There is sometimes a tendency for people who feel passionate and enthusiastic about psychedelics – or even evangelical about them – to see their influence everywhere. When you spend a lot of time thinking about these substances, as well as using them, it’s as if the world becomes more psychedelic; nature becomes more alive, and you imagine how things would look, and how great it would be, if in a psychedelic state of mind.
A passion for psychedelics can interact with a human cognitive bias known as apophenia, which is the tendency to perceive meaningful patterns where none exist – to make connections between unrelated phenomena. Psychedelics may also enhance this apophenic tendency – both during and after the experience – which could help explain why some psychonauts become fixated on theories of how psychedelics played a crucial role in some aspect of humanity.
Of course, there are both plausible and evidence-based theories of how psychedelics influenced humanity, but these can be separated from the tendency to see this influence, in which enthusiasm can lead to belief in fringe psychedelic theories, irrespective of evidence. When this happens, however, this also doesn’t mean we should be dismissive of the tendency or theorising involved, as this openness and intellectual curiosity can lead to hypotheses that eventually are supported by evidence. On the other hand, we have good reason to be sceptical of viewing psychedelics as the ‘magic ingredient’ that made us human, when there may be less exciting (but more defensible) explanations at hand.
In this piece, I’ll be using the term ‘psychedelic apophenia’ to refer specifically to the tendency noted above, that is, apophenia about psychedelics: forming patterns out of unrelated things so that we see psychedelics' role in ‘X’. However, as we’ll see later on in the article, apophenia caused by psychedelics may be a contributing factor in this tendency.
How Psychedelic Apophenia Manifests
In my early 20s, I did a solo trip across southern and central Mexico. I visited many Maya and Aztec ruins. This was also early in my days of being interested in psychedelics, and I was aware of the influence that psilocybin mushrooms had in ancient Mesoamerica. My trip ended in Mexico City, where I visited the National Museum of Anthropology, the largest and most visited museum in Mexico, and which contains significant archaeological and anthropological artefacts from the country’s pre-Columbian heritage, such as the Stone of the Sun (or the Aztec calendar stone).
One artefact, an Aztec statue of the god Xōchipilli, includes carvings of what scholars believe to be various psychoactive plants and fungi, although there is no consensus about what plants and fungi are depicted precisely: candidates include psilocybin mushrooms (Psilocybe aztecorum), tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum), ololiúqui (Turbina corymbosa), sinicuichi (Heimia salicifolia), and cacahuaxochitl (Quararibea funebris). We know the Aztecs ceremonially used these natural psychoactives. In addition, as the scholar Osiris González Romero writes:
The expression of astonishment by the statue is palpable, intensified by the position of its face thrown back and the depth of its gaze. Viewing the statue, we are in the presence of someone who is not looking as we do everyday, who is absorbed in rapturous experience, the sacred trance of the temicxoch, what they [the Aztecs] call “The Flowery Dream.”
Legitimate scholarship can identify the psychedelic influence here, and it can lead to valid disagreements about what specific psychedelics are being symbolically depicted. But I remember walking around the museum, seeing the distinctive patterns carved onto other artefacts – which include a lot of spirals – and thinking, This must have been influenced by psilocybin. However, while we know the Maya and Aztecs used these mushrooms, the latter referring to them as teonanácatl (or "flesh of the gods"), this doesn’t mean that psychedelic experiences necessarily inspired the ‘trippy’ patterns they carved into temples and statues.
In Maya and Aztec art, spirals may represent water, waves, rain, clouds, or breath. Spirals are a widely used symbol in cultures all over the world. They are one of the most ancient symbols. They often represent aspects of nature or cycles of nature or time. While spiral-type visuals or other Maya or Aztec patterns are commonly seen in psychedelic states, this doesn’t mean that all Maya and Aztec art must have been inspired by psychedelics, just because I might perceive that as its ‘obvious’ influence. Similarly, the colourful, geometric patterns used in Islamic architecture – which many psychonauts say resemble psychedelic visions – were used for reasons nothing to do with altered states of consciousness.
I think the clearest example of psychedelic apophenia is probably Terence McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory. This theory – more accurately a hypothesis – posits that many of the key features that make us distinctly human were catalysed by the consumption of psilocybin mushrooms by our ancient ancestors. These features include our large brains, the capacity for language, and the creation of art and religion. While psychedelics could have influenced some of these features – such as religion and cave art – we don’t know that these substances are responsible for the origins of these human phenomena, which is McKenna’s contention.
