psilocybin, n.

An alkaloid, found in several mushrooms native to Central America (esp. of the genus Psilocybe), which when ingested produces hallucinogenic effects similar to those of LSD but milder and more short-lived. Cf. magic mushroom n. at MAGIC adj. Special uses.
Psilocybin is the dihydrogen phosphate ester of psilocin. Formula: C₁₂H₁₇N₂O₄P.

1958 A. HOFMANN et al. in Experientia 14 109/1 The compound has been given the name Psilocybin; it possesses indole characteristics and contains phosphorus. 1962 A. HUXLEY Let. 18 Sept. (1969) 939 Mescalin, LSD and psilocybin all produce a state of affairs in which verbalizing and conceptualizing are in some sort bypassed. One can talk about the experiencebut always with the knowledge that ‘the rest is silence’. 1993 R. RUCKER et al. Mondo 2000 86/1 The clarity of atomic vision you get when you’re very high on LSD or peyote or psilocybin is a sheer tuning in to the way the brain actually operates. 2004 Independent (Tabloid ed.) 30 Nov. (Review section) 13/2 Next month, a new trial will begin at Harvard exploring whether psilocybin can relieve the symptoms of cluster headaches.

Anxiety may have been the first effect. My heart began to race and the fat, shouting stand-up comic on the television grew unbearably irritating. “Time to turn this shit off,” I told The Chemist. The bedroom in The Chemist’s flat, comfortable just a moment ago, seemed to grow smaller and threatened to become too confining. I sat on the bed and tried to subdue this ominous feeling. I didn’t want the fear of bad trip to become the very cause of one. The Chemist paced about, turned off the television, shuffled through a disorganized stack of CDs. He too was beginning to feel increasingly agitated. Half an hour had passed with no certain result. But, we both knew, results were certainly forthcoming: An NMR had been performed to ensure that the synthesis was exactly correct, and we measured our dosages according to bodyweight, consuming a “high, safe dose” as specified in a Johns Hopkins University study.

I had fired a brief email to William just before taking the capsule: “I am about to take a trip measured in milligrams.”

He would know what that was about. I thought it might be nice to speak with him during the trip for professional guidance.

…He knows about these kinds of things.

Already I worried that I was somewhere in the preliminaries of a bad trip. I focused on my breathing while staring at the various posters covering the wall opposite me. Then, something odd happened. The posters suddenly defied the linear confines of the wall behind them, some floating out to the foreground, others sinking back at varying depths.

All at once, the anxiety had passed and curiosity gripped me as space slowly altered around me.

I reported all this to The Chemist who agreed that he too was now undeniably experiencing something quite beyond placebo. We decided to move into the Living Room, where we could lounge more comfortably on the couches. The Chemist only asked that I try to keep my head and maintain some sense of propriety should one of his roommates arrive. As this was my only psychedelic excursion, I couldn’t make any guarantees regarding my affected behaviour, but I promised I’d do my best…¹

When upright and ambulatory, the more dramatic effects of the drug were dampened. The most intense experiences occurred when stationary, eyes closed. Psilocybin confounded my preconceived notion of the psychedelic experience as primarily visual. I was pleased to find that all the senses conspired to the extent that changes in my very posture subtly altered the entire ambiance. Nor were the visual hallucinations themselves as entirely independent of my conscious thoughts as I may have believed. The hallucinatory effect, for me, was mostly dependant upon associations derived through a heightened sense of pareidolia. I distinguished distinct images in random patterns, and I began to feel that certain objects looked quite a bit like something else entirely, even though I remained completely aware of the reality of their shape. My mind tended to isolate the embedded swastika in a pattern of alternating rectangles on a folded quilt upon a chair and among the outlines of squares on a grid pattern on the wall. Every object became a stationary life form: Smooth surfaces, insect shells; soft objects, fleshy masses… everything surface just an outer layer concealing moist viscera and meat. Underneath, everything was alive. This was a non-visual hallucination. A psychotic idea.

