The Brain without Organs: Ayahuasca and the Theory of Neural Regression

Prelude:

“A BwO [Body without organs] is made in such a way that it can be occupied, populated only by intensities. Only intensities pass and circulate. Still, the BwO is not a scene, a place, or even a support upon which something comes to pass; it produces and distributes them in a spatium that is itself intensive, lacking extension. […] Matter equals energy. Production of the real as an intensive magnitude starting at zero. That is why we treat the BwO as the full egg (fertilized egg*) before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata; as the intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds, by dynamic tendencies involving energy transformation and kinematic movements involving group displacement, by migrations: all independent of accessory forms because the organs appear and function here only as pure intensities […] ‘No organ is constant as regards either function or position… sex organs sprout anywhere… rectums open, defecate and close… the entire organism changes color and consistency in split-second adjustments.’The tantric egg.”¹
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

It was Antonin Artaud who discovered and named the body without organs: “The body is the body/ it stands alone/ it has no need of organs/ the body is never an organism/ organisms are the enemies of bodies.”²

Creative acts in the form of poetry, sculpture, architect, film and website design are some examples of the process of estrangement or ostranenie as defined by the great Russian literary theorist Viktor Shklovsky to explain the aesthetic emotion and pleasure of forms when they become delinked from habit and instead perform unprecedented and unexpected deviations. “And so, in order to return sensation to our limbs, in order to make us feel objects, to make a stone feel stony, man has been given the tool of art. The purpose of art, then, is to lead us to a knowledge of a thing through the organ of sight instead of recognition. By ‘estranging’ objects and complicating form, the device of art makes perception long and ‘laborious’.”³ Aesthetic practice must awaken forms from the slumber of the expected and normal symmetries and rhythmic lullaby of convention. It allows for a “regress to a non-specified and non-codified state of bodies without organ.”⁴ I want to push this idea of the BwO further in light of the mutated observer in our moment of cognitive capitalism in which a situated and self-reflective form of understanding predominates.⁵ I want to speak about the Brain without Organs (BrWO): an entity that is indeterminate and malleable. The BrWO is in a constant state of becoming and regression trending towards a non-organismic duration space/time in paroxysm resulting intermittently in an expression of pure pluripotentiality. Tracing Deleuze’s idea of the body without organs and superimposing it upon a notion of the brain, one could say that the fact that the brain without organs does not lack modules, hubs and verifiable cognits, it simply lacks the organism, that is a particular organization of organs. The Brain without Organs is an indeterminate organ and the neuralplasticity is its agency. One could also say that our neural plastic potential is a form of the common currently under the assault by neoliberalist politics and its apparatuses; private and corporate ownership. This becomes the point of departure for this essay and becomes a spring- board upon which to launch the effect of psychedelic drugs on the brain and mind. Foundational for this text is the notion of the role of the psychedelic drugs in degenerating and retro-engineering the organization of a sculpted and politicized semiotic brain. Drugs, I argue return the Neural Bios to the Neural Zoe.

Introduction:

