. We’re not allowed to imagine things that are not so, or couldn’t be, right? Conversely, are we only ‘allowed’ to think in strictly rational-analytical ways?

A strict adherence to rational thought would be a problem even within science. A number of the greatest theories were in some sense day-dreamed or dreamt into existence, the theory of Relativity, Mendeleev’s conception of the periodic table, and Loew’s recognition of the principle of neurotransmitters being examples (Corliss, 2004). And it was Einstein who said that imagination was more important than knowledge. Science is not just about step-by-step reasoning. It’s important, but not really the heart of creation and invention. And the abolition of the imagination would be a positive crime in a culture in which it is already sorely lacking.

References.

Beauregard, M. & O’Leary, D. (2007) The Spiritual Brain. HarperOne.

Corliss, W.R. (2004). Science Frontiers II. Sourcebook Project: Glen Arm, MA.

Watson, P. (2005). Not Written in Stone. New Scientist, Aug 29.

Das ewig weibliche zieht uns hinan.

The eternally feminine leads us forward.

– Goethe

He who binds himself to a joy does the winged life destroy,
But he who kisses the joy as it flies lives in Eternity’s sunrise.

– William Blake

Only connect.

– E. M. Forster

I‘m finally ready to declare myself. I am a ladies’ man. A womanizer. A libertine. A rake. A rogue. A roué. A goddamn running loose dog. I’d admit to being a lecher, but that word implies a solipsistic predation that I hope never applies to any of my relations with the mysterious sex.This

is about something more sacred than anything a drooling wanker could appreciate.

This is about worship. From the time the testosterone kicked in, I have knelt at the altar of that
which is female in this world. I love women. What I love in them is something that moves and must be free to do so. I love their smells, their textures,

their complexities, the inexhaustible variety of their psychic weather patterns. I love to flirt with them, dance with them, and to discourse with them endlessly on the differences between men and women. I love to make love.

The sexual fires have always burned bright in my brainstem. Priapically preoccupied, I’ve written poetry by the ream, stormed police lines, ridden broncs, thrown punches and generally embarrassed myself on countless occasions. (Actually, I suspect that history consists largely of foolish things men have done to show off for women.)

There are probably twenty-five or thirty women — I certainly don’t count them — for whom I feel an abiding and deep emotional attachment. They’re scattered all over the planet. They range in age from less than half to almost twice my own. Most of these relationships are not actively sexual. Some were at one time. More never will be. But most of them feel as if they could become so. I love the feel of that tension, the delicious gravity of possibilities.

I must also admit that for me this gravity generally increases with novelty. The New, the fresh
and unknown expanses of the emotional frontier, hold a fascination for me that I wish they did not. This breeds superficiality and the appearance of a hunger for conquest. But, unfortunately, I love the
voltage, the charged gap between two people that can draw across itself such huge flows of
information from so many parts of us. I love the feel of human bandwidth — intercourse
on all channels — and there is so much more to exchange when nothing is yet known.

Despite many clear and cosmic messages that women (and death) were meant to be the curricula of my life — my dharma — and that practically everything I’ve done has been about trying to understand them, I resisted formal matriculation into this perilous course of study until well past the age when most men have already given up and settled into monogamies as comfortable and unquestioned as their football loyalties.

And now, late in my forties, I doubt I’ll ever be monogamous again. For reasons I’ll explain, I feel strangely exiled into a condition of emotional wandering. I think my heart will travel widely. I want to know as many more women as time and their indulgence will permit me.

Even so, I also want to go on loving the women I love now — and I do love them — for the rest of
my life. These are relationships that have already lasted much longer than most marriages, even though some of them had to endure the hiatus of my own previous monogamies, one imposed by society, the other by what felt like an act of God.

The Road to Hell

I tried monogamy despite feeling from the get-go that being monogamous made as much sense as declaring that I liked, say, mashed potatoes and gravy so darned much that I would resolve to eat nothing else for the rest of my life.

So I got married and stayed that way for seventeen years, attempting with some grim success to impose fidelity on myself. It was, I figured, the price I had to pay in return for a good place to raise kids. And though I loved my ex-wife, and still do, I wasn’t in love with her. Didn’t believe in it, actually. I thought being in love was a myth people had invented to punish themselves for lacking it.