The outlines of angled objects extended their boundaries in the peripherals of my vision, as in an architect’s rough sketch. To look at anything directly destroyed the illusion and, as mentioned, the whole experience was far more mundane when observed through open eyes. With my eyes closed, my mind lost the visual framework of my body to fit its kinesthetic sense to. My left arm stretched and lengthened to twice normal, while the fingers did likewise, reaching into a shifting, luminescent abyss. Oddly, my right arm withered to little more than a nub. Sitting Japanese-style on my knees, my legs melted into themselves and all but disappeared from consciousness. My head was reduced to little more than a floating eye. A strange tickling sensation made me aware of my spine. When I rose to use the lavatory, this tickling of the spine caused me to walk in exaggerated motions. “I feel like a cartoon bug” I told The Chemist, looking more like a pantomime thief with my long tip-toed lurches and wild counter-balancing arm gestures. The toilet was to the end of the hall which had, it seemed, grown considerably in length since last I’d seen it. It would be convenient, it occurred to me, if I could just close my eyes, reach my extended left arm into the distant lavatory, point into the toilet and piss out my index finger.

Best not to try it, I decided, lest I piss my pants.

I wondered if these lunatic ideas would overcome me to the point in which I would actually be pissing myself, sawing off extraneous left arm, and who-knows-what. Despite this possibility, it was pleasing to note that I was calm and unafraid. Fear simply was not in me. The Fear Mechanism seemed so entirely numbed that it occurred to me that an intruding murderer would find me unimpressed and complaisant. How is it possible, I began to wonder, for anybody to have the “Bad Trip” on psilocybin?

Then, terror nearly struck as I reached the end of the hall and beheld the toilet. The seat of the toilet – a varnished wood model – provoked a grotesquely deformed visual association. Most of the toilet seats that I am familiar with are shaped like a U curved inward (more like an upended C) with a stopper at each end. This toilet seat, while of the standard shape, was equipped with four stoppers – one extra at each lower end of the curve. Who would do this?! The stoppers looked much like eyes – this toilet had four! – and they leveled an incriminating gaze over its imposing, gaping maw. The toilet had taken the general visage of some ancient North American god, and I was impiously to pee into its mouth?

I could just pee into the sink…

There I went again. Get a hold of yourself, you idiot.

I regarded myself in the mirror, something I had been specifically advised not to do while under the influence of psilocybin. One has a tendency, I had been told, to see horrifying shape-shifting deformities, melting flesh, and monstrous defects in the mirror through psychedelic eyes. I scrutinized my features. My face maintained its integrity. In fact, I wore it well.

I felt a need to keep a hold of the wall as I walked back down the hall toward the Living Room (more to establish a physical hold on reality than for balance).

The Chemist was having a grim episode of introspection. He began expressing self-doubt and insecurity regarding his current life path.

“Get a hold of yourself, you idiot!” I encouraged him. I hoped I could placate him and prevent him from compromising the peak I felt myself reaching. My psilocybin experience was reaching a whole new level of intensity and I was delighted that, despite the strong reservations that had prevented me from experimenting with mind-altering substances in the past, I was well at home with what I was experiencing now.

I closed my eyes and watched hidden images briefly surface and disappear in an expansive void that appeared something like a three dimensional television static with the individual black, white and grey bits writhing and contorting like millions of translucent ghostly maggots. The brief images formed and faded – sometimes elaborate and geometrical, other times animal-like and animated – despite my best efforts to retain their vision and make sense of their “meaning”. I felt that I was looking directly upon the patterns that form the basis of my subconscious, atavistic mind. I wondered if it was a failing of mine that I found myself unable to make more sense of it all. I felt that with the proper training, with some esoteric method, I would be able to navigate this internal world more sensibly, and learn more from it.