(A more academically rigorous version of the Stoned Ape Theory, which makes narrower and more conservative claims, has been presented by José Manuel Rodríguez Arce and Michael James Winkelman in a 2021 paper, wherein they state our hominin ancestors likely ingested psilocybin mushrooms and that this could have conferred several evolutionary advantages, such as managing distress, enhancing social bonding, and facilitating collective ritual.)
Theories that view a psychedelic influence in Christianity are widely embraced. These include Brian Muraresku’s theory that the Christian Eucharist is rooted in the consumption of a psychedelic brew, inherited from the Eleusinian Mysteries. This idea has garnered more attention and support than John Marco Allegro and Jan Irvin’s theories, owing to Muraresku’s highly successful book The Immortality Key (2020). But, as writer Ed Prideaux points out, his theory is built on shaky ground.
An example of a psychedelic apophenic tendency would be to say that psychedelics must have been responsible for the origins of religion – by inducing spiritual experiences, the ‘core’ of religion – as well as cave art (because the geometric patterns look like psychedelic visions), large brains (because psychedelics induce neurogenesis and neuroplasticity), and language (because psychedelics induce synaesthesia, the mixing of the senses, and language is inherently synaesthetic, as it involves attaching meaning to mouth noises). However, robust evidence for these psychedelic origins is lacking.
(I’d like to emphasise the point that even if altered states are involved in the roots of art and religion, for example, such states are also commonly induced without psychedelics. The bias towards preferring the psychedelic explanation over those that involve other psychoactive plants or non-drug techniques – without strong reasons or evidential support for doing so – would be an example of psychedelic exceptionalism.)
We already have theories – sometimes competing, sometimes complementary – on how distinctive human traits emerged: explanations for the origins of art include shamanism and altered states (not necessarily psychedelic in nature), sexual selection, social bonding, and as a communication tool for survival; those for language include gestural origins and social grooming; those for religion include cognitive byproduct theories, costly signalling theory, and social cohesion; and those for the doubling of our brain size, beginning 1.8 million years ago, include the social brain hypothesis, the need to cooperate in harsh conditions, and diet and cooking.
Some of these explanations are generally favoured over others. Nonetheless, the evolutionary origins of these distinctive human traits are still shrouded in mystery, which is unsurprising, given how long ago these traits emerged. New evidence continues to lend support to existing theories and away from others, or towards novel ones. Whenever there is mystery surrounding the emergence of something distinctly human or impressive, this creates space for fringe theories, and some of the latter include psychedelic theories, inspired by – or embraced because of – psychedelic apophenic tendencies.
In my book Altered Perspectives, I even suggested a psychedelic theory of the origins of writing, but I stress that it is highly speculative and that other mainstream theories carry more explanatory weight. I think it’s fine to make these speculations, so long as they’re highlighted as such, and that they’re critically analysed, rather than tightly clung to and rigidly promoted. Prideaux writes of The Immortality Key, “Patrick McGovern, the archaeochemist mentioned over 70 times throughout The Immortality Key, walked away from the project. He accused Muraresku of promoting a ‘psychedelic mysticism agenda’ under false pretences of scientific objectivity.”
I previously wrote about this kind of agenda – this psychedelic apophenia – in the connections that many psychonauts make between the pineal gland and DMT. While DMT has been detected in the brain (of rats), the idea that it exists in high enough quantities to elicit altered states of consciousness has been critiqued. More recent research has failed to find endogenous DMT in rat brains. In the article I wrote on the pineal gland and DMT, I suggest apophenia may help explain why people take ancient ideas about the ‘third eye’, pine cone symbolism in religion (the pineal gland is a pine cone-shaped organ), and Descartes’ theory of the pineal gland, and connect them all with DMT. Linking the endogenous production of DMT by the pineal gland to mystical states follows from the apophenic tendency to see many phenomena as related, which may not be related at all. It is seeing psychedelic connections where none may exist.