The essay will be divided into five parts. The first section will deal with one of the residuals of this process, the variable nervous system. I want to delve into the implications of this polymorphism and variation as a place for oestranenie expression and the role of Ayahuasca in creating estranged habits of perception. When the brain and mind are the new factories of the 21st century then the reorganization of the brain and mind by either aesthetic or pharmacologic means become pathways to new forms of resistance acting to thwart the processes of subjectivization that semiocapitalism instigates. I want to also include how psychedelic drugs might sample the brain’s variation, first by providing excess agency at the neural synaptic cleft in the form of serotonic agonists and, secondly, through altering habits of perception themselves leading to new forms of attention. In cognitive capitalism the attention economy is essential to the production of valorization and its neurobiological analogue, salience. As such, Ayahuasca’s newly found popularity might offer a reprieve from the subjugating effects of advanced data surveillance and normalization that depend upon coherent, consistent, patterned searches and interactions with the World Wide Web and its machinic algorithmic intelligence. Might this system be put in jeopardy by the effects of drugs that alter perception, produce hallucinations, drive the mind back into itself in self-reflective contemplation? Ayahuasca’s effect upon divergent thinking and enhanced mindfulness-related capacities are cases in point.⁶ All of which skew the effects of algorithmically generated Google filter bubble that affect our free choices and the production of a future full of chance encounters. As we will see further on, hallucinogenic drugs reopen the future that has been denigrated in cognitive capitalism. Folded into this section, I will unpack the concepts I have called the Neural Zoe and the Neural Bios. I want to suggest that the Primary Repertoire, the architecture of the brain at birth, is linked to the former term and the Secondary Repertoire, the experienced brain, to the latter.⁷ In the second section, I will analyze the metaphor of the BrWO through a deterritorialization and reterritorialization of the concepts of Neural Darwinism and Neural Constructivism, which describe the development of the early childhood brain and mind. In the third section I want to introduce the concept of Neural deregulation and Neural regression as terms through which we might understand how psychedelic drugs interact with the brain producing, as an aftermath, a brain without organs or BrWO; returning it to a state where new neural connections and the thoughts, they help make possible, are again imaginable. In other words, the Neural bios or the politicized brain is returned to its natural state, before its reorganization, as the, so-called, Neural Zoe. I will speculate that the use of Ayahuasca has neurotrophic effects as well as stimulating what is known as the 5-HT 2A receptor. Agonists like Ayahuasca acting at this receptor on apical dendrites of pyramidal cells, especially in the pre-frontal cortex, mediate its hallucinogenic activity. In the past two decades, it has become clear that what is necessary for the hallucinogenic effect is what is called 5-HT2A+mGlu2 receptor dimer activation which when activated leads to an intracellular cascade which precipitates the hallucinogenic action.⁸ Whatever the case may be this hallucinogenic state is a temporary psychic state, which leaves memory traces of an interaction with an alternative consciousness. Its reported positive long-term effects may be result a result of the above two conditions working together. We will delve into this more deeply later but for now its neural plastic effects affect the architecture and communication between neurons especially existing neural circuits that mediate maladaptive behavior. Its therapeutic effect is the result of stimulating new circuits supporting new behaviors, so called, rewiring of the brain’s reward pathways.⁹ In the fourth section I will unpack the role of the prefrontal cortex in modulating top-down and bottom up information flows. I will draw attention to the changing understanding of the prefrontal cortex as a modulator of information flow and will further delineate the implications of this new role. Finally in the fifth section I will theorize on the relation of Ayahuasca to deregulating and emancipating the brain from the oppression of the prefrontal cortex.

I want to suggest that the emancipation of neural architecture from its plan and program by Ayahuasca and its subsequent reengineering is a means with which to build a concept of neural regression. Like psychic regression, neural regression describes the ways and means that the functions of higher cortical centers are depressed allowing for the expression of formerly repressed lower centers. This hierarchy was the result of changes taking place during the evolution of the brain in which higher centers involved in language, attention, and prognostication subsumed earlier regions involved in hormonal regulation, sleep, and emotional memory. I want to suggest that the therapeutic reimagining mentioned above is the seed to understanding how one might transform cultural emancipation into neural deregulation.

Part 1:
The Variable Nervous System

I would like to suggest that key to the brains pluri-potentiality, is its variation made manifest in its adjustable population of nervous elements and undetermined or labile, potential synapses. This array is constituted as the primary repertoire and results, through interaction with an unspecified and evolving culture milieu, in the secondary repertoire. Key to what follows is that this variation is a source of exit from the conundrum of absolute control in the moment of the ‘Society of Data’ in which engaging images create data by engaging user attention to produce likes on Facebook and Instagram. The ‘Society of Data’ is the latest manifestation of the Society of the Spectacle.

I agree with Joaquin M. Fuster who suggests “perhaps, among the ‘degrees of freedom’ of the statistical variance in the cortex hides one of the reasons for the freedom of the human mind.”¹⁰ He argues that variance in the brain is a necessary condition for plasticity, development, and emergence of new functions. Variance plays a role similar to the one it plays in evolution for the following reasons: 1) Selection among variance leads to the emergence of traits in evolution as well as the brain; and 2) These patterns are biologically adaptive for the species as well as the individual.¹¹ As Olaf Sporns puts it, “The indeterminacy of the information content of world objects and events is matched by the structural variability of animal nervous systems, at many levels of organization.”¹² This variation occurs at many levels in the nervous system including the number of synapses, their forms, the number of neurons, the patterns of neurochemical distribution, the sequence of events at the growing tip of growth cones and the consequent variation of structure due to learning.¹³ Essential here is to understand where, in other systems, variation can represent noise which degrades performance, the opposite is true in selectional and constructivist systems, which propose that the brain’s variable population of neural elements with variable characteristics and tuning personalities allows for a differential response to an unknown environment. In a variable population of neurons with variable characteristics, there occurs differential amplification of those elements most in synch with the environmental contingencies and cell death, apoptosis, for those elements, which are not¹⁴ Those populations are selectively stabilized and they go on to create other connections with other like selected populations of neural elements which result in the building of the brain’s architecture. What produces this variable environment that is always calling out to different populations of like minded neural elements? Art, architecture, cinema, poetry, and now Internet art are sources of disparity and difference. I am calling for another way to understand the avant-garde drive to express the new. I am suggesting the generation of novelty is a means through which art can alter the architecture of the brain while not forgetting the recuperating capacity of neo-liberal capitalism to reverse that.