As I considered this, my kinesthetic sense again distorted, transforming me into a hemispherical flat surface. The entire environment, still a chaotic static, also flattened becoming one with my body and forming the opposite surface of the sphere I was now looking into – not from without, but as.

I felt that I had gained some type of godlike dominance over this uncharted territory… but I lamented that I had no I had no idea what to do with it, and I somehow knew that this bizarre but enjoyable perception was to be fleeting. With arms outstretched, I flexed my hands, causing the orb to lightly pulsate.

My mind had deranged, turned inside-out, and the dark hidden corners were brought to the surface in full exposure. Introspection was inevitable, and mine seemed to be carried out on some level throughout the entire trip. Like The Chemist, I began considering the very validity of everything I am currently involved in: my job, my studies, my creative projects and independent research. Happily, I came to conclusion that all of the things that I am involved in now are exactly those things which I should be involved in now, and even if they are ultimately “unsuccessful”, I can do nothing more than see them through to their conclusion. Everything, I convinced myself, will work out as it should.

As it is, so be it.

The internal voice that worked to sooth my unquiet mind resonated with a new authority, its answers certain and absolute. These answers came not as opinions, but epiphanies. Everything would be okay. I was certain of it.

I conveyed this information to The Chemist. Then I called a friend of mine in Detroit and belaboured her with maniac rantings. While speaking to her, I was struck by the fact that I wasn’t as articulate as I felt I was. It had seemed as though my conscious mind were still entirely rational, observing this alteration of the senses more-or-less unaffected, but this uncharacteristic inability to find proper words suggested otherwise. Perhaps I’d retarded my reason after all. Perhaps I’d be permanently affected, reduced to a hellish existence lumbering about a swastika-decorated world, babbling like a fool, with my True Self exiled somewhere within wailing, “Would to God I’d never done it! Would to God I’d never done it!”

…I couldn’t convince myself that this was a serious concern. The psilocybin seemed to be following a path, a direction. The peak had passed (somewhere in the orb), and though it faded very slowly, I was certain that this trip would eventually end.

I ended my phone call and voiced senseless profundities to The Chemist. I began to feel as though I were enjoying myself at his expense, that I had somehow hoarded all the fun and positivity to myself while leaving him to his own devices.

But by now, the effects of the psilocybin were slowly wearing off. The Chemist grew more lucid and nonchalant, having regained perspective, sensible enough to not take his psychedelic mental wanderings too terribly seriously. We went outdoors so that he could smoke a cigarette. He spoke more like a disappointed tourist who had lost his sunglasses on a rollercoaster than the victim of a traumatized psyche. I felt that my own positive experience was testament to a certain level of emotional fortitude that I now knew I possessed. Little did I know that only a month later all anxiety would not only have fully returned, but would strike so hard that it would be followed by a prolonged illness, during which I would lose 20 pounds before recovering… So much for long-term benefits…

We went back indoors. The Chemist retired to his bedroom while I returned to the Living Room and attempted to fall asleep on the couch. My mind refused rest, still racing with unfamiliar activity. I was exhausted and just wanted it to stop. I faded into sleep with difficulty, but psilocybin and I parted on decidedly amiable terms.

1. Many people, while getting to know me, are surprised to learn that I am for the most part “clean”, and relatively inexperienced in recreational, or experimental, drug use. For one reason or another I seem to come off with an air of drugs savvy I don’t possess. Yet, a good number of my closest friends are not the least bit ashamed to be classified as drug-users. On the other hand, The Church of Scientology, when I underwent their “orientation” (for both my own amusement and as a segment of my Process research) claimed that recreational drug use wasn’t a natural behaviour for a person of my character. I have the questionable distinction of having scored well on their character analysis examination, and this score – taken together with my Intelligence Test results – indicated a drug-free mind. These traits, the scientologists reasoned, colluded to make me a sound and sober individual. But then, with circular logic, they also claimed that these traits were a natural by-product of my sobriety. Either way – and as with most things – I feel that the Scientologists are wrong. I believe my abstention to be a matter of nurture rather than nature. A friend of mine once speculated that, had I been raised in an environment wherein illegal drug-usage had been rare, my natural contrarian tendencies would have led me into the life of a junkie. As it is, early exposure to addicts convinced me that recreational drug usage didn’t do anybody any “good”.