Fidelity always felt like work: an act of will rather than nature. As time passed, nature gradually
gained the upper hand, as she almost always does. I was never quite able to stop flirting — a form of exchange that has always felt holy to me — nor was I able to disguise from my wife my
undiminished appreciation of other women. This led to sexual distance between us, and I started to get hungry. There began to be incidents of what is called, in rock n roll, “offshore drilling.”

Not realizing that women hate deceit even more than they hate infidelity — and they always
know — I turned into a sneak and a liar. I became someone I couldn’t respect, and so I left my
marriage.

Not long after that, I experienced the miracle of voluntary monogamy for one brief and
blissful period, during which, at the age of forty-six, I did fall in love for the first time in my
life. During the year that followed, it was as though there were no other women except in the most abstract sense. I still delighted in the presence of pulchritude, but it was an appreciation as sublime in its detachment as my enjoyment of nature’s other wonders. I didn’t want to do anything about these beauties, any more than I would want do something about sunsets or Bach fugues. Cynthia
was the only woman. But two days before we were to be married, I put her on a plane in Los Angeles
and somewhere between there and New York the virus that had been secretly consuming her stopped her
heart.

The most important consequence of losing Cynthia is that I now believe in the human soul. I had to see it and, once seen, it became obvious to me. No longer did I dismiss it as a biological
artifact, a kind of software that arises in the electrochemical sputterings of the squishyware and
cannot run otherwise. Rather I can feel the soul as an independent though immaterial identity that wears bodies like a costume.

I finally had the answer to a question I’d been asked shortly before I met her. I’d been speaking to a bunch of kids at the New York University film school about Virtual Reality when I got the usual question about virtual sex. This was such a predictable question that I had a mental tape I always ran in response to it that went something like: “I don’t get the fascination with virtual sex. Sex is about bodies, and being in VR is like having had your body amputated. What could be less sexy?”

At this point, a very embodied young woman in the front row raised her beautiful hand. “But don’t you think,” she asked, “that when it comes to sex, the body is just a prosthesis?”

My tape stopped running. “A prosthesis for what?”

“That’s the interesting question, isn’t it.” she smiled, all sphinxy.

Yeah. That was the interesting question alright, and Cynthia, in both the way she inhabited her body and the way she remained after leaving it, answered it for me. There is indeed a hand that moves the hand, there is a kiss that lives inside both sets of lips.

At that point I decided that, whatever the pressures of society or the propensity of most women to
insist on it, I wouldn’t attempt monogamy again unless and until I encountered someone who induced it in me as naturally as she did. And I like to believe that nothing would make me happier than to have that happen. To fall in love. To be singularly devoted again.

(But I have to confess to aspects of my current behavior pattern that are subconsciously designed to prevent this very thing from happening. If just once in your life you’ve put all of your emotional eggs in one basket, only to have that basket smashed almost immediately, it inclines you toward more distributed systems of emotional support.)

There is a central woman in my life, a luminous Swede who lives in San Francisco. She is the person I always call when I feel bad in the middle of the night. She is beautiful and funny, as game on an adventure as Indiana Jones; she is a sexual poet, and I love her.

That she is not the only woman in my life pains her — as will this piece — and I wish to cause her no pain. But I learned from my marriage what suffering can be inflicted by someone who tries unsuccessfully to contain himself in the service of someone else’s feelings.

And scrupulous honesty, though it requires courage on both sides, is a lot more practical than most men believe it to be. The fact that I don’t lie to her about these other encounters brings us closer rather than separating us. And sin, as Nietzsche said (and I often quote), is that which separates.

A Pariah’s Advantages

While I’ve been honest about all this to my girlfriend and the other objects of my affection, I

haven’t come clean in public until now. It’s an odd omission. I’ve tried to write as candidly as

possible about my other deviations from standard American morality. I’m in the lucky position of being so de-institutionalized that I can

say whatever I like without fear of adverse economic consequences. Indeed, lunatic candor seems to be my primary product these days. Like Hunter S. Thompson, the badder I get, the better I get paid.

A bad reputation can set you free. After all, if you’ve already declared yourself to be a

pot-smoking, acid-addled slut, your opponents are forced to oppose your ideas on their merits,

rather than strategically revealing your hidden depravities. Shame is no weapon against the

shameless.

In fact, part of what motivates this public revelation is a belief that I am behaving morally,

despite following a course that society would generally condemn. My conscience is clear, a fact that

is not simply due to poor memory or an unwillingness to examine it carefully.

These admissions are also related to the fact that I find myself a few gray hair-breadths away from

turning fifty, an age beyond which surreptitious ladies’ men become pathetic in direct proportion to

the uneasiness they feel with their own lascivious impulses.