Either way, the development of brain networks does not involve brain processes alone, neural mechanisms for learning and plasticity allow for the developing brain to extract statistical regularities occurring in the environment. These uniformities can be partly the result of sensorimotor interactions between the learning organism and the surrounding physical and social world.¹⁵ Today these uniformities and effects are predominately structured not by nature, but by sovereign culture, designing the urban and virtual spaces and temporalities. As Manuel DeLanda says, homogeneous states are highly unlikely states that are man made not nature made. They result in intense pressures that sculpt, in this case, first the environment and then the neural plastic potential.¹⁶ As we now know from the writings of Jacques Rancière in his now famous book The Politics of Aesthetics, the ‘distribution of the sensible’or ‘le partage du sensible’ as the ’implicit law governing the sensible order that parcels out places and forms of participation in a common world by first establishing the modes of perception within which these are inscribed.’¹⁷ Implicit in this statement is that sovereignty, the entity, whether absolute or popular, local or global, that has jurisdiction over a territory or group of people, produces a system of perceptual facts that are regulated and, in turn, regulate its constituents as perceptual bodies molding them into a concrete and uniform entity.¹⁸ Seen from this perspective, institutional regimes structuring the distribution of sensibility might create a normalized population through regulating and homogenizing the designed space and, as a result the neural architecture that couples with it. Artists, on the other hand, might deregulate this distribution adding to its variability through invented processes, which estrange and derange its readability and comprehension. Think here about the power of DADA, post-colonial art practices, Feminist art of the 1970’s, Situationism and Surrealism, to transform the cultural habitus and by its additions its variability and complexity.

What would be the mechanism for such a thought? How would different populations of neurons with different tuning capabilities be called to respond by altering the environment in which they operate. To understand this, we need to understand two concepts: epigenesis and selective stabilization. Let’s go through each term individually as they will important for what is to come.

Epigenesis as it pertains to the sculpting of the brain is a series of post-natal events in which the network’s activity is shaped through its interaction with the environment and so “the epigenetic selection of synapses represents learning in the network as the organism is shaped to fit its environment. In this sense, learning can be considered as a Darwinian process, because it depends on elimination of the unfit synapses.”¹⁹ But the story does not end here, because along with this pruning or cell death is also the possibility for expansion and growth. After all, the brain greatly enlarges from its size at birth to its adult form. According to Marc Jeannerod, “If a synapse belongs to a circuit in frequent use, it tends to grow in volume, its permeability increases and its efficacy increases. Inversely, a little-used synapse tends to become less efficacious.”²⁰ The post-natal period is a complex time that produces individuals who are different from each other as a result of their variable lived experiences, which through different histories of neural intensification and synchronicity produces variable brains. Let us look deeper into epigenesis through its effect on a variable nervous system with the hope of looping back into a discussion of the power of art and Ayahuasca to affect the morphology of the brain’s architecture. Key to understanding the importance of the variable nervous system is the idea of selective stabilization. Massive overproduction of synapses occurs in infancy and these may be later incorporated in what are called functional networks where pruning occurs. Many of these synapses are labile or unspecified and electrically silent. Electrically silent means that they are without electrical activity under normal physiological conditions and have not yet been incorporated into functioning circuits. Repeated high frequency electrical stimulation caused by a recurring and important stimulus in the environment deems this afferent input important and transforms them into functioning units according to Changeux theory of synapse specification and validation.²¹ Those synapses so stimulated become stabilized and specified and therefore selected for whilst those which have not been incorporated into circuits become eliminated. Changeux proposed that the inclusion of a synapse into a functioning network is dependent upon the environment and its input and that this process of inclusion is referred to as functional validation.²² Those synapses that are validated are stabilized and those that are not regress. What then of art and Ayahuasca. It is tenable that the estranged distribution of the sensible either as a result of artistic or drug-induced interventions could wake up dormant, unspecified silent synapses, and thus validate them. Fields of replicated gestalts, affordances, and designed stylistic conceits organized in institutionally designed space have the power to stabilize networks of unspecified synapses, as do artistic interventions. Styles and fashion in art practices create these replicated spaces in their own times but also across generations.