My argument is that we, you, I have a choice. For some, that choice is much harder to make than for others but none the less it’s there. I’ve really enjoyed a few books by the late communications theorist Neil Postman. In one book he published what he described as an open source speech for any valedictorian to be who might be in need of one. It’s a very good piece and does a far better job of illustrating my point than I do. Please read on…

MY GRADUATION SPEECH
by Neil Postman

Having sat through two dozen or so graduation speeches, I have naturally wondered why they are so often so bad. One reason, of course, is that the speakers are chosen for their eminence in some field, and not because they are either competent speakers or gifted writers. Another reason is that the audience is eager to be done with all ceremony so that it can proceed to some serious reveling. Thus any speech longer than, say, fifteen minutes will seem tedious, if not entirely pointless. There are other reasons as well, including the difficulty of saying something inspirational without being banal. Here I try my hand at writing a graduation speech, and not merely to discover if I can conquer the form. This is precisely what I would like to say to young people if I had their attention for a few minutes.

If you think my graduation speech is good, I hereby grant you permission to use it, without further approval from or credit to me, should you be in an appropriate situation.

Members of the faculty, parents, guests, and graduates, have no fear. I am well aware that on a day of such high excitement, what you require, first and foremost, of any speaker is brevity. I shall not fail you in this respect. There are exactly eighty-five sentences in my speech, four of which you have just heard. It will take me about twelve minutes to speak all of them and I must tell you that such economy was not easy for me to arrange, because I have chosen as my topic the complex subject of your ancestors. Not, of course, your biological ancestors, about whom I know nothing, but your spiritual ancestors, about whom I know a little. To be specific, I want to tell you about two groups of people who lived many years ago but whose influence is still with us. They were very different from each other, representing opposite values and traditions. I think it is appropriate for you to be reminded of them on this day because, sooner than you know, you must align yourself with the spirit of one or the spirit of the other.

The first group lived about 2,500 years ago in the place which we now call Greece, in a city they called Athens. We do not know as much about their origins as we would like. But we do know a great deal about their accomplishments. They were, for example, the first people to develop a complete alphabet, and therefore they became the first truly literate population on earth. They invented the idea of political democracy, which they practiced with a vigor that puts us to shame. They invented what we call philosophy. And they also invented what we call logic and rhetoric. They came very close to inventing what we call science, and one of them-Democritus by name-conceived of the atomic theory of matter 2,300 years before it occurred to any modern scientist. They composed and sang epic poems of unsurpassed beauty and insight. And they wrote and performed plays that, almost three millennia later, still have the power to make audiences laugh and weep. They even invented what, today, we call the Olympics, and among their values none stood higher than that in all things one should strive for excellence. They believed in reason. They believed in beauty. They believed in moderation. And they invented the word and the idea which we know today as ecology.

About 2,000 years ago, the vitality of their culture declined and these people began to disappear. But not what they had created. Their imagination, art, politics, literature, and language spread all over the world so that, today, it is hardly possible to speak on any subject without repeating what some Athenian said on the matter 2,500 years ago.

The second group of people lived in the place we now call Germany, and flourished about 1,700 years ago. We call them the Visigoths, and you may remember that your sixth or seventh-grade teacher mentioned them. They were spectacularly good horsemen, which is about the only pleasant thing history can say of them. They were marauders-ruthless and brutal. Their language lacked subtlety and depth. Their art was crude and even grotesque. They swept down through Europe destroying everything in their path, and they overran the Roman Empire. There was nothing a Visigoth liked better than to burn a book, desecrate a building, or smash a work of art. From the Visigoths, we have no poetry, no theater, no logic, no science, no humane politics.

