Your Brain
(and Body)
on Cannabis
Ancient civilizations that used cannabis placed a great deal of importance on the plant. They knew from experience what scientists have only recently discovered. While the existence of cannabinoid chemicals, the compounds that give cannabis its unique healing and psychoactive properties, was known as early as the 1940s, it wasn’t until 1964 that Dr. Raphael Mechoulam isolated THC and identified it as the main psychoactive compound. And it wasn’t until the 1980s that Mechoulam and his team identified the cannabinoid receptors in the human body and the “endocannabinoid system” (ECS), the set of receptors and internal chemicals that helps to maintain balance in quite a few organs and bodily systems.
The extent of the endocannabinoid system is still being revealed, but it has become obvious that it acts as a moderator, a control mechanism for a variety of immune, metabolic, and brain functions. Cannabinoid receptors are found not only in the brain but throughout the body with concentrations in the spinal cord and in the gut. There are two general types of cannabinoid receptor: CB1, which seems to be connected more with the “high,” and CB2, which is connected more with somatic feelings and immune processes. There are subtypes of each, though the study of these is in its infancy. In general, the function of the ECS is to maintain balance, to inhibit or excite depending on what is needed in a particular system at a particular time. The endocannabinoid system maintains homeostasis, the delicate and ever-changing balance between the processes and systems of the human body.
The ubiquity of the cannabinoid receptors throughout the human organism—and the importance of maintaining homeostasis—helps to explain the broad effects and usefulness of cannabis as medicine. It can treat quite a few ailments because the endocannabinoid system is integral to so many physical processes. Think of the ECS as being akin to the endocrine system, nervous system or cardiovascular system in importance. “Cannabinoid medicine” will likely be a medical specialty of the near future. Indeed, at the moment, the internet and libraries are loaded with both clinical information about cannabis as medicine 54 and, even more, the media is inundated with anecdotal reports of seemingly miraculous cures of various kinds. We are more concerned with magick and spiritual use here, but there is certainly some crossover between magick and healing, and we’ll explore those aspects when the time comes.
For now, let’s take a look at what cannabis does in the human brain that might be applied to either magick or healing. Again, cannabinoid receptors are found throughout the brain with concentrations in the amygdala, cerebellum, and hippocampus.
Learning and Brain Change
It was once widely believed that, after it was formed in childhood, the brain would pretty much stay the same for the rest of its life, perhaps deteriorating slowly as we age or do unhealthy things. We now know that as we learn and experience, throughout our lives, the synaptic pathways and structure of the brain change constantly. This is known as plasticity and it appears that the CB1 receptors play a crucial role in how we learn. As neurons communicate with each other via bioelectrical signals and the release of neurotransmitters, they continually monitor themselves and each other. If a cell is signaling too much or too little or releasing too much or too little of a neurotransmitter, a nearby neuron will release endocannabinoids that either activate or inhibit the action at the synapse. As the connections between neurons are either strengthened or weakened by this process, old neural pathways are extinguished and new ones are formed.55 This synaptic plasticity is controlled by the CB1 receptors, and if we are attempting to change our thought processes and ourselves via magick, this is a key process that must be accessed in the brain.
The same effects have been observed from plant-derived cannabinoids, which not only act directly on the receptors themselves but also stimulate the release of endocannabinoids at the synaptic level.56
Emotional Memory and Orientation
Large concentrations of cannabinoid receptors have been found in the amygdala, a pair of structures located on either side of the brain in the temporal lobe. The amygdala is important in processing emotional memory and in controlling memory reconsolidation. In these regions, the release of endocannabinoids appears to be the main mechanism by which emotional memories, both good and bad, are encoded or extinguished. The action of cannabinoids in these brain areas allows us to resolve and move past emotional trauma. Likewise, it may also help us to attach powerful, positive emotional states to other, more pleasant memories. Both of these processes may be useful in magick.57
There is also some indication that the amygdala is involved in creativity 58 and cannabinoids may stimulate that process.
Cannabinoid receptors also play an important role in brain areas responsible for orientation in space, including the hippocampus and the cerebellum.59 This may account for some of the body feelings that we get when we’re high, including sensations of lightness or floating.
What Was the Question?