Part 2:
Revisiting the Body Without Organs (BrWO) in Relation to Cultural Memory

“We come to the gradual realization that the BwO [Body without Organs] is not at all the opposite of the organs. The organs are not its enemies. The enemy is the organism. The BwO is opposed not to the organs but to that organization of the organs called the organism.”²³

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari

What is a BwO? It is a body that is totally unfixed like a ter- atoma or a body of heterodoxy. It is a body in which the organization of its organs—from its intimate cellular structure to its relationship with other organs to its relationship to the entire organism-are free from the despotism of the body’s overall plan. In other words, it is free of the rules and regulations of the specific apriori-program situated in the DNA code. It utilizes its different pathologies as methodologies of escape and defense against this evolutionary dictatorship. It is the hypochondriacal body in which part of the body denied. It is the schizo-body in a state of catatonia. It is the masochistic body who ‘has its sadist or whore sew it up; the eyes, anus, urethra, breasts, and nose are sewn up. It has itself strung up to stop the organs from working, flayed, as if the organs clung to the skin, sodomized, smothered, to make sure everything is sealed tight.”²⁴ In other words it is a body that is remade into another image of itself and which functions according to other codes of disorder and anarchy. It implies, therefore, a body still neutral that can become anything within reason or unreason. But, the Body without Organs is also a brain in a state of incessant remapping of its own neural connective logics as a result of the continual reconfiguration of its materiality and immaterial relations; its static hardware and dynamic moment-to-moment resonances. Neuroplasticity is a property of the human nervous system that allows the genetically inscribed hardwiring of the brain to become something else. That “something else” as we will see shortly, results from the unfolding of these genetic predispositions in the context of an evolving cultural disposition that alters it. As Peter R. Huttenlocher, the late pediatric neurologist at the University of Chicago, so eloquently expressed it: “While neural plasticity probably exists in the nervous system of all species, it appears to be most marked in specific regions of [the] human cerebral cortex, in areas that subserve the so-called higher cortical functions, including language, mathematical ability, musical ability, and executive functions.”²⁵

The brain is an organ that adheres to both genetic and somatic evolution. Everyone is familiar with genetic evolution, a process that, in the case of humans, takes place over more than a million years and is inscribed in changes at the level of the DNA of the chromosome. Somatic evolution describes the changes that occur in the human body or brain in the course of a lifetime. Both processes determine the brain’s anatomy.²⁶ The brain’s blueprint, or plan, is inscribed in the genetic DNA, and the brain unfolds according to it. But that unfolding is in a cultural context. The brain’s plasticity allows it to be modified by the environment, be it natural or cultural, within its lifetime. Those somatic changes that occur die with each person. Cultural memory—as it is deposited in the cultural landscape through cultural labor as art works, design products, and buildings—is a repository for the effects of this somatic evolution, and expresses, in analogue or digital fashion, the details of the collective brain’s effort. In other words, artists of all sorts inspired by the immaterial conditions of their epoch create works of art that are deposited, for instance, in and around architecture as cultural memory.

The struggle of expressing their collective voice and having it displayed are always acts of contestation that have implications for future generations. The residue of these cultural effects, produced by a social body—not just artists but game designers, filmmakers, industrial designers, urban planners and so forth and so on—, reflect, in total, the real and immaterial conditions of their peer group, which are displayed in various materials and formats and are important for the sculpting of brains in future generations. This reflects sovereignty’s new found biopower in cognitive capitalism its so- called neuropower. The desiring individual body molded by biopower in the industrial age has now been switched for a population of valorized brains molded by neuropower in the information age. As we saw above this molding activates and deactivates the neural processes of these brains. This process continues ad infinitum as the products of somatic evolution sculpt each successive generation.

Is the question that Deleuze and Guattari ask in A Thousand Plateaus, “How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” a cry for a kind of emancipatory gesture?²⁷ In other words, how might the body and the brain release itself from the bonds of any particular despotic organization, be it the society, the Catholic Church or psychoanalysis or all three bundled together? How can a politicized body epigenetically sculpted through its experience with the social, political, psychological, spiritual and economic relations elaborated by sovereignty be turned back to its original moment of pluri-potential, neuroplastic exuberance? How can the fixed brain return to a brain unspecified? What I would like to suggest is that a form of neural regression takes place in which the organized brain the Neural Bios or political brain informed by language, returns to its unconditional status as the Neural Zoe. Perhaps it is only for a few hours as a result of Ayahuasca inebriation or maybe for a lifetime.

