A rebirth is taking place in general interest and sanctioned clinical research on that most fascinating class of psychoactive drugs, the hallucinogens.   Impressive new reports revealing their therapeutic benefits from respected institutions are now adding to the literature stimulated in the last fifty years by the astonishing effects of hallucinogens on the mind.   Overall, this literature falls into two distinct categories: the spiritual/psychological and the neurobiological.   The former, derived largely from serious therapeutic trials, self experimentation and the botany of indigenous peoples since antiquity, has illuminated new insights into the possibilities of psychic experience and the potential of hallucinogens in clinical research, psychotherapy, spirituality and psychic wholeness. The latter category, the neurobiological, encompasses the careful documentation of scientific data from laboratory experiments performed with consummate skill within the areas of receptor function, neurotransmitters, neurophysiology, animal behavior and genetics.   Ultimately, a bridge is anticipated, connecting neurobiological results to the subjective realms of the psychological literature.   To this end, successful studies on hallucinogens have been designed to correlate metabolism and activity in specific brain areas with quantifiable alterations in mood and perception of the outer world.  

We know from neurobiology that, in addition to serotonin, there are three or four similar molecules, i.e., natural (endogenous) hallucinogens, that can be secreted within the human brain and we know the specific receptors they favor to produce psychic effects that are generally well known.  These natural secretions are found in the blood and urine and, like serotonin, act as agonists to well-known receptors found in serotonergic neurons throughout the brain.   Yet, we don’t know the biological role these powerful internal drugs might play in the course of our lives.   This monograph offers a hypothesis about an hallucinogenic effect that is not generally recognized and purports to suggest that this effect represents the biological role of the endogenous hallucinogen (EH) in human parturition and in REM sleep.

These suggestions on the hallucinogen’s role are based on an interpretation of a single individual’s unexpected and exceptional experiences with LSD.   While these LSD results are anecdotal and obtained outside the controlled environment of the laboratory or clinic, they are real and subject to biological interpretation, owing to their simplicity.  These LSD effects were not what one would expect from reading the predominant literature.  Instead of a subjective and impressionistic sojourn into psychic realms of spirituality, introspection, art and heuristic insight, LSD elicited purely physical effects of two different kinds that occurred sequentially in two sets of “sessions”.   In the first, a one-time recall of sensations appeared in distinct areas within the skull, along with anesthesia and some visceral activity. These effects were found to correspond unmistakably to fetal trauma from an abandoned obstetric procedure called Twilight sleep.  This recalled memory returned as flashbacks, exact encores of the first recall,that diminished over time.   In a second set of LSD trials, the effects were not memory recall.  Instead, they were pharmacological effects in real time expressed as fetal activation and movement in the adult.  This is (probably) the first evidence that LSD acts as a pharmaceutical in the conventional sense clarifying the general view of LSD pharmacology as  uncharacteristic and undefined.  In the adult, LSD becomes a surrogate to the fetal endogenous hallucinogen to act on a pharmaceutical target remaining into adulthood. This is interpreted as evidence of fetal pharmacological target within the adult mesencephalon that remained unused during the contraction phase of parturition   As such, this would represent a developmental deficit caused by scopolamine at birth. 

A central assumption underlies the interpretation of both sets of LSD experimentation.  It is that the LSD effects observed in the adult and the consolidation of this birth memory by the fetus at birth are both the results of the same brainstem condition in response to hallucinogens.  This leads naturally to the idea of a bi-directional mechanism involving an “On-Off” relay nucleus controlled by the hallucinogen.  Well-documented interactions within the brainstem form a model, in which the suppression of serotonergic neurons within raphe nuclei (Ra) dis-inhibit closely associated reticular nuclei (RN) to unblock the flow impulses between a memory site and the cerebral cortex for interpretation.  The initial event is the binding of the hallucinogen to the 5-HT1a receptor within the raphe.  Known serotonergic agonists like LSD are present in human tissue and bind to the same LSD receptors to produce strong hallucinogenic effects.  Like LSD, these are based on the indole molecular structure as congeners of N.N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT+).

The RaRN model represents the aforementioned bridge between the neurobiology and psychology of hallucinogens as another kind of gate among many in the brain.   It forms the basis of a general neurobiological definition of trauma, a hypothesis on the biological role of REM sleep and a fresh view of possible corrections in present thinking about hallucinogens, flashbacks and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD).  Operating on a grosser level than that of the consolidation and retrieval of traumatic memory at the synaptic level, the RaRN model simply mediates consolidation and release of a newly defined category of memory, long hidden within the brain to affect the individual’s life through unconscious paths.

Within the huge and incompletely known neural complexity of the human brain, a model, so simple that it takes on the cloak of a paradigm or principle, is offered to account for the initial process in the “storage” and function of developmental memory during birth and of traumatic memory during the totality of an individual's life.  The description of a well-established precedent as an analog of this model will be taken from the exhaustive studies on Pavlov association that define the substrates for memory “storage”.

Next:  Part 1 for the first issue of birth memory recall with the link, 1.1