The hippocampus is also the part of the brain that processes short-term memory. Experiences are processed in short-term memory before they are archived, as it were, in long-term memory. Cannabis is rather famous for disrupting short-term memory, and when very high, a cannabis user may lose their way in speaking full sentences, forget the most recent question asked them, or wonder just why they walked into the kitchen. While these are often humorous and sometimes annoying effects, they also may demonstrate how the cannabinoid system helps us to heal from trauma (by forgetting!) and how cannabis can help in magick and meditation: by keeping our minds in the present. Having a very short short-term memory helps to keep awareness in the moment of now.
The Default Mode Network
Human brains spend a hell of a lot of time sorting and searching. Every time we encounter a word, to some extent we have to sort through definitions and contexts and find the appropriate meaning. For example, the word “chair” can refer to many different kinds of seating equipment. In making sense of the word, our brains may flip through a few different kinds of chairs before fixing on the one that makes sense in the current context, perhaps the one that you’re sitting in now. Usually this happens too fast for the conscious mind to track, but when we start to pay attention, we can notice the process.
Exercise #1:
Think of a time when you felt really, really good.
So what happened when you attempted to recall a time when you felt really good? Most people, when encountering a vague suggestion of this kind, will find themselves recalling not just one, but at least several memories, and then comparing and contrasting for a few moments until finding one that comes closest to the criterion of “really, really good.”
If this happened to you, what you just experienced was a process called transderivational search,60 which is mediated by a feature of the human brain known to neuroscientists as the default mode network (DMN). Here’s another example:
Exercise #2:
Picture a really sexy face.
Whose face did you end up picturing? How many faces did you have to look at and adjust before you settled on that one? How quickly did the process happen?
Okay, one more for now:
Exercise #3:
What’s the most comfortable item of clothing that you own?
While the original concept of transderivational search was applied to linguistics, to the choices that we make in our words, these experiences of the DMN and sorting happen in every sense. We sort through images, voices, music, emotions, tactile feelings, and every other form of human perception and internal representation, with equal ease. And we do it, consciously or unconsciously, on and off through most of our lives.
The discovery of the DMN by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle was in part unexpected. Dr. Raichle was hoping to measure baseline activity in the brain, to provide a statistical basis to compare with experimental activities. The idea was that when it wasn’t doing anything consciously directed, the brain would power down like the hard drive in your computer, a mental screen saver would come on and the brain scans would show, in general, less activity than when the subject was working a math problem or solving a jigsaw puzzle. When Raichle and his team placed subjects in the fMRI machine with no specific instructions and scanned while they did “nothing,” he found something odd. Certain areas of the brain, including the hippocampus, midline cortical structures, and some frontal cortex structures, would hook up in a new configuration and really go to work. Raichle didn’t know what these brain areas were doing, chattering furiously to each other, but the brains were using 30 percent more energy than when the subjects were consciously working on mental activities.61
After years of study, scientists are figuring out what the DMN does. I’ll cut to the short answer, so you can sort out what I’m getting at here.
The default mode network creates reality.
Or, to state it in a wordier but more accurate way, the DMN is a physical component of the human organism that mediates the largely nonmaterial process of delineating and experiencing our world. It is the engine of sorting in the brain that also mediates some of the important processes of magick. And understanding how the DMN works in the brain can give important clues as to how to create more effective magick. I promise that after you give yourself a moment to sort through the range of things your brain wants to include as “important clues” or “effective magick,” I’ll explain what I mean.
The DMN can be thought of as an engine of narrative. It starts with active experience in the hippocampus, where the brain processes short-term memory. This can be either something that you just experienced within the last, say, half a minute, or it could be something that you remembered, the memory being shunted back to short-term memory so that you can experience parts of it again. If it is a memory, it already comes with some notes in the margin from the last time it took a tour of the DMN. The notes in the margin come in the form of sensory markers called submodalities. These are the qualities that we use to fine-tune our perceptions, for instance, brightness, dimness, volume, size, distance, location, color, movement, shape, and so on. If the narrative created by the DMN—the story of your life—were a motion picture, the submodalities would be the lighting, camera angles, and sound design that are used to convey mood, passage of time, foreshadowing, and so on. Here’s an example:
Exercise #4:
Think of two things that are objectively the same (or pretty damn similar), but you like one and not the other. For instance, oak trees versus maple trees, Toyotas versus Hyundais, Coke versus Pepsi, pullover sweaters versus button-down sweaters, and so on. The stronger your feelings of like and dislike, the better.
First think of the thing you like and make a visual representation. Look at it in your mind. Eliminate context and background, so that you are only looking at the object in question. Notice where you have to aim your eyes to look at this imagining. Point to it. Notice the colors of the image—are they rich and vibrant or dull and subtle? Notice how large you have made the image, how far away from you it is, and whether the lighting in the image is bright or dim.