Part 3:
Neural Emancipation and Neural Regression in Cognitive Capitalism

In cognitive capitalism the material brain and the mind are the new factories of the 21st century. Cognitive capitalism is defined by an early and late phase. Its early phase, which commences around 1975 according to Yann Moulier-Boutang, demarcates the moment when industrial capital gives way to informational and semiotic capitalism.²⁸ Early cognitive capitalism heralds a mutation of post-Fordist capitalist accumulation with its emphasis on flexploitation of labor processes and flexible specialization, just-in-time production and consumption, rapid acceleration in the pace of product innovation, faster product turnover times, computer and robotic interventions, valorization and financialization of capital, and communicative capitalism. Late cognitive capitalism is also known as the cognitive turn in cognitive capitalism and commences around the turn of this century.²⁹ Labor itself is predominately mental in nature and is located in the ‘factory of the brain.’ In a world in which the predominate forms of labor are intellectual and service oriented, the machinery of the brain takes on added importance as a locus of capitalistic adventurism and speculation. As such, various interdisciplinary approaches have been engaged to understand its logics including cognitive neuroscience, behavioral economics and epigenetics. It is defined by three conditions two of which are important for us here. Neuropower in which a population of bodies are administered through actions upon the brains neuroplasticity, specifically its static and dynamic network conditions, is clearly the most important for us as it creates a bridge through which we will better understand the Brain Without Organs. My point of departure for the latter part of this essay will suggest that Ayahuasca deregulates the organism and its overall organization and rekindles the neuroplastic ‘spirit.’

Before doing this, I want to give an example of how the brain is transformed and how it is truly a Brain without Organs. The following examples of the plasticity of the cerebral cortex delineate my theory of the brain as an organ without “organization” as Deleuze understood it and subject to modulation. There are examples of development which show that under special laboratory conditions the brain can become delinked from its DNA prescribed unfolding. The following examples will describe how the cerebral cortex is an undifferentiated organ subsumed in its developmental trajectory by the input it receives from the environment during critical periods of development. “The critical period is the time during post natal development when the development and maturation of brain functions such as sensory processing or language is particularly dependent upon and shaped by experience or environmental influences. In the absence of appropriate stimulation during this period, the affected function(s) may not develop at all, or not develop properly.”³⁰

Especially relevant is what is called cross-modal plasticity between the auditory and visual cortex. If retinal projections are induced to project to the auditory cortex after selective destruction of the visual cortex, the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) (the normal target of retinal projections) as well as the medial geniculate nucleus (MGN) (the normal target of the auditory inputs) undergo astounding mutations. Retinal projections will reroute themselves to the MGN and from there to the auditory cortex where it will transform the normal auditory cortex into a visually responsive one. The auditory cortex becomes orientation and direction selective as well as becoming binocular! Furthermore, the earlier auditory cortex developed a two-dimensional retinal map.³¹ Clearly, the cortex of the brain is malleable.

The second example describes the plasticity of the visual cortex and the treatment of Amblyopia, an ophthalmologic condition occurring in two percent of the population. Amblyopia is defined clinically as a reduced visual acuity, despite optimal refraction and in the absence of any other persisting ocular pathology. It is due to the disruption of normal visual development in childhood and is accompanied by one or more known amblyogenic factors, such as strabismus (crossed eyes), anisometropia (different refractive errors in the two eyes greater then 2.5 diopters) and cataract.³² The resulting double vision leads to blindness in the effected eye due to the maldevelopment of the structure and function of the visual cortex. Two important components of plasticity influence critical periods of cortical maturation, especially those concerned with reversing the effects of strabismus. The first is the functioning of the NMDA or N-Methyl-D-Aspartate, a glutamate receptor and ion channel protein which regulates Na+, K+ and Ca++ flow into cells, depolarizing the neurons membrane potential. Opening the flood gates controlled by the NMDA receptors leads to increased intracellular concentrations of Na++ in the post-synaptic membrane, leading to long term potentiation (LTP) or in some cases LTD, long term depression. These are both considered long-term cellular correlates of learning and memory. The second is the GABAergic intracortical inhibitor, which fine tunes neurotransmission. These two factors have the potential to affect the time course of the critical period for development of visual acuity and visual deprivation caused amblyopia or blindness which is normally limited and inflexible occurring from a few months to eight years. Infusion into the visual cortex of the GABA agonist Diazepam restores the neuroplasticity that was previously shut down after the termination of the critical period. Recent research into the tissue plasminogen activator (tPA), an extracellular protease, has been shown to reactivate structural plasticity as well. Fluoxetine, also known as Prozac, a selective serotonin uptake inhibitor, is a promising treatment for amblyopia as it reactivates cortical plasticity.³³ Ayahuasca, do not forget, is related to Serotonin. In fact, Ayahuasca has been shown to stimulate neurotrophic and transcription factors associated with synaptic plasticity. Its regular use has been shown to thin the posterior cingulate cortex, which sits behind the frontal cortex directly above the corpus callosum and is involved with emotion, learning and memory. It is an important area for the default mode network (DMN), which manages the resting state of the brain when it is not actively engaged for instance in daydreaming.³⁴ Ayahuasca causes a significant decrease of activity in most parts of the DMN and its connections.³⁵