Like the Athenians, the Visigoths also disappeared, but not before they had ushered in the period known as the Dark Ages. It took Europe almost a thousand years to recover from the Visigoths.

Now, the point I want to make is that the Athenians and the Visigoths still survive, and they do so through us and the ways in which we conduct our lives. All around us-in this hall, in this community, in our city-there are people whose way of looking at the world reflects the way of the Athenians, and there are people whose way is the way of the Visigoths. I do not mean, of course, that our modern-day Athenians roam abstractedly through the streets reciting poetry and philosophy, or that the modern-day Visigoths are killers. I mean that to be an Athenian or a Visigoth is to organize your life around a set of values. An Athenian is an idea. And a Visigoth is an idea. Let me tell you briefly what these ideas consist of.

To be an Athenian is to hold knowledge and, especially the quest for knowledge in high esteem. To contemplate, to reason, to experiment, to question-these are, to an Athenian, the most exalted activities a person can perform. To a Visigoth, the quest for knowledge is useless unless it can help you to earn money or to gain power over other people.

To be an Athenian is to cherish language because you believe it to be humankind’s most precious gift. In their use of language, Athenians strive for grace, precision, and variety. And they admire those who can achieve such skill. To a Visigoth, one word is as good as another, one sentence in distinguishable from another. A Visigoth’s language aspires to nothing higher than the cliché.

To be an Athenian is to understand that the thread which holds civilized society together is thin and vulnerable; therefore, Athenians place great value on tradition, social restraint, and continuity. To an Athenian, bad manners are acts of violence against the social order. The modern Visigoth cares very little about any of this. The Visigoths think of themselves as the center of the universe. Tradition exists for their own convenience, good manners are an affectation and a burden, and history is merely what is in yesterday’s newspaper.

To be an Athenian is to take an interest in public affairs and the improvement of public behavior. Indeed, the ancient Athenians had a word for people who did not. The word was idiotes, from which we get our word “idiot.” A modern Visigoth is interested only in his own affairs and has no sense of the meaning of community.

And, finally, to be an Athenian is to esteem the discipline, skill, and taste that are required to produce enduring art. Therefore, in approaching a work of art, Athenians prepare their imagination through learning and experience. To a Visigoth, there is no measure of artistic excellence except popularity. What catches the fancy of the multitude is good. No other standard is respected or even acknowledged by the Visigoth.

Now, it must be obvious what all of this has to do with you. Eventually, like the rest of us, you must be on one side or the other. You must be an Athenian or a Visigoth. Of course, it is much harder to be an Athenian, for you must learn how to be one, you must work at being one, whereas we are all, in a way, natural-born Visigoths. That is why there are so many more Visigoths than Athenians. And I must tell you that you do not become an Athenian merely by attending school or accumulating academic degrees. My father-in-law was one of the most committed Athenians I have ever known, and he spent his entire adult life working as a dress cutter on Seventh Avenue in New York City. On the other hand, I know physicians, lawyers, and engineers who are Visigoths of unmistakable persuasion. And I must also tell you, as much in sorrow as in shame, that at some of our great universities, perhaps even this one, there are professors of whom we may fairly say they are closet Visigoths. And yet, you must not doubt for a moment that a school, after all, is essentially an Athenian idea. There is a direct link between the cultural achievements of Athens and what the faculty at this university is all about. I have no difficulty imagining that Plato, Aristotle, or Democritus would be quite at home in our class rooms. A Visigoth would merely scrawl obscenities on the wall.

And so, whether you were aware of it or not, the purpose of your having been at this university was to give you a glimpse of the Athenian way, to interest you in the Athenian way. We cannot know on this day how many of you will choose that way and how many will not. You are young and it is not given to us to see your future. But I will tell you this, with which I will close: I can wish for you no higher compliment than that in the future it will be reported that among your graduating class the Athenians mightily outnumbered the Visigoths.