Now perform the same experiment for the thing you don’t like. Notice the qualities of the representation you make. Eliminate context and background. Notice where you have to aim your eyes. Point to it. Are the colors rich and vibrant or dull and subtle? Notice how large you have made the image, how far away from you it is, whether the lighting in the image is bright or dim, if the focus is sharp or blurry, and if the image is moving or still.
Most people will notice some differences between these two internal representations. You will point to different locations or one will be larger, brighter, or more colorful than the other. Each one of us has a unique set of submodality tags that we apply, so the results of this experiment will be at least somewhat different for each person, but the lesson to be derived is that we represent images, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells to ourselves with variations that let us know crucial information about the memories or imaginings. Often these submodality differences will be reflected in metaphoric language: something very clever might be “brilliant” (have a brighter internal representation); someone you feel uncomfortable with might be “distant”; a friend with a distinctive personality might be “colorful”; a dynamic person might be represented as “larger than life”; something you don’t like “smells rotten”; and so on. In each case, the content of the memory remains fairly consistent, although some way of viewing, hearing, feeling, tasting, and smelling has been altered to convey a message. Those judgments and evaluations of perception help to adapt memories and experience into the greater narrative.
The default mode network, as the engine of narrative, is the seat of the imagination. It runs our fantasies, daydreams, visualizations, and hallucinations as tools to incorporate information into the overarching tale of our existence. The submodality choices carry emotional and evaluative information along with the tale. The way the choices are made, running through a super-position of multiple possibilities before collapsing to a single delineation, parallels the process of measurement and delineation of particles in quantum physics. In effect, each submodality nuance that our DMN attaches to a memory defines what kind of reality, what story, we inhabit. And the DMN makes those delineations quite frequently.
Except when it doesn’t. For some reason, focused attention and DMN activity are mutually exclusive. This is why your third grade teacher told you to stop daydreaming—you can’t solve an arithmetic problem while your DMN is operating. For that, you need focused attention from the prefrontal cortex, known as executive function. Normally, that kind of focused attention shuts down the DMN and, vice versa, your wandering mind can prevent focused attention.
Unless you’re high.
One of many roles of cannabinoid chemicals in the brain is moderation of the default mode network. In brain scan studies, it was observed that smoked cannabis switches on the DMN—without fully deactivating the areas of the brain involved in executive function. Which means that when you are high, you can be focused and spacey at the same time, clever and creative, productive and imaginative.62
It means that your connection to the realm of imagination, myth, legend, symbol, and magical archetype can remain active while you engage in almost any activity. The most ancient texts that mention cannabis, some thousands of years old, tell us that the herb was used to communicate with the spirit realm. No matter how often it was repeated in Chinese medical texts, Indian sacred writings, African lore, Arabic traditions, and in writings from nearly every civilization that knew of the psychoactive qualities of cannabis, the whole “spirit realm” concept was usually branded primitive superstition and soundly ignored. But now we can understand that there is a real basis for the connection between the plant and the world of thoughtforms and imagination.
As well, what we can hold in focused attention is rather limited. In the 1950s, scientists determined that our conscious awareness can hold “seven plus or minus two” pieces of information at any one time.63 However accurate that number might be, it certainly does seem that the DMN can work with quite a bit more information at any one time, including every derivation of a transderivational search, and every detail of a vast plot arc. This creates opportunity for mystical experience, for perceiving the connections and patterns between apparently disparate objects and ideas. At the extreme end of cannabis-influenced mystical experience, consider Aleister Crowley’s 1906 “Vision of the Universal Peacock”:
The “millions of worlds” game—the peacock multiform with each “eye” of its fan a mirror of glory wherein also another peacock—everything thus. (Here consciousness has no longer any knowledge of normal impression. Each thought is itself visualized as a World Peacock …) 1:20 a.m. Head still buzzing: wrote above. Samadhi is Hashish, an ye will; but Hashish is not Samadhi …64
While Crowley apparently struggled, at that early date, with the role that cannabis might play in magick, his “World Peacock” is a fine description of a cannabis revelation, including the richness and depth of information in a cosmic-scale narrative and some interesting hints as to what submodality cues Uncle Al’s brain might favor.
