Molecules.

Dancing in the streets.

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1. Quanta magazine interview with Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist and psychiatric researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.

DÖLEN: I think, especially now that psychedelics have become acceptable as research topics, you might find the number of neuroscientists who have always been interested in psychedelics to be larger than you might expect. It’s the dream of a serious neuroscientist to be able to get these big psychological terms — consciousness, ego — down to a single molecule or a single methyl group.

I had already had that sort of insight about psychedelics and consciousness when I was in college. I went to Duke and I had designed my own major — it was comparative perspectives on the mind. And I had this idea that, if we’re going to ask those big questions, we’re going to need some kind of breakthrough that’s going to allow us to correlate a molecular mechanism to these bigger psychological phenomenon.

And the first time I had this insight that this is the way forward was when I saw the serotonin molecule right next to the LSD molecule. And the similarity between them really convinced me that, when people are having these altered states of consciousness on psychedelics, what they’re really experiencing is one molecule binding to another molecule.

And that to me was profound because it said everything that we think of as consciousness, everything that we think of as spirituality, everything that we think of as ego, everything that we think of as vision is just molecules. (Sources: quantamagazine.org, psychedelics.berkeley.edu)