Thank you, and congratulations.

If I were to interpret this dream, something which I don’t spend a lot of time doing, I would say that I was projecting my ideal state of mind in the context of the situation. That is to say that if I were dying, it’s kind of the way I’d like to deal with it. The really interesting thing about the dream was that I simply wasn’t afraid. All I wanted to do was finish up what I was working on quietly before I died. Had I been sweeping the floor I would have wanted to simply empty the dust bin first.
This is Mecca for me. It’s what I strive for above all things in my life. To embrace death, rather than to avoid it. As I get older I find that I look at people and try to understand them by knowing what it is that they love, and fear. I generally end up being close to the ones who embrace both. Fear is the proverbial elephant in the room but its ubiquitous nature makes it semi transparent. Just the way most people like it. I think that’s too bad because it is the great leveler. Doesn’t matter how rich, smart, beautiful or strong you are. If I walk into the room holding the thing that you fear the most you will quickly revert to your base self and in most cases be rendered powerless. That’s why it’s the great tool of the oppressor.

So I’d like to take this opportunity to remind you, yes YOU, that you are going to die. Nothing is going to stop it and science, although it may buy you a bit more time, is not going to save you. At least not in the near future. You might drop dead of an aneurysm or die slowly of a really horrible disease (which seems to be one of the major fears people hold) or you might die peacefully in your sleep. Whatever, it’s happening and I would say that there is a very good chance that NOTHING is waiting for you on the other side. Now, if you take this grim news and post it on your fridge, or get it tattooed on the inside of your eyelids where you cannot avoid it well, something interesting might happen. You might, just might slowly come to the realization that you really don’t have anything to lose (in the big picture sense).
That’s pretty liberating and it puts your fears in a different light.
When I was a kid I was scared shitless of amusement park rides. I got over it one day by getting on the Zipper (still a freaky ride) alone. It was one of the great defining moments of my life, lost I’m sure, on the carnie operating the ride. So now when i am cresting the first hill of some ginormous roller coaster (or about to face some big fear in my life) I don’t close my eyes even though I still feel fear. I put my arms up in the air and scream my guts out. I always find that on the other side of that rush of fear is a heightened sense of clarity and confidence.

Her behaviour indicated that she understood this.

One day, She spontaneously broke into tears and tore up a female classmate’s art project: a construction paper jack-o-lantern with tears coming from its eyes.

“You always draw everything with tears in its eyes,” she wailed, collapsing – ironically – in sobs.

The class was a regimented prison camp. Unauthorized communication was forbidden. We were issued ID numbers for head-count, and desks which we were charged with keeping immaculate. When She spoke, we listened – nothing more. Everybody tried to remain anonymous. I often had questions, but this was no environment for my petty hair-splitting. Just the same, when She collected us together at story time to tell us about the Send a Mouse to College programme, I was intensely curious. This programme, we were told, allowed us to sponsor a mouse… in College!

I knew how the educational system broke down back then; Kindergarten was for babies. Elementary School was for growing tots like me. Middle School was for big kids, almost adults… complex concepts would be introduced. High School? The intellectual battlefield that separated the weak from the strong, deciding who would – and who would not – make it to College. College was strictly for dedicated academics… brains, geniuses.

In the first grade, we couldn’t be expected to understand a damned thing in the College curriculum, and yet here we were being told that there mice that had achieved this level of scholarly discipline.

The pamphlet, which we were required to bring home to our parents, bore an artistic rendering of the idealized mouse scholar, all smiles, proudly gripping his rolled parchment.

Could this be?

I had to ask: “Do we get to meet the mice that we sponsor?”

She was exasperated by my ignorance and impudence. “Just give the pamphlet to your parents.”

Later that night, I begged my parents to donate to the programme. They weren’t persuaded.

My older brother disabused me of this particular “innocence”. “The mice aren’t students,” he informed me, “they are test subjects. They are dissected and killed.”

