Anatomy of a trip
Sunday mornings are spent reading the news. Sometimes they're spent catching up on news. This is how, last weekend, I was sorry to learn - and so late - that the British zoologist and ethologist Desmond Morris had died. When I was young in the UK, Desmond Morris was huge. I had found his popular science books, in particular 'The Naked Ape' inspiring when I read them already twenty years after their original publication. There's a lot I wouldn't subscribe to anymore, but it was thanks to Morris that it really dawned on me that humans are animals too. We're equipped with things that have made us fundamentally different but, all in all, the way we are made follows the same guidelines as that of any animal. In the same pile of newspapers, I also read about psilocybin, the psychedelic produced by the mushroom P.semilanceata and how it seems to cause architectural changes in the brain. Still immersed in thoughts about Desmond Morris, his art immediately sprung to mind. For, yes, he was a respected surrealist artist too, and his paintings have always reminded me, in a strange sort of way, of the cellular world. The research the magic mushroom article was referring to describes a receptor psilocybin binds to in our brain, and the anatomical effects it is said to have had on several individuals. The psychedelic binds to a receptor known as 5-HT2AR, to which serotonin usually binds.