The phrase “dirty old man” begins to haunt me, especially as I continue to find my pot-bellied old

self attracted to the same youthful feminine specifications that put steel in my poker when I was

twenty-five.

Yet that’s not all there is to it: for me, it is the combination of these two beauties, the inner and the outer, that draws me most
compellingly. There are plenty of perfectly formed surfaces that have no light within them and they
don’t do much for me. At the same time,
there are beautiful souls within bodies that are the female equivalent of my own, and while some of
these are close friends, they lack the sexual spice that really fuels most discourse between the
sexes.

I thus remain convinced that there is something holy about beauty, whether attached to a woman or a waterfall,
and I have the entire history of art — at least until the Twentieth Century — to back me up on
this. I don’t think of beauty as being something that is part of a woman, but rather something like
a mist that gathers around her that becomes more beautiful if illuminated brightly from within. The
real beauty, the part that lasts, is in the soul and not the skin.

Even when one is seeking sex between souls, the “prostheses” they wear are not irrelevant.

King Dick Meets My Inner Lesbian

But ironically enough, a lot of being sexy means getting past the root-level sex drive. One of the great moments in my sexual education came some years back when Dick Cavett was
interviewing Raquel Welch at the height of her va-va-voomishness. “Tell me, Raquel,” he leered,
“what’s your favorite erogenous zone?”

She paused, gave him a level look that completely revised my opinion of her intelligence, and said
crisply, “My mind, Dick.”

The mind, I have since discovered, is just about every woman’s favorite erogenous zone, but it is

mystical terrain and must be explored with care and time. The dick, in its youthful phase, is not
big on care or time. It is the very definition of urgency. It makes non-negotiable demands of its
bearer that are related to the inner
nature of its target only to the extent that some knowledge of her has strategic value in getting
her into bed.

Now my formerly dictatorial appendage is more like an old sidekick. A fellow veteran. It doesn’t
have the same reload rate of old, but there’s no ejaculatio praecox to worry about either.
The old soldier can pace itself. And if it can’t spit five shots in quick succession, it’s no longer
calling my shots as it once did. Into the vacuum of its diminished authority has risen my heretofore
undiscovered inner lesbian.

My inner lesbian is a wonderful accomplice, since she knows a lot about what turns women on, is more
attuned to sensuality than the old in-out, and believes strongly that the journey is the reward.
This doesn’t mean that she is not interested in orgasms, but she knows that one great thing about
being a woman is that if you can come at all — which a lamentably high percentage cannot — you can
usually come a lot and in a variety of ways. She makes it a lot easier to get away from my own
sexual objectives and into the multifarious delights of the joint critter, the one Shakespeare
called “the beast with two backs.”

And creating that larger organism, making the Other into the Self, merging the Self into the Other
is, after all, what sex is ultimately about. And of course, the point is not to have a self at all.
To be Everything.

The Infinity of Love

All said, you’re probably wondering why any woman would want to become emotionally or physically
involved with a man whose promiscuity is so freely confessed. Of course, many of them don’t. I
eliminate a lot of opportunity by wearing my Don Juan warning placard so visibly (even then, the
hesitant don’t leave me entirely bereft).

But most of the resistance to becoming involved with a self-admitted playboy has to do with that
all-important female perception of being special. It is hard to feel that knowing there are

others out there. But there is an answer to this, and finding it has enabled me to feel a deeper sense of connection not only with
women but with all the rest of my species.

The answer is that everyone is special. So also is every relationship. The creature that
forms
between any one person and another is like no other creature in the world. It is theirs and theirs alone.
Furthermore,
while time and
space and attention may be painfully finite, love is not. Love has no quantity to exhaust. It is a
quality, a living thing, that grows stronger the more it is felt. The vigorous practice of love
expands the heart and opens its apertures to the world.

In other words, to love a lot of women, you have to love them, without a trace of bullshit, one
woman at a time. You have to bring each of them with you into the perfectly present, creating there
a private zone of space and time that can be filled with that particular love. You won’t have any of
the comforting (though generally broken) social conventions to assure you that your vulnerability is
safe. There are no assurances at all except for those that come directly from the feeling of
connection you can make together. You are, in effect, beating back the darkness with the light you
generate yourselves.

When I judge myself, there is one question I ask: Would I want my daughters to encounter a man like
me? And because I want them to be brave in their love, because I want their faith to be annealed by
experience on the edge, I hope they find a few of my kind. But I hope they don’t bring too many of
us home.