I called him an idiot. Who would want to send a mouse to College for that?

Insane.

Nonetheless, I followed up with my mother. A little hesitantly, she agreed with my brother. These were lab rats.

I felt betrayed. I’d been had. But I got over it soon enough. My attention didn’t hold to anything too terribly long at that age.

Years later, I would recall the Send a Mouse to College programme in disbelief. “Can you believe they pulled that stunt on us?” I asked friends of mine. They were perplexed. None of them remembered any such programme. Was I sure? Not really, the more I thought about it. So I searched for information. There wasn’t much, but I imagined there had to have been some outcry about this at some point. I found that the programme had been contrived by the American Cancer Society (ACS), so I called them to ask about it. I told them that I was thinking about writing an article about the programme, so they put me in touch with one of their PR flacks in Massachusetts.

Her name was Karen Rouse, and despite her annoying tendency to continually mention the ACS’s financial contributions to the University I am in attendance of, I found her to be amiable and helpful. Of course, that’s her job, but I’ll take it at face value.”It does seem a bit weird by today’s standards,” Rouse admitted, “It’s antiquated. But, at the time, we were trying to educate children. We wanted to get them thinking about cancer and about research.”

Rouse, who has been with the ACS for 34 years, and remembered Send a Mouse to College from personal experience, acknowledged that the campaign upset a few children and parents who found the usage of pamphlets and literature depicting the happy mouse, holding a diploma, deceptive. “We did start to get letters; very heart-felt letters. I remember one in particular from a boy, probably about 12 years old, in the mid-seventies. He said that he wanted to help in the fight against cancer, but he wanted to know if there was something else he could do that didn’t entail sending a rodent to its death.” According to her, the quantity of negative letters was significant, but not copious. “I wouldn’t say that there was a ground-swell of these letters, but it did run its course.”

Turns out, no organized objection to the campaign – which ran, according to Rouse’s recollection, from the mid-sixties to the early eighties – ever surfaced.

She explained that during the eighties, the ACS began to focus more on teaching children about cancer prevention, focusing primarily on tobacco and the usage of sunscreen. “We [the ACS] moved away from programmes like Send a Mouse to College, because it had run its course.”

“Today,” says Rouse, “childhood cancer is considered 99% Treatable.” Also, the ACS today is able to raise $425 million annually in nationwide research funding. She credits this in part to awareness campaigns like Send a Mouse to College. As for the efficacy of the Send a Mouse to College campaign itself: “I have no idea how extensive the campaign was. I know it was nationwide, but I have no record of how many schools were involved or how much money was ultimately raised.”

Clearly, Rouse’s answers were contrived and scripted – which is merely to say that she was cautious, not dishonest. At points, I felt as though she were actually reading to me. She seemed to sense trouble from a journalist exploring such territory. She tried to get a feel for my angle. Where was I coming from? What did I want? Was I outraged?

No, not really. I was, but not anymore. I still think it was stupid campaign, but nothing worth exacting bitter revenge over.

Ultimately, I never wrote the intended article for publication.

People are just too touchy about these kinds of things…

Many known belief systems in the world feature the idea of a ‘soul’ — a sentient component of an entire human being; in most of these systems, the existence of this soul continues beyond the corporeal existence of the human being, maintaining some carry over from its time spent in the host body (depending on belief system, ranging from actual memories and feelings, to more hand-waving-vagaries like ‘psychic energy’). I won’t address the varying theories about where these souls are supposed to come from, what their state of existence is prior to the physical existence of the host form, which is an article unto its own; i will, instead, focus on what the continual march of scientific discovery brings to light on dark age notions of the soul.