The second component of the cognitive turn in cognitive capitalism concerns regulating the efficiency of the brain and its cognitive labor. In cognitive capitalism, where the brain and mind are the new factories of the twenty-first century, it behooves neural capitalism to make the cognitive labor of the cognitariat more efficient. After all, ‘Time means Money’. As this is not directly related to my inquiry here I refer the reader to my essay “Epigenetic Architecture and the Statisticon” published in Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism Part 2.³⁶ The last factor of late stage cognitive capitalism is the importance of the capacities of the prefrontal cortex in cognitive capitalism, specifically its abilities in regards to attention, forecasting and working memory. These abilities are essential and necessary components to achieve success in the new economy. This was mentioned earlier. Additionally, the frontal cortex is also the perfect metaphor with which to understand the coordinating and modulating conditions of power in the semio- capitalism first described by Giles Deleuze’s in his breakthrough essay Postscript on the Society of Control. The extensive hierarchical spaces of enclosure that Michel Foucault described as the hallmarks of the Disciplinary Society have given way to a system of omnipresent intense modulations characteristic of the Society of Control. “Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.” Furthermore, “In the societies of control […] what is important is no longer a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password. Meanwhile, disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses, samples, data, markets, or “banks.”³⁷ This transition from the disciplinary society to the society of control mimics the evolution of our understanding of how the prefrontal cortex operates as well. Just as our comprehension of our expanded and accelerated cultural habitus has transitioned into one which is distributed and networked so to has our understanding of the brain as a networked entity comprising static and dynamic functional processes. In the past twenty years, science has discovered that rather than an organ specifically using top-down disciplinary apparatuses and processes the prefrontal cortex is an organ of modulation and dividuation. The prefrontal cortex manages everything through bidirectional flows, modulating inputs from the rest of brain and sending back coded messages that affect, for instance, the saliency of inputs. Salience refers to whether sensory inputs are considered important enough to be paid attention to and has implications for what becomes remembered. Let us look deeper into this as it will be important in our understanding the effects of Ayahuasca.

Part 4:
Top-down and Bottom-up Processing in the Transition from Fordism-Post-Fordism to Cognitive Capitalism

Recent discoveries in neuroscientific research has pressured a change in what was formerly called the classical view of the brain function, in which the brain acted as a passive stimulus-driven-device, simply reacting to sensory inputs, to a model in which it is actively engaged in creating “action-oriented pointers.”³⁸ This new appreciation of the brain’s relationship with the world requires an understanding of the increased importance of top-down processing in addition to bottom-up processing. Abstract concepts concerned with, for instance, expectations based on experience centered in the forebrain and pre-frontal cortex modulate future actions and behaviors by deciding which information streaming in from downstream sensorial and perceptual systems located in the posterior portion of the brain is salient. Today neural synchrony is thought to play a role in this process as those populations of neurons that are made to resonate together harmoniously, temporally binding themselves together as ensembles, “The model assumes that neural synchrony […] is crucial for object recognition, response selection, attention and sensorimotor integration. Synchrony imposed from above enhances the saliency of neural responses, because correlated discharges have a much stronger impact on neuronal populations than temporally disorganized inputs.”³⁹ Neural Capitalism directly intervenes with the brains’ material character by intensifying certain inputs by synchronizing them, which plays is important for memory consolidation.⁴⁰

Ayahuasca has been shown to affect this system in two important ways. First of all, it disrupts neural hierarchies by reducing top-down control and increasing bottom-up information streaming. It has been shown that Ayahuasca decreases anterior-to-posterior information flow, from the prefrontal cortex to the sensorial brain located in the parietal cortex, while, at the same time, increasing the flow in the opposite direction, towards the now debilitated frontal cortex. In this case the prefrontal cortex is no longer modulating the information as it normally does and there is therefore an expanding tsunami of sensory impulses made available to consciousness.⁴¹

Bayesian inference models postulate that the subjective experience of reality emerges from the dynamic interaction between bottom-up or feed-forward sensory information and top-down or feedback projections that interpret incoming signals based on previous knowledge and expectation.⁴² In this theoretical framework, the frontal cortex is at the top of the hierarchy, sending downward projections that modulate incoming information according to a series of constraints.⁴³ We know that the frontal cortex was the last lobe of the brain to evolve and its processes are considered those that make us distinctly human. This denigration of inputs, from the frontal executive modulatory cortex and the resulting increase in the parietal input, leads to a type of thinking called divergent rather than convergent. Divergent thinking consists of having to solve a problem from the many possible solutions that are available at a particular time. A good example of divergent thinking is brainstorming. The frontal cortex is an important source of convergent thinking where upon a single optimal solution is generating. By suppressing the normal modulating activities of the frontal cortex upon the bottom-up data streams from the posterior cortex Ayahuasca promotes divergent thinking.