As founder and publisher of Skeptic Magazine, Michael Shermer has exposed fallacies behind intelligent design, 9/11 conspiracies, the low-carb craze, alien sightings and other popular beliefs and paranoias. But it’s not about debunking for debunking’s sake. Shermer defends the notion that we can understand our world better only by matching good theory with good science. Thus, in order to explore a conspiracy theory that pre-planted explosives caused the World Trade Center towers to fall on 9/11, the magazine called on demolition experts.

Shermer’s work offers cognitive context for our often misguided beliefs: In the absence of sound science, incomplete information can powerfully combine with the power of suggestion (helping us hear Satanic lyrics when “Stairway to Heaven” plays backwards, for example). In fact, a common thread that runs through beliefs of all sorts, he says, is our tendency to convince ourselves: We overvalue the shreds of evidence that support our preferred outcome, and ignore the facts we aren’t looking for.

From the Guardian, by Cian O’Luanaigh

A gene that controls red blood cell production evolved quickly to enable Tibetans to tolerate high altitudes, a study suggests. The finding could lead researchers to new genes controlling oxygen metabolism in the body.

An international team of researchers compared the DNA of 50 Tibetans with that of 40 Han Chinese and found 34 mutations that have become more common in Tibetans in the 2,750 years since the populations split. More than half of these changes are related to oxygen metabolism.

The researchers looked at specific genes responsible for high-altitude adaptation in Tibetans. “By identifying genes with mutations that are very common in Tibetans, but very rare in lowland populations we can identify genes that have been under natural selection in the Tibetan population,” said Professor Nielsen. “We found a list of 20 genes showing evidence for selection in Tibet – but one stood out: EPAS1.”

The gene, which codes for a protein involved in responding to falling oxygen levels and is associated with improved athletic performance in endurance athletes, seems to be the key to Tibetan adaptation to life at high altitude. A mutation in the gene that is thought to affect red blood cell production was present in only 9% of the Han population, but was found in 87% of the Tibetan population.

“It is the fastest change in the frequency of a mutation described in humans,” said Professor Rasmus Nielsen of the University of California Berkeley, who took part in the study.

There is 40% less oxygen in the air on the 4,000m high Tibetan plateau than at sea level. Under these conditions, people accustomed to living below 2,000m – including most Han Chinese – cannot get enough oxygen to their tissues, and experience altitude sickness. They get headaches, tire easily, and have lower birth rates and higher child mortality than high-altitude populations.

Tibetans have none of these problems, despite having lower oxygen saturation in their tissues and a lower red blood cell count than the Han Chinese.

Around the world, populations have adapted to life at high altitude in different ways. One adaptation involves making more red blood cells, which transport oxygen to the body’s tissues. Indigenous people in the Peruvian Andes have higher red blood cell counts than their countrymen living at sea level, for example.

But Tibetans have evolved a different method. “Tibetans have the highest expression levels for EPAS1 in the world,” said co-author Dr Jian Wang of the Beijing Genomics Institute in Schenzhen, China, a research facility that collected the data. “For Western people, after two to three weeks at altitude, the red blood cell count starts to increase. But Tibetans and Sherpas keep the same levels,” he said.

“I just summitted Everest a few weeks ago,” added Dr Wang. He said the Sherpas and Tibetans were much stronger than the Westerners or lowland Chinese on the climb. “Their tissue oxygen concentration is almost the same as Westerners and Chinese but they are strong,” he said “and their red blood cell count is not that high compared to people in Peru.”

“The remarkable thing about Tibetans is that they can function well in high altitudes without having to produce so much haemoglobin,” said Prof Nielsen. “The entire mechanism is not well-understood – but is seems that the gene responsible is EPAS1.”

Nielsen said the gene is involved in regulating anaerobic and anaerobic metabolism in the body (cell respiration with and without oxygen). “It may be that the [mutated gene] helps balance anaerobic versus aerobic metabolism in a way that is more optimal for the low-oxygen environment of the Tibetan plateau,” he said.

Writing in Science, where the results are published today, the authors say: “EPAS1 may therefore represent the strongest instance of natural selection documented in a human population, and variation at this gene appears to have had important consequences for human survival and/or reproduction in the Tibetan region.”

Dr Wang said future research will focus on comparing the levels of EPAS1 expression in the placentas of Tibetan and Han Chinese women.