Let me define what a ‘state machine’ is; it’s a bit of a nerdy term which might detract a bit from what you may have anticipated just reading the title. (If so, i say, ‘you’ve already bought the horse, so you might as well give it a ride.’)
The ‘state’ of an object can be thought of as a description of all of the meaningful attributes of that object at any specific instant in time. For example, the state of my car this morning could be described (incompletely) like, ‘the gas tank was 5/8 full; the FL, FR, RL, and RR tires were measured to have 33, 33, 31, and 31 PSI; there were 8 CDs in the changer with the following titles: …; etc etc etc’.
A ‘State Machine’ is a name that is given to an object that has some number of finite states and performs transitions from one state to another state due to some condition. Without straying too far from strict definitions, the human body — as well as the brain¹ — can be considered to be state machines, like the automobile.
In more complex state machines (like cars and humans), damage can be taken which doesn’t end the functioning of the machine but instead just prevents some of its states from being reached while in the damaged state:

• if a tire has gone flat, my car will not be able to reach the state in which it is moving 85 mph under its own propulsion
• if i fracture all of the fingers on my right hand, i won’t be able to play the piano with my right hand

The implied part of that sentence is that there is, of course, damage which is not mendable:

• that obliterated BMW in Florida
• significant brain damage in which large amounts of matter becomes unusable through either a wasting disease (like Alzheimer’s) or physical damage (like Phineas Gage and the rail spike)

Now that we’ve gotten through that, for those that believe in a soul what the exact role that the soul plays in the human host tends to be varied, nebulous, and a bit fluffy; given this, i’ll avoid trying to corner that slippery pig and instead suggest that we look at two types of functions which the brain has been recognized to provide:
Event (and personal history) memory
      The evidence that the formation, re-writing, and storage of the memory is performed in the brain is outstandingly documented — if in doubt, i’d invite the reader to start by listening to an episode devoted to this topic by the world’s best public radio program – Radio Lab.² It could be argued that ‘object preference’ is largely related to the memory function³ since the repeated positive exposures to an object that would increase preference are likely instigated due to memory of previous positive exposure. (An analogue argument would be that an Alzheimer’s patient who forgets what their favourite food is, is unlikely to seek it out and will thereby cease manifestation of that preference.)
      In both cases of a wasting disease, and of changed memories due to re-writes, there is not the slightest evidence to suggest that there is a secondary storehouse of the original information.
The amorphously defined ‘personality’
      While object preference plays a large role in defining the personality of a person, there are other factors which are brain based. Likelihood of aggressivity (which one might nudge gently into the larger group of ‘value system’), for example, has been shown to be related to brain architecture, and as well could be both apparently seen in the post-explosion version of Phineas, and is an all too frequent occurrence in Alzheimer’s patients.

What’s common in these is that the biological brain matter is the storehouse for these things, for were it some other object (such as a soul), it would be expected that the functions would still exist despite the destruction of the grey and white matter. I suppose one could argue that a soul is a one way device while its host is living — in other words, that it is acting as purely a container of state — and after death could become transformed into an emitter of state as well. The poison misstep in that argument, though, is that it also argues that the soul has no contribution to a living human’s personality and value choices, which seems contrary to the described role of a soul in at least one or two major belief systems.

To boil that all down a bit, we have fairly compelling evidence that the biological lump we refer to as the brain is the actual container of the state descriptors which make up that person which we, and others, recognize us as. Since those qualities are manifestations of the underlying biological matter, after the physical cessation of a human host an attached hypothetical soul would have no semantic relation to that human host (or so little recognizable semantic commonality that two souls from hosts A and B would be unable to be ascribed to A or B in any of the ways that we, as living humans, identify unique individuals).
Due to that, one has to ask what it means, what value it provides, to describe the human form as having an ethereal component when that ethereal component is forcibly divorced from nearly all of the qualities which make us, as humans, unique individuals.

1. … as reasonably posited by Alan Turing
2. Andrei Codrescu’s [awful] spoken piece in this episode is thankfully an uncharacteristic addition to Radio Lab episodes.
3. Though the identical twin studies of Turecki and Rathus strongly suggest that there is a genetic component as well.