A cognitive-psychological study of ayahuasca
Benny Shanon, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Hebrew University
MAPS has pledged $5,000 to this research into the analysis of ayahuasca
visions from a cognitive psychology perspective.
I am a cognitive psychologist and a philosopher. My empirical work is
concerned with semantics and natural language, thought processes and
creativity, and the phenomenology of human consciousness. My philosophical
work focuses on basic conceptual issues pertaining to cognition and the
scientific study of mind. Until my encounter with ayahuasca I did not have
any special interest in psychedelics nor any particular interest in or
knowledge of Amerindian cultures. I came to ayahuasca by chance. In 1991,
I was invited to participate in a scientific conference in Brazil. Being
an avid traveler, after the conference I took off and travelled around the
country. One thing led to another, and I found myself in Colônia
Cinco Mil, the Daime [a syncretic religion bringing together elements of
Christianity, Indian traditions and Afro-Brazilian folklore] community in
the Amazonian state of Acre. I stayed with that community for a week, in
the course of which I partook of ayahuasca four times. At the time I knew
practically nothing about this psychoactive drink nor, in fact anything
about the community which hosted me. Now a significant part of my research
program is devoted to the study of ayahuasca and the psychology of altered
states of consciousness. I would like to explain why.
Returning Home
Whatever its context of use, ayahuasca is a powerful psychotropic agent.
Its consumption usually induces vivid and magnificent visions as well as
hallucinations in all other perceptual modalities. Pronounced
non-perceptual cognitive effects are encounter ed as well. These include
ideations, intellectual and personal insights, and mystical experiences.
In addition, the brew has significant affective effects: after an initial
phase of fear, one usually experiences great tranquility that often leads
to euphoria and a sense of deep self-fulfillment and profound happiness.
When I returned to my own world after my initial trip and experiences at
Colônia Cinco Mil, I immersed myself in reading whatever I could
about ayahuasca. To my amazement, I discovered the images I had seen in my
visions were of types similar to those reported by indigenous persons. As
a cognitive psychologist, I was puzzled. How could I, a person with a
totally different personal background, saw what the Indians see? I
realized that w hat may be presenting itself here is a manifestation of
the universals of the human mind. Cognitive psychologists are especially
interested in such universals, for these are the determinants that define
the basic feature of what make us human. Usually, the universals are of a
formal or structural type - the deep syntactic structures of natural
language, the basic operations of logic and reasoning, elementary schemes
of categorization. But the commonalities presented by ayahuasca were
different: they pertai ned to content. This presented a great puzzle to
me. Could it be that serpents and felines, precious stones and palaces are
also universals of the human mind? Are there contents that are not
culturally determined? Contemporary cognitive scientists are not prepared
for affirmative answers to these questions. Nor is such a state of affairs
to be accounted for by current neurophysiological theories of the brain.
Studying the scientific literature on ayahuasca, I further discovered that
practically all of it pertained to either two clusters of disciplines. The
first is that of the natural sciences - botany and ethnobotany,
pharmacology and biochemistry and brain p hysiology; the second is that of
the social sciences, notably anthropology. Important as they are, it seems
to me that the two lines of research noted fail to touch upon some of the
most crucial issues pertaining to ayahuasca. Both view ayahuasca from the
outside, so to speak. Ayahuasca is intriguing because of the extraordinary
experience it generates in people. Clearly this experience is
psychological. The various natural sciences tell us what ayahuasca is made
of and what brain events it may produce, but they say nothing - indeed
they can say nothing - about the special experiences associated with the
drink. The social sciences look at things from the outside too. Usually,
anthropologists focus on the context of consumption but what they say
about the phenomenon itself is quite limited.
Admittedly, ayahuasca would not have been known to us in the West had it
not been for the daring adventures of botanists and anthropologists. Yet,
the real puzzles this brew presents pertain, I think, neither to botany
nor to culture but rather to the hum an mind. As such, the study of
ayahuasca belongs first and foremost to the domain of psychology, and more
specifically cognitive psychology - the discipline investigating the
workings of the human mind. While there have been some clinical
psychological stu dies of ayahuasca, to date no cognitive investigation
has been carried out.
Research Resumes
What was further clear was that one cannot study the ayahuasca experience
without extensive first hand acquaintance with it. After all, it would be
strange to study dreams without having dreamt oneself, or to investigate
music without having listened to various kinds of music. Guided by the
appreciation that the topic at hand should be studied from a
cognitive-psychological perspective and on the basis of first hand
experience, I decided to pursue the study of ayahuasca and to embark on an
odyssey which was both personal and professional. First, I went for a
short visit to Columbia. There in the Southern region of the Putumayo and
the valley of Sibundoy I had my first encounters with ayahuasca in its
native Indian context of use. Later from 1993 to 1995 I spent more than a
year in Brazil and Peru. During this period I consumed ayahuasca in many
different locales and contexts - traditional settings in the Amazon,
healing sessions held by mestizo curandeiros (healers), indigenous
rituals, rituals of the three syncretic religions União do Vegetal,
Santo Daime and Barqinia, small groups of individual persons outside any
institutional settings, and alone. Except for the first few sessions, all
my sessions were summarized in writing immediately after the session
ended. At times I also made tape recordings of sessions.
In the course of my stay in South America, I interviewed many users of
ayahuasca regarding their experiences. At first, the interviews were
conducted in a non-systematic fashion. Later, I returned to Brazil and
Peru and employed a structured questionnaire. In it people were asked
about the content of their visions, as well as other effects that the brew
produced in them. The informants included indigenous and non-indigenous
persons, medicine men and masters of ayahuasca ceremonies, people with
long-time experience with the drink and ones who had taken it for the
first time.