Part 5:
Phylogeny and Neural Regression

I would like to close this discussion with something I would like to call materialist regression in contrast to psychic regression. The famous neurologist John Hughlings Jackson influenced by the pioneering work of the philosopher Herbert Spencer, and specially his book The Principles of Psychology, invented the idea of dissolution. Spencer had postulated that the human mind could only be understood from a phylogenetic perspective in which consciousness illustrated the general principle of evolution, from which the human mind evolved from simple undifferentiated homogeneous automatic responses found in lower organisms to differentiated, heterogeneous complex ones. “Spencer envisaged the evolutionary change of neural structures toward higher complexity as a process of stratification or layering of neural formations. Thus, each neural formation of the nervous system not only represents impressions and experiences of the individual’s past, but also those of its ancestors.” From a neurological perspective, this would mean that a lesion at a higher cerebral level exposes neural and mental functions from an earlier evolutionary stage.⁴⁴

Jackson’s theory of dissolution took the opposite approach. He suggested that neurological lesions that decreased the function of a higher center, like a tumor or blood clot, released previous evolutionary structures and capacities in lower centers that were now freed from top-down control to express themselves. It has now been proven by recent neuro-imaging studies that the rostral caudal axis of the brain is hierarchically organized. The frontal cortex does affect the more primitive caudal sensorial brain of the parietal lobe. In fact it has been shown that Ayahuasca exerts considerable inhibition upon frontal lobe structures and thus loosens the cognitive grip by which the frontal cortex exerts control over the system of saliency. “Intelligent behavior presupposes that a cognitive system can detach itself to varying degrees from the current stimulus situation, and select—in agreement with intrinsic goals and motivational states—only those inputs that are meaningful for the control of action.⁴⁵

Released from the despotism of the frontal lobes and prefrontal cortices modulatory tone, the bottom-up strategies of information overload can leave its mark in emergent patterns of becoming. It was suggested that the higher excitability of posterior regions, in combination with the loosening of the cognitive grip exerted by frontal regions responsible for executive control, may underlie the associations and insights that emerge during the experience called divergent thinking.⁴⁶ I am wagering that this, in fact, leads to the condition of dissolution that Hughlings Jackson referred to. It is also relevant that this phylogenetic perspective was also incorporated in Freudian theories of regression in which, like the brain, the ego formation was formed phylogenetically according to the logics of developmental stages from the oral, to anal to genital. During periods of stress, in which unacceptable impulses unveiled themselves, the patient regressed or temporarily reverted to an earlier more comfortable psychosexual level in order to avert anxiety, alienation and neurosis. This idea of regression finds its way also into the literature of Ayahuasca, most notably the work of Stanislav Grof and his Beyond Death: The Gates of Consciousness, where he states “Some experiences belonging to this category can be interpreted as regression in historical time and exploration of one’s own biological or spiritual past. It is not infrequent in psychedelic states to experience quite concrete and realistic episodes that take the form of foetal or embryonal memories. Many subjects have reported vivid sequences experienced on the level of cellular consciousness that seemed to reflect their existence in the form of the sperm or ovum at the moment of conception. Sometimes the regression appears to go even further, and the individual has a convinced feeling of reliving memories from the lives of ancestors, or even of drawing on the racial and collective unconscious.⁴⁷ I want to suggest that Ayahuasca’s effect of decreasing anterior-to-posterior information transfer from the frontal motor brain to the posterior sensorial brain located in the parietal cortex, while at the same time increasing the flow in the opposite direction, is, on the one hand, a form of dissolution and on the other mimics forms of regression. I want to wager that perhaps the two conditions are related and the fact that, in the case of Ayahuasca intoxication, an abundance of bottom-up information flows, the result of emancipating more primitive brain centers from frontal cortex oppression, is the reason for its effects. I want to label this as neural regression.

Part 6:
Conclusion:

I would like to conclude by summing up the actions that Ayahuasca takes on the brain, mind and consciousness as an emancipatory force. We have come to understand the capacity of Ayahuasca to return the organism to a state of lack of organization. In this regard, I created the term the Brain without Organs, echoing Gilles Deleuze’s concept of the Body without Organs. We have located an apparatus by which the body and its genetic code allots to human brains an overabundance of neural plasticity through which it can constantly reinvent itself, using processes of the deterritorialization and destabilization of labile synapses, and the reterritoriliazation of alternative populations of neural elements or cognits. We discovered that Ayahuasca has actual, direct, neurotrophic and transcriptive properties that are important to neural plasticity.⁴⁸

1. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis, MN/London: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 153.
2. Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon, The Logic of Sensation. (New York, NY/London: Continuum, 2004), 44.
3. Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose (Champaign, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 2009), 4.
4. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, And, Phenomenology of the End, Sensibility and Connective Mutation (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2015), 36.
5. Warren Neidich, Blow-Up: Photography, Cinema and the Brain (Riverside, CA: DAP and the University of California Press, 2003).
6. K. C. Kuypers, et al., “Ayahuasca enhances creative divergent thinking while decreasing conventional convergent thinking,” Psychopharmacology 233, 18 (September 2016), 3395–403.
7. Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness, How Matter Becomes Imagination (London: Penguin, 2001), 79.
8. E. Frecska, Bokor, M. Winkelman, “The Therapeutic Potentials of Ayahuasca: Possible Effects against Various Diseases of Civilization,” Frontiers in Pharmacology 7, 35 (March 2, 2016), 3
9. Ibid.
10. Joaquin M. Fuster, The Neuroscience of Freedom and Creativity, Our Predictive Brain (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 9 (Introduction).
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid., 244.
13. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).
14. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 12.
15. Ibid., 244.
16. Manuel DeLanda, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2005).
17. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics (London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2004), 12.
18. Ibid.
19. Jean-Pierre Changeux, “Synaptic Epigenesis and the Evolution of Higher Brain Functions,” in Sassone-Corsi and Y. Christen (eds.), Epigenetics, Brain and Behavior, Research and Perspectives in Neurosciences (Berlin/Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, 2012), 12.
20. Marc Jeannerod, “Foreword,” in Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), xii.
21. Peter R. Huttenlocher, Neural Plasticity, The Effects of Environment on the Development of the Cerebral Cortex (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 5.
22. Ibid., 192
23. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Ibid. 158
24. Deleuze and Guattari, Ibid. 150.
25. Huttenlocher, Ibid., 5.
26. Terrance Deacon, “Multilevel Selection and Language Evolution,” in Bruce H. Weber and David J. Depew (eds.), Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin Effect Reconsidered (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): “[…] The most extensive modification to take place in human brain evolution—the disproportionate expansion of the cerebral cortex, and specifically of the prefrontal cortex—reflects the evolutionary adaptation to this intensive working memory processing demand imposed by symbol learning. So the very nature of symbolic reference, and its unusual cognitive demands when compared to nonsymbolic forms of reference, is a selection force working on those neurological resources most critical to supporting it. In the context of a society heavily dependent on symbol use—as is any conceivable human society, but no nonhuman societies—brains would have been under intense selection to adapt to these needs. […] This, then, is a case of selection pressure affecting the evolution of a biological substrate (the brain) and yet which is imposed, not by the physical environment, but ultimately from a purely semiotic realm.”
27. Deleuze and Guattari. Ibid. 149.
28. Yann Moulier-Boutang, Cognitive Capitalism (London: Polity, 2011), 9.
29. Warren Neidich, The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism, Part 2 (Berlin: Archive Press, 2013), 18.
30. 30 Frank Sengpiel, “Plasticity of the Visual Cortex and Treatment of Amblyopia,” Current Biology 24, 80 (September 22, 2014), R936–R940.
31. Mark H. Johnson and Michelle de Haan, Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience: An Introduction, Fourth Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons Ltd., 2015), 70.
32. Sengpiel, Ibid.
33. Ibid., R936.
34. J. C. Bouso, F. Palhano-Fontes, A. Rodríguez-Fornells, S. Ribeiro, R. Sanches, J. A. Crippa, J. E. Hallak, D. B. de Araujo, J. Riba, “Long-term use of psychedelic drugs is associated with differences in brain structure and personality in humans,” European Neuropsychopharmacology 25, 4 (April 2015), 483–92.
35. Fernanda Palhano-Fontes, et al., “The Psychedelic State Induced by Ayahuasca Modulates the Activity and Connectivity of the Default Mode Network”, PLoS One 10, 2 (February 18, 2015).
36. Neidich. Ibid.
37. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter 1992), 4–5.
38. Andreas K. Engel, Pascal Fries, Wolf Singer, “Dynamic predictions: Oscillations and predictions in top-down processing,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, 704–716 (October 2001), 75.
39. Ibid.
40. Gerald Edelman and Giulio Tononi, Consciousness, How Matter Becomes Imagination (London: Penguin, 2001), 79.
41. Joan Francesc Alonso, Sergio Romero, Miquel Àngel Mañanas, Jordi Riba, “Serotonergic Psychedelics Temporarily Modify Information Transfer,” International Journal of Neuropsychopharmacology 18, 8 (April 27, 2015).
42. K. J. Friston, “The Disconnection Hypothesis,” Schizophrenia Research 30,
43. Alonso, et al., Ibid.
44. Gerald Wiest, “Neural and Mental Hierarchies,” Frontiers in Psychology 3, 516 (November 26, 2012).
45. Engel, et al., Ibid.
46. Alonso, et al., Ibid.
47. Stanislaus Grof, Beyond Death: The States of Consciousness (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980), 29.
48. Bouso et al., Ibid.