The same happens with depictions of mushrooms in Christian art. As well as apophenia, confirmation bias could be involved as well in related psychedelic fringe theories. For example, mushrooms are seen to be represented in some Christian art; this is used to defend the view that knowledge of early Christianity as a mushroom cult was being communicated through this artwork. But this ignores the more parsimonious explanation (the one requiring fewer assumptions) that these so-called mushrooms – as seen in the 12th-century Plaincourault Chapel fresco in France – are, in fact, just stylised trees. After all, they often have branches, which psychedelic mushrooms don’t. Moreover, only a very small selection of Christian art shows these purported mushrooms (which are assumed to be the psychedelic kind). Why would only a tiny selection of churches depict them but not others? There seems to be no rational explanation for this, in a way that fits the psychedelic theory.
German art historians use the term Pilzbaum (‘mushroom tree’) for a specific stylised tree-form that recurs in Byzantine and Romanesque religious art, long before and after Plaincourault, and in regions for which there is no evidence of a mushroom cult. There are hundreds of examples of the ‘mushroom tree’ motif in medieval art, well known to art historians as a conventional way of rendering foliage, not fungi. Art historians Marcia Kupfer, Elina Gertsman, and Erwin Panofsky stress that the Plaincourault fresco has nothing to do with mushrooms, with Panofsky arguing that any resemblance to Amanita muscaria is purely fortuitous.
Apophenia and confirmation bias can work together to see a psychedelic influence in Christianity when more robust evidence is lacking and simpler explanations are available. For example, in other variations of the scene shown at the Plaincourault Chapel fresco, which depicts Adam and Eve at the ‘tree of knowledge’, featuring a serpent wrapped around it, it is more clearly a tree that is depicted. It’s not hard to see the Plaincourault image as a stylised version of it, although I’ll admit, it’s completely understandable to see it as depicting mushrooms, and what looks like the Amanita muscaria mushroom (with its red cap and white dots).
On the other hand, it could be argued that the artists were stylising well-known imagery in order to communicate the belief – also espoused by McKenna in Food of the Gods (1992) – that the biblical tree represented a psychedelic mushroom. (However, McKenna identified the mushroom as a psilocybin mushroom, in which case, it wouldn’t make sense for Christian artists to depict it as Amanita muscaria.) Nevertheless, given the explanation given by art historians, the ‘transmission of a secret mushroom cult’ theory appears more complicated and therefore less likely to be true (according to Occam’s razor). It also has the markings of apophenia and confirmation bias (i.e. focusing attention on the thought that this looks a lot like a mushroom, and ignoring other evidence and explanations), which characterise fringe psychedelic theories.
We can see psychedelic apophenia in a Reddit post about Spielberg’s latest film, Disclosure Day (it’s tongue-in-cheek, but it still gets across that mentality):
“I'm 100% serious. I believe Ketamine was a not insubstantial influence on the film". The reasons are as follows:
- No other movie I've seen explicitly mentions Ketamine twice.
- We're able to make much better CGI animals. Why make them look so uncanny / like on a trip
- The aliens walk like they just ripped a line
- Emily Blunt's childhood memory looks super trippy. Why's it giving Disney Christmas?
- After she wakes up from the memory, she goes "woah" in the exact same way I do after a trip
- They do a trip huddle with the Alien
- The Alien is k-holing on the ground in one of the archive videos
It’s funny because you can imagine someone actually thinking this way, or trying to convince others of their psychedelic theory. When you become obsessed with psychedelics, or a particular psychedelic, you may end up imposing their influence in places where they’ve played no role: artists and architects who designed beautiful Islamic mosques were definitely tripping on DMT.
Why Does Psychedelic Apophenia Arise?
So, we’ve looked at the different ways psychedelic apophenia can arise, but it’s also worth examining why it arises in the first place. What is it about psychedelics that makes users so prone to impose their influence onto the world?
First, psychedelic experiences can be wondrous. An early psychedelic experience might feel like you’ve reached a zenith of euphoria, bliss, meaning, and insight. It can feel like the most emotionally, personally, and spiritually significant event of your life (thus far), or at least one such event. There may be the sense that if this was a highly meaningful and important experience for me, it must be a highly meaningful and important experience for humanity. The experience is so special and profound that it may seem clear it’s responsible for all that we deem most special and profound – art, religion, language, and so on. If we imagine our hominin ancestors having this mind-blowing, awe-inspiring experience, then it must have shaped their consciousness and evolution, and it must be the sole or major such influence.