My study is couched in the appraisal that the bringing together of
cognitive-psychological research and the study of ayahuasca benefits both
fields of inquiry. The conceptual framework and methodology of
contemporary cognitive science allows a systematic analysis of the
phenomenological data. With this, rule-like patterns in the ayahuasca
experience may be defined and theoretical generalization about it may be
made. On the other hand, the study of ayahuasca can contribute to
cognitive psychology in that it presents new data pertaining to human
consciousness, and thus new issues for investigation, new ways to look at
things and perhaps new answers. As Aldous Huxley noted in conjunction with
mescaline, the psychotropic agent reveals heretofore hidden and un charted
territories of the mind. With this, it may indicate that some features
normally considered as defining characteristics of the human cognitive
system need not necessarily hold. For instance, commonly made claims
regarding human consciousness may be true only of "standard"
consciousness, not of consciousness in general. But surely, any
comprehensive theory of cognition has to encompass both the standard and
the non-standard facets of the mind.
Data Analysis
Currently, I am involved with the systematic analysis of the data I have
collected. I have developed a codification system and all the data are now
being coded and subjected to statistical analysis. The analysis is
extensive, as it covers all aspects of the rich phenomenology of the
ayahuasca experience. Here I would like only to present a glimpse of one
aspect of the data, that having to do with the interpersonal commonalities
in the content of visions. The analysis at hand is based on two sets of
data - the summary records of 70 sessions with myself and that of a group
of 19 persons to whom I refer as independent drinkers. They are residents
of Rio de Janeiro with an extensive familiarity with ayahuasca who at the
present are not members of any institu tionalized group. Having counted
all the items indicated in my records, I ranked them by order of
descending frequency. Likewise, I counted all items indicated in the
interviews I had with the independent drinkers and for each item I counted
the number of informants who reported having seen it; here, too, I
generated a ranked list.
For my ayahuasca visions, the most frequent categories - those encountered
in at least 17% of my ayahuasca sessions - were, in descending order:
animals, beings (by this term I refer to creatures which are neither
humans, nor animals, nor celestial ones), cities, palaces, birds,
felines, serpents, artistic objects, celestial scenes, divine beings,
landscapes, human beings, royalty and forests. The corresponding ranked
list based on the interviews included all items reported by at least 47%
of the members of the group. In descending order this list runs as
follows: beings, animals, palaces, human beings, serpents, ancient
civilizations, birds, angels and divine beings, felines, forests, cities,
landscapes and flowers. The similarity between the two lists is, I find,
striking. First, note that except two - artistic objects and royalty - all
the items on the list based on my experiences are also on the list based
on the informant data. Second, except for two - ancient civilizations and
flowers - all the items on the informant list are also on mine. It will be
noted that there the category of ancient civilizations is very close to
that of cities which appears very high on the list based on my own data.
Data I have collected from other subjects, not fully analyzed yet,
corroborate these findings. In particular, we note that on the one hand
the items reported by indigenous people and pertaining to the context of
the forest - animals, birds and serpents - feature on both lists. Also
appearing on both lists, are non-natural beings - the spirits from which
ayahuasca derived its name. But also on both lists, and featuring very
prominently, are palaces. On the basis of interviews, my impression is
that this is actually true of residents of Amazonia. They too, very often,
see magnificent palaces - items which are definitely not part of the
Amazonian or South American milieu.
There is much more to say about these and other data. It seems that strong
support has been found for the hypothesis of universals which first drew
me to the study of ayahuasca. Noting again that the two lists are based on
two totally independent corpora of data, furnished from different
populations and on the basis of sessions taking place in different
settings and contexts, I allow myself to say that I find this most
remarkable. The full analysis of the data, an attempt to find a cognitive
modelling of them and a treatment of the various intriguing theoretical
and philosophical issues raised by them are the subject of a book which I
am now writing.
Beyond Data
During my stay in South America many people who knew I am a university
professor asked me whether my quest is personal or professional... The
truth is that in all my academic engagements I have never separated the
personal from the professional. Evidently , this is even more so with
respect to this ayahuasca quest. There is no question that my engagement
with this brew has had a profound personal effect on me. This is not the
place to talk about this aspect of my odyssey. At this stage and context
suffice it to say that a scientific analysis of the ayahuasca experience
along the lines indicated here constitute only one facet of the study of
this experience.
It is a most important one and it fits our Western European discourse, one
which I value very much and in which my entire life is grounded. Yet,
while attempting to advance the scientific enterprise, one should, I
believe, always keep in mind its limitations. Objective scientific
analysis is indispensable for the gaining of further understanding of the
non-standard cognitive phenomena ayahuasca presents. At the same time,
however, to have had ayahuasca and remain the Western European that one
had been beforehand amounts to having missed some of the most essential
and most precious things that the ayahuasca experience can offer. With
this, however, one finds oneself outside the domain of cognitive
psychology. One is led to the province of philosophical reflection and
metaphysical speculation as well as to realms which are very personal and
as such are beyond the context of public discourse. Some aspects of the
ayahuasca experience are beyond the realms of any discourse whatsoever.
With respect to these one can only acknowledge profound gratitude for a
most wondrous and blessed gift that one has been fortunate to be presented
with. And as Ludwig Wittgenstein has said, "What we cannot speak
about we must pass over in silence."
Benny Shanon, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Hebrew University
Mt. Scopus
91905 Jerusalem, Israel
E-mail:
msshanon@pluto.mscc.huji.ac.il
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