Among animals, humans stand out in their consummate propensity to self-induce altered states of mind. Archaeology, history and ethnography show these activities have taken place since the beginnings of civilization, yet their role in the emergence and evolution of the human mind itself remains debatable. The means through which modern humans actively alter their experience of self and reality frequently depend on psychoactive substances, but it is uncertain whether psychedelics or other drugs were part of the ecology or culture of ancient hominins. Moreover, non-human great apes in captivity are currently being retired from medical research, rendering comparative approaches thus far impracticable. Researchers from the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham circumvented this limitation by harnessing the breadth of publicly available YouTube videos to show that apes engage in rope spinning during solitary play; when spinning, the apes achieved speeds sufficient to alter self-perception and situational awareness that were comparable to those tapped for transcendent experiences in humans, and the number of revolutions spun predicted behavioral evidence for dizziness.
Seeking altered mental states is seemingly a human universal, historically and culturally.
The biological and behavioral precursors of such experiences are, however, unclear, notably because it is challenging to confidently confirm if substance use was viable within the highly diversified ecological and cultural human paleobackdrop.
Whether altered state experiences within the hominid family shaped the emergence and evolution of the modern human mind remains one of the major and most thought-provoking unknowns in cognitive science.
Wild primates consume fermented foods with alcoholic content. Consumption of these foods typically depends on natural availability and the opportunistic use of scarce resources.
Though consumption…
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