Multistate Theory Basel 2008 derived from “New Horizons: Potential Benefits of Psychedelics for Humanity” 4 thinks and realizes that one is thinking. In religion and spiritual discussions, consciousness means level of spiritual development as in, “The mystical experience raised John’s level of consciousness.” In psychology consciousness is ambiguous too. It may mean what someone habitually pays attention to what one pays attention to as in “Joan has strong ecological consciousness.” While the he sequence of these items becomes the stream of consciousness and is what one attends to second by second. These are not different kinds of one thing, not varieties of consciousness. They are one word with a variety of meanings. By replacing consciousness with mindbody, the cognitive sciences can avoid ambiguity and specify the meaning they are using when they consider overall patterns of mind plus body functioning at any one time. Mindbody states function analogously to how programs function in computers: programs : computers :: mindbody states : minds. This analogy does not say that our brains are merely computers, but it implies that there are many useful mindbody states just as there are many useful computer programs. And just as one can write and install large numbers of electronic information processing programs in a computer, one can design and install a large number of bioprocessing programs in our bodies. As the example of problem solving and enhanced intelligence with psychedelics shows, mindbody programs, like computer programs, have their distinct applications. The both accept distinct types of input, process it their respective ways, and provide their characteristic outputs. Psychotechnology The second major concept in the multistate theory is psychotechnology. Usually, when people think of technologies they think of electronic, biological, or mechanical Multistate Theory Basel 2008 derived from “New Horizons: Potential Benefits of Psychedelics for Humanity” 5 technologies. Psychotechnologies are a currently unrecognized class of biotechnologies. The multistate theory includes psychotechnologies (techniques, methods, treatments) which produce states (install programs) that affect cognition, perception, emotion, and other psychological and biological processes (Roberts, 2006a). Among psychotechnologies are selected exercise routines, mediation, psychoactive plants and chemicals, yoga and the martial arts, sensory overload and sensory deprivation, chanting, dreaming, breathing techniques, biofeedback and neurofeedback, contemplative prayer, vision quests, drumming, and many more. Each of these is not one lone psychotechnology, but a family of related techniques, such as the many types of meditation and contemplative prayer. A full map of the human mind needs to include all mindbody states and all their functions

“Turn on, tune in, drop out,” “Bad trip,” “Shrooming.” The phrases associated with psychedelic experiences are as unscientific as they are outdated. But in the past 20 years, neurological research into hallucinogens has grown—and so have the number of people who study it.

Assistant Professor of Anthropology Nicolas Langlitz, who joined The New School for Social Research’s Department of Anthropology in January 2010, studies those who study drugs. Langlitz’s work reveals that these researchers often find themselves navigating a difficult space between scientific standards and personal interests.

“In their research practice, they must adhere to objectivity,” Langlitz says, “but scientists who focus in this area tend to be invested in drug mysticism.”

According to Langlitz, the field has long been troubled by a popular perception of unethical or unacademic behavior. After Timothy Leary famously turned on his Harvard colleagues and graduate students to LSD in the early ‘60s, hallucinogenic research—formerly a thriving discipline—ground to a halt in the U.S. in-depth inquiry into the brain’s response to psychedelic drugs was not revived for 30 years, when President George H. W. Bush declared the nineties to be the “Decade of the Brain.”

“In contrast to their countercultural ancestors, this new generation of hallucinogen researchers aims to reintroduce psychedelic drugs into mainstream science and society,” Langlitz says. “The current hype around the neurosciences has helped them to re-legitimate their research interest in psychedelics, not as symbols of social dissent or as magic drugs but as tools to study the brain. But the mystical tradition of the sixties lives on—for example, psychedelics are used to alleviate existential anxiety in advanced-stage cancer patients.”

Langlitz brings to his research a background in both social and biological sciences. He holds an MD from Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, a PhD in the History of Medicine from Humboldt Universität/Freie Universität Berlin, and a PhD in Medical Anthropology from the University of California, Berkeley. Langlitz has served as a postdoctoral fellow at Berlin’s Max Planck Institute for the History of Science.

The widely published Langlitz is currently adapting his Berkeley dissertation, Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain, for publication. This year he is also teaching three New School for Social Research courses, Sites of Contention in Contemporary Ethnography, Drug Cultures, and Anthropology of Science.