The Scientist: A Novel Autobiography in The Psychedelic Reading Group

Jun 24, 2011 Oldak rated it really liked it

Shelves: psychedelics

[Review contains spoilers. I haven't read this book for a couple of years, and write this review based on my impressions after this time.]

This book is fascinating not least because Lilly lived a very unusual life, but also because it is an expression of a self-confessed ketamine addict, and of a schizophrenic (Lilly was, at least, schizotypal).

Lilly went to med school, and thereafter pursued research in electrical stimulation of the brain. He describes a particular line of work in which electrod [Review contains spoilers. I haven't read this book for a couple of years, and write this review based on my impressions after this time.]

This book is fascinating not least because Lilly lived a very unusual life, but also because it is an expression of a self-confessed ketamine addict, and of a schizophrenic (Lilly was, at least, schizotypal).

Lilly went to med school, and thereafter pursued research in electrical stimulation of the brain. He describes a particular line of work in which electrodes were implanted into the brain of a mule (I think?), and could be used to control the direction of movement of the animal. The CIA took interest in this work, and planned to use this technology to remote-control mules so that they would traverse remote mountain ranges.

Lilly went on to work at the National Institutes of Mental Health in Bethesda. It was there that he began to experiment with lysergic acid diethylamide, and began to develop the floatation tank to achieve heightened psychedelic experiences through sensory deprivation. Eventually, he would be introduced to ketamine, a novel anaesthetic that exhibits psychedelic properties. Combining this dissociative drug with sensory deprivation, he began to explore the internal structure of his mind, and the scope of the use of these tools in "metaprogramming". He would eventually become an addict, dosing himself every 45 minutes for weeks at a time, losing his grasp of reality. This addiction would cause him to be briefly institutionalised, and to nearly drown. One anecdote describes him trying to bicycle down a hill in the midst of one of his ketamine binges, only to fall from the bike and break several bones. In an interview in the early 1990s, he admitted that this fall had not occurred during a ketamine binge, but rather after taking phencyclidine (PCP), a related, but much more long-lasting and neurotoxic, dissociative anaesthetic. His medic friends who had supplied him with ketamine had attempted to cut him off, after seeing the state of his health, and Lilly began taking PCP instead.

Later in life, he set up a lab in Maui, Hawaii, where he carried out work in dolphin communication. He continued to work with sensory deprivation and ketamine during this time. In his beach-side lab complex, he built a floatation tank above the dolphin tank in an attempt to gain a sense of dolphin language.

The book isn't a procedural biography, his "eccentric" ideas about the nature of reality colour his anecdotes and experiences. He describes encountering entities--angel-like beings--in a church during his childhood. As his ketamine addiction developed, he believed that the drug allowed him to communicate with alien entities. He had the impression of increasing "synchronicity", believing that he was experiencing more coincidental events, and perceiving various unrelated events to be causally related. To explain this, he developed a narrative connecting synchronicity to the entities he encountered during his ketamine experiences: they belonged to an agency which controls the occurrence of coincident events in the universe. The three entities with which he was familiar were posted at the "Earth Coincidence Control Office" (ECCO), a subdivision of the "Solar System Control Unit" (SSCU), and were contacting him as a kind-of human agent (purportedly because those entities believed him to have a certain type of open mind that they could communicate with).

Karl Jansen, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on ketamine, thinks that Lilly was schizotypal, a personality disorder in which schizophrenia-like personality features are expressed (prone-ness to delusion, seeing patterns where there aren't patterns, noticing coincidence where there is none). Ketamine addiction tends to produce a schizophrenia-like syndrome in some people, although it is unclear whether the drug is causing this to occur, or whether people who are disposed to schizophrenia or are schizotypal are more likely to be attracted to the drug, and it brings out these personality features in them. As Jansen suggests, Lilly may have been schizotypal before he ever tried ketamine, something to which his description of encountering entities as a child attests (unless these memories were confabulated).

I don't wish to medicalise Lilly, and I don't think that the possibility that he was somewhat delusional invalidates his work and his experience. However, it is interesting to consider the nature of schizophrenia when reading this book, and to try to understand the fantastical experiences he describes in the context of that neurological style.

The book is well-written and should appeal to people interested in ketamine, psychedelia, dolphin communication, neuroscience, as well as those who enjoy a well-written biography. My main criticism is that he goes a bit far with his fantastical ideation at times, such as in the first chapter where he describes his conception in a phantasmagorical mode.

Lilly is a fascinating character because his personality combines a very structured, scientific style of thinking (at least, earlier in his life), with magical, shamanic style of thinking. These personality features rarely coexist in a single person, and it is possible that they only came to coexist in Lilly because of his affair with ketamine. He is a fascinating, complicated figure, and this book provides some insight into his world. ...more

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