MDMA is an empathy-inducing drug
rarely researched due to its illicit status under Federal Law. As a student in
Behavior and Environment, I seek to find solutions to the disparity between our
current environmental behavior and the behavior required to cope with a looming
natural resource shortage. As I currently understand, if we are to become more
environmentally conscious as a species, we must alter our connection with
nature and our surroundings, so that instead of seeing ourselves as separate
from nature, we understand ourselves to be a part of nature. With an
understanding that nature and us are one and the same, we can naturally begin
mending our abusive relationship to the environment. We will supposedly enact
less selfish behaviors, and display more of a loving/kindness relationship to
other life forms. I propose that achieving this state of empathy could be
accelerated through the use of psychoactive empathogens, such as MDMA. Medical
research is at its infancy, but anecdotal observations coupled with scientific
understanding of perception may shed light on the benefits of MDMA therapy to
help heal our abusive relationship to the environment.
Through my observations, one of the
most pronounced misunderstood side effects of MDMA consumption is blurred
vision and disparity in visual fields. Users frequently comment on their
trouble seeing things clear enough to decipher variability in objects or
between object and background. Users also notice that they are seeing double,
as if their right and left eyes cannot unify their separate visual fields to
create a unified cohesive perception of their surroundings. This experience of
partial blindness occurs in unison with the drug’s main effect, empathy. The
connection between the two altered states of consciousness is poorly
understood, and cannot be easily intuited. By explaining the mechanisms
underlying visual perception, I hope to infer a link of causal necessity between
impaired vision and empathy.
Most people incorrectly assume that
visual perception works like a camera snapping images of your environment.
Instead, visual perception is a highly complex system involving several
internal mechanisms that seldom provide an accurate representation of what we
are sensing in our environment.
Visual analysis begins when light
strikes the retina. Specialized nerve cells interpret partial coherent
abstractions of specific features of the visual environment. There could be as
many as twelve different interpretations occurring simultaneously in the
retina. These interpretations are all sent to the thalamus then divided and
redirected to the visual cortex in the occipital lobe. The visual cortex is
like a bank’s headquarters. Digital currency is flowing from all over the world
through different digital streams. Each digital stream processes different
money from different accounts. The headquarters creates a projection of the
economy through the behavior it observes from monetary transactions through its
credit cards at various stores. The economic projection is not accurate, and
must account for a lot of variability and incomplete information.
Like a bank projecting the state of
the economy with big data analytics, we sense our surroundings with incomplete
visual analysis. This understanding of our environment is particularly
problematic because we trust our senses enough to believe that what we see
individually is what is actually in our environment, when in fact, each one of us
harbors a blind spot at all times, called the optic disk. The optic disk is a
region in the eye, where retinal neurons carrying visual information gather
together before moving into deep brain tissue. There are no cells that perceive
sight in the optic disk, so it is a blind spot in each eye. The brain fills in
your blind spot by evaluating all of the visual information around that spot,
and giving a prediction of what is there. So you do not have a 100% accurate
portrayal of your visual field at any given time.
It is problematic to assume that you
can accurately make sense of a 3-dimensional world with a 2-dimensional retina,
and do so with a unified visual field created from two incomplete competing
eyes. Your brain must make a ton of guesses just to approximate what in in your
environment. And after all of those guesses in milliseconds, you take your
brain’s leap of faith, rooted in your previous experience and unique underlying
knowledge system as an undoubtedly truthful understanding of what is in your
environment. You wouldn’t believe for a second that if someone else saw
differently, your eyes were wrong.
The leap of faith that our brains
make from all of the incomplete sensory data to a cohesive perceivable
understanding of our environment is the root of all bigotry. It is at this
point in visual analysis, that our individual mind has a chance to step up and
offer a guess that would most agree with our goals and motivations. We see what
we want to see, something that makes sense to who we are as individuals. If we
have had a bad experience with black people, we see them as thieves and
criminals. If we have had a bad experience with an abusive parent, we see the
world as harmful and scary. Our preconceived notions, through the visual
analysis of our incomplete sensory input, shape our conscious understanding of
our environment at the time our brain needs to guess what we cannot directly
infer.
What is particularly interesting
about MDMA, is that it prevents you from accessing your preconceived notions
about the world to guess what is out there. For once you can see clearly. You
do not see your neighbor as a different person deep down, rather you see him as
yourself. Through this bridge in individual ideologies, you can finally connect
to other forms of life and love them. You become empathetic towards suffering
and injustice, whether it is in the form of poverty or environmental
destruction. By reducing your capacity to infer what is there from your own
knowledge system, you enhance your capacity to relate to others.
Psychologically speaking, MDMA
reduces your visual capacity in order to enhance your empathetic capacity. If
you could see clearly, decipher the background from the object of focus, or
decipher an object from its variations, you would be able to easily access your
semantic network, and within a blink of an eye, mindlessly make sense of your
environment. By reducing the clarity of your vision, MDMA forces you to be
mindful. Spreading activation of neurons speeds up, but closure on a specific
internal representation is not reached mindlessly. You become more mentally
flexible, having access to thoughts and ideas you previously did not consider.
With a lack of visual unity from your separate visual fields, you maintain a
state of incompleteness, not settling on a leap of faith to guess what you
cannot infer. Your mind does not settle in on a best guess internal
representation because your individual bias is prevented from making a decision.
You see what is truly there instead of imposing your self onto what is in the
environment. Your conscious perception becomes one and the same with your
environment. There is no me, you, and the environment. There is just one
unified being.
In order to
achieve a state of environmental consciousness,
I must
Empathize with
others,
By
Losing unity of
my separate visual fields
By
Preventing
closure on an internal representation
By
Losing my
ideologies
By
Losing my
self-concept
By
Speeding up
spreading activation
By
Decreasing
variability in objects and clarity of focus
By
Blurring my
vision
By
Seeing eye to
eye
Not
Seeing I to I
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