The wondrousness and exaltation of the psychedelic state can leave a strong impression; you may want to rave about the experience, and end up doing so. This positive perception of psychedelics could attach itself to the pre-existing tendency towards apophenia, so that one is more inclined to think about the significant influence psychedelics must have had in the past, or more likely to seek out and accept fringe psychedelic theories.
Second, psychedelics may enhance conceptual apophenia – the sort that makes you perceive meaningful connections between unrelated ideas, rather than see a meaningful pattern (e.g. an animal or face) in a random or ambiguous pattern (e.g. a cloud), which is known as pareidolia, a type of apophenia. A possible example of psychedelic-induced conceptual apophenia comes from the philosopher Edward Slingerland, who said:
So what psychedelics are doing is just de-patterning the brain completely. So just parts of your brain or talking to other parts of the brain that normally doesn't happen at all. And as he [Michael Pollan] points out, that usually results in bullshit. So, you know, I did a lot of psychedelics in San Francisco in my 20s. And I used to go up to Mount Tam and do mushrooms or LSD. And this one trip, I always brought a notebook with me. I talk about this in the book that I was convinced during one trip that I had solved everything. That I was a Ph.D. student at the time. I was convinced that once I published this thing I was writing, they would give me my Ph.D. They would give me a tenured full professorship. And that was it. And it was because I had proven that truth is the color blue. And I had like a 20-page treatise where I laid this out. It had diagrams and there were mathematical equations. And I really came out of the trip thinking, this is it. I fucking solved it. And then, you know, the next day I looked at it. I was like, oh, yeah, I probably won't publish this. So most of what comes out of trips is complete nonsense.
Slingerland’s psychedelic insight will be funny to many psychonauts, since they’ll certainly relate to the Aha feeling of arriving at this ‘single thing’ that explains everything else, or connecting two or more ideas together in one’s mind in a novel way, suddenly perceiving how important this discovery is, but then later realising upon sober reflection how nonsensical, ridiculous, trivial, or wrong it is.
I’m not sure if most of what comes out of trips is nonsense, as Slingerland says, but certainly many grand revelations and theories you come up with while tripping can be. As a team of researchers proposed in a 2024 paper, “subjective and brain-based alterations caused by psychedelics increases the quantity and subjective intensity of insights and thence beliefs, including false ones.” Part of the reason for this may lie in psychedelics’ enhancement of conceptual apophenia, but more research is needed on this. In any case, it’s hard not to see conceptual apophenia in some of the grand insights and theories that can arise while tripping, as they are often based on perceived meaningful connections, which are, in fact, meaningless.
Alongside a possible acute magnification of conceptual apophenia while tripping, psychedelics also magnify the perception of meaning and significance. Hence, any apophenic-inspired insights one has on psychedelics may be imbued with more significance, thus making them seem even more true and important. What also often happens is that, in a group setting, the subject of psychedelics gets talked about while in the psychedelic state: the importance of the psychedelic experience gets passionately discussed and theorised about as one is having it, which is fertile ground for psychedelic apophenia, if apophenia and meaning are magnified in this state.
Apophenia helps explain the propensity of some people to believe in conspiracy theories. In a previous article, I suggested that many psychonauts’ embrace of conspiracy theories may be related to the effects of psychedelic use. I speculated that psychedelics may lead to some enduring increases in apophenia, which could be indicated by the higher frequency of so-called ‘synchronicities’ that users experience following a psychedelic trip. Nonetheless, research would be needed to establish a causal connection between psychedelic use and lasting increases in apophenia; it may be that those attracted to psychedelics already score higher in this tendency, or in personality traits associated with apophenia (e.g. openness to experience).
Early positive psychedelic experiences, or ample such experiences, can also lead some users to develop positive biases about psychedelics – how they’re inherently good, wise, healing, and spiritual. These biases may encourage or add further fuel to psychedelic apophenia, so that one sees psychedelic experiences as the origin of human goodness, wisdom, healing, and spirituality.
While psychedelic apophenia may lead to a hasty and unjustified conclusion about the origin of a particular human trait, ability, or practice, as we’ve seen in the case of McKenna’s Stoned Ape Theory, a more rigorous version of that theory may later be formulated. As with many ideas inspired by psychedelics, among the nonsense could be a kernel of truth, somewhere in there – after you disentangle a lot of the knotted connections.