James' World 2

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As the fumes took effect, they bathed his mind in what James called “the tremendously exciting sense of … metaphysical illumination.” What stuck with him after the drugs wore off, though, was not any particular thought — which he soberly conceded as “meaningless drivel” — but the intense feeling of meaning they came packaged in. He called that sense of significance the “noetic quality” of mystical experience.

The noetic quality describes a sensation of encountering revelations of the highest order, where the secret workings of your mind and the world are unfolded before you. But as James also described, these encounters have an elusive quality that makes them difficult to communicate. And through the 20th century, mainstream psychology moved away from nebulous ideas like noeticism and meaning, in favor of variables that were more objective and observable.

Until 2006, when a landmark paper led by the late Roland Griffiths of Johns Hopkins University signaled that research on the profound sense of meaning that accompanies noetic insights was making its way back into mainstream psychology — this time by way of psychedelic drugs.

Griffiths’s study found that, two months after taking psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, two-thirds out of 30 volunteers rated their subsequent trip as one of the five most meaningful experiences of their lives. Further studies that ask the same question have pushed that number to as high as 87 percent of participants, confirming the curious fact that a group of molecules can reliably deliver on demand what the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl called the central human motivation: the search for meaning.

Despite the past two decades of research documenting the tight relationship between psychedelics and meaningful experiences, we still know surprisingly little about what’s actually going on in the brain when psychedelic-assisted meaning sets in. In a paper published earlier this year in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, psychologists Patric Plesa and Rotem Petranker pointed out that even “the best minds in psychedelic research … consistently report that psychedelics enhance a subjective sense of meaning without an explicit theory of meaning.” It’s strange that we lack a mechanical understanding of something so central to a life well lived. If we understood more about the neural mechanics of these bursts of revelation, could we learn anything about how to coax them into our sober lives more often?

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