Let’s return to the idea of transderivational search for a moment. Every perception induces some measure of sorting through a range of similar experiences, memories, emotions, and thoughts so that our brains can delineate and attempt to make some meaning. Cannabis takes this process that usually runs below the level of conscious awareness and brings it gently into ongoing experience. That means that every moment blossoms with associations. Every thought spawns a thousand and everything you see, hear, and feel comes within a fractal, ever-changing entourage of similar images, sounds, and feelings.
Cannabis may disrupt short-term memory when you’re high (experiential evidence of its action on the hippocampus, processor of short-term memory), but the flow of narrative creation continues unabated and you may find later that your experiences are written large upon on the screen of long-term memory. Ordinary events and objects become imbued with mythic importance. Your hand becomes the symbol of the universe’s striving, a trip to White Castle becomes an epic quest, a sip of beverage becomes a peak experience, a visualized shape gains depth and form, music becomes even more moving and life-changing, and the elements of ritual exude their symbolic properties. And each perception becomes consolidated in memory with submodality markers denoting importance in the story of your life.
[It] is the Quality of this Grass to quicken the Operation of Thought it may be a Thousandfold, and moreover to figure each Step in Images complex and overpowering in Beauty, so that one hath not Time wherein to conceive, much less to utter any Word for a Name of any one of them. Also, such was the Multiplicity … that the Memory holdeth no more any one of them, but only a certain Comprehension of the Method. 65
Exercise #5:
Take a few tokes. Wait five to ten minutes for the effects to be felt. Then experiment again with the following:
1. Think of a time when you felt really, really good.
2. Picture a really sexy face.
3. What’s the most comfortable item of clothing that you own?
Now perform the same experiment with some fresh questions:
1. Think of a time when you felt as free as you ever have.
2. Picture your tallest friend.
3. What’s the most exciting movie you’ve seen in recent years?
How were these experiences different than when you first attempted them, above (that is, assuming you weren’t high when you experimented with them earlier)? What happened when you attempted this with new questions?
The Letters Game
This is a pretty simple game that makes use of some of the mental processes we’ve discussed here. It works nicely with two to four people (though it can be fun in a larger group, too, if you keep it moving rapidly). For the most fun, play a few rounds without cannabis, then get high and play a few more.
Pick a two or three letter combination, perhaps the initials of someone present. Then think of as many phrases as you can that begin with those letters. For instance, C. G. gives us crazy glue, clever girl, commanding general, code green, Cary Grant, etc. The funnier, the better. Take turns, or just shout them out when you think of them. Play for as long as you’d like.
Afterward, consider the game as an interplay between the brain’s default network (making internal lists of words, picking them out, finding matches, etc.) and problem-solving focused awareness. How was it different to play not high and then high? Which took longer to find matching phrases? Which phrases were more interesting, clever, poetic, or funny?
54. International Association for Cannabinoid Medicines, https://www.cannabis-med.org/?lng=en; Holland, 2010; Granny Storm Crow, “If the truth won’t do, then something is wrong,” Granny Storm Crow’s List (of cannabis news and studies). https://grannystormcrowslist.wordpress.com/the-list/.
55. Gerdman, Gregory L., and Jason B. Schechter. “The Endocannabinoid System.” in Holland, Julie (ed.). The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis. Park Street Press, 2010.
56. Ibid; Wolf et al. “Cannabinoid receptor CB1 mediates baseline and activity-induced survival of new neurons in adult hippocampal neurogenesis.” Cell Communication and Signaling, 2010 8:12.
57. Gerdman and Schechter, 2010.
58. Asari et al. “Amygdalar Enlargement Associated with Unique Perception.” Cortex 46 (1): 94–99, 2010.
59. Gerdman and Schechter, 2010.
60. Dilts, Robert, and Judith DeLozier. Encyclopedia of Systemic Neuro-Linguistic Programming and NLP New Coding. Scotts Valley, CA: NLP University Press, 2000.
61. Marcus E. Raichle et al. “A Default Mode of Brain Function.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 16, 2001, vol. 98, no. 2, 676–682.
62. Bossong et al. Default Mode Network in the Effects of Δ9-Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) on Human Executive Function, PLoS One, July 31, 2013.
63. Miller, G. A. “The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information.” Psychological Review. 63 (2): 81–97.
64. Crowley journal entry from OTO archive, quoted in L. Sutin, Do What Thou Wilt. St. Martin’s Press, New York. 2000.
65. Crowley, Aleister. The Book of Thoth. Samuel Weiser, Inc. York Beach, ME, 1974.