Where am I? Psychedelics and the Search for Self-Consciousness
Psychedelics are fundamentally changing the way that neuroscientists view the brain, can they help lead the way in the quest to find the basis of self-consciousness?
In September of 1848, a group of construction workers were tamping down blasting powder with 3cm thick iron rods when an accident sent a rod through the skull of the foreman, Phineas Gage. The rod entered the roof of his mouth and exited through his frontal lobe with immense force.
Thirty minutes after the incident a physician arrived to the victim calmly sitting in a chair, fully conscious, with a gaping hole in his head. Gage calmly told the physician, while covered in blood, “Here is business enough for you.” Gage lived until 1860, another 12 years.
Extraordinary mental changes followed. Before the incident, Gage was described as a balanced, hard-working, and favorable foreman. Afterwards, the physician reported profound mental instability, writing, “The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity.”
