Mad world

Given my dual fascination with history and botany, it's a bit surprising that yesterday I ran into a story I'd never heard before that involves both.  I wonder if you know about it?

It's the strange tale of "mad honey."

Turns out in eastern Turkey, near the Black Sea, there are two species of rhododendron -- Rhododendron ponticum and Rhododendron luteum -- that grow in such great profusion that they dominate the landscape.  When they flower, the effect is absolutely spectacular.

Rhododendron ponticum [Image is in the Public Domain]

But there's another species that appreciates the display, and that's bees.  Both species are pollinated by bees, which are lured in not only by the flowers' bright colors, but by the abundance of nectar.

So when these plants flower, the local honey comes almost exclusively from these two species.

The problem is, these plants don't only produce sugar, they produce organic compounds called grayanotoxins.  The grayanotoxins appear not to bother the bees at all -- it would be seriously counterproductive for the plants to poison their pollinators -- but humans who consume the honey made from the nectar of these species end up with serious problems, including hallucinations, dizziness, nausea, bradycardia, and vascular hypotension.  The symptoms are rarely fatal; you'd have to consume a lot of the stuff to die from it.  Most people with what is called "mad honey syndrome" recover in a day or two, although during that period they might well think they're not going to make it.

So, of course, humans being what they are, there are people who take it recreationally.  Me, if I want a mood-altering substance, I'll stick with a glass of red wine.

Where it gets interesting is that "mad honey" has intersected with history on more than one occasion.  The Greek historian Xenophon, in his chronicle Anabasis, recounts an interesting experience some of the troops had while traveling through eastern Anatolia on the way back to Greece from their time as mercenaries in Persia:

Now for the most part there was nothing here which they really found strange; but the swarms of bees in the neighborhood were numerous, and the soldiers who ate of the honey all went off their heads, and suffered from vomiting and diarrhea, and not one of them could stand up, but those who had eaten a little were like people exceedingly drunk, while those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy, or even, in some cases, dying men.  So they lay there in great numbers as though the army had suffered a defeat, and great despondency prevailed.  On the next day, however, no one had died, and at approximately the same hour as they had eaten the honey they began to come to their senses; and on the third or fourth day they got up, as if from a drugging.

A few centuries later, a similar incident happened, but deliberately, and with a much less happy ending.  The Greek historian Strabo writes in his book Geography of the unfortunate fate of some of Pompey the Great's soldiers during their campaign against King Mithridates VI of Pontus:

Now all these peoples who live in the mountains are utterly savage, but the Heptacometae are worse than the rest.  Some also live in trees or turrets; and it was on this account that the ancients called them Mosynoeci, the turrets being called mosyni.  They live on the flesh of wild animals and on nuts; and they also attack wayfarers, leaping down upon them from their scaffolds.  The Heptacometae cut down three maniples [around 1,500 soldiers] of Pompey's army when they were passing through the mountainous country; for they mixed bowls of the crazing honey which is yielded by the tree-twigs, and placed them in the roads, and then, when the soldiers drank the mixture and lost their senses, they attacked them and easily disposed of them.

Which raises the question of exactly how stupid these Roman soldiers were.  They were marching through a hostile region occupied by people who were known to be "utterly savage," and just happened upon bowls of honey left for them on the side of the road -- and instead of being suspicious, they were like, "Nom nom, looks good to me!"

My opinion is that the resulting massacre was just natural selection at work.

Anyhow, apparently "mad honey" is available for purchase if you go to Turkey, where it's (1) legal, but (2) strongly discouraged, because like many psychotropic substances, the difference between "whoa, far out" and "HOLY SHIT THE WORLD IS ENDING" is a very blurry line.  So even if there aren't savage bands of Heptacometae waiting for you to get high so they can stab you with sharpened sticks, you might find yourself regretting consuming it, like a middle-aged couple did in 2008 when they heard the stuff improved your sex life and instead of having a fun frolic ended up in the hospital because they thought they were having heart attacks.

So restraint is recommended.

Anyhow, that's our curious historical vignette of the day.  Greek military campaigns, beautiful flowers, and hallucinogenic honey.  And given what some plant toxins can do -- monkshood and manchineel come to mind -- this one is pretty mild.

But if I ever get to visit Turkey, I still think I'll still steer clear.

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DMT and NDEs

No one would be happier than me if it turned out there was an afterlife.

Well, at least some types of afterlife.  The tortured-forever-in-the-fiery-furnace version doesn't appeal much to me, especially given my status as an evil godless heathen.  Reincarnation, in my opinion, would also kind of suck, since it's basically getting sent back to the beginning of the game.  Valhalla would be kind of cool, though.  I could definitely get into swordfighting and quaffing mead.  And some of the ones where you get to relax in fields of flowers, with every need taken care of, also sound good, especially on work days.

The problem is, there's no real evidence of any of them.  Not that you'd expect there'd be; after all, to get to the afterlife you pretty much have to be dead.  And as Michael Shermer put it, it's easy to talk to the dead -- the hard part is getting them to respond.

There are people who claim there's evidence from near-death experiences -- NDEs, in common parlance.  The idea is that people who have had NDEs report back a lot of common features, including the well-known "tunnel of light" and feelings of oneness, bliss, and transcendence.  The argument goes that since what people claim to have experienced is often very similar, there must be something to it -- those people have peeked across the threshold, and come back to tell us about it.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

I've never found that argument terribly convincing.  Since we all have brains (although some of us could stand to use them more frequently), you'd expect that they'd respond similarly under similar circumstances of oxygen deprivation, neural shutdown, and all the other things that happens when a person dies.  And that stance has been bolstered considerably by a study done at Imperial College (London) last month, in which thirteen volunteers were given a chemical called dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and reported back experiences identical to what has been heard from people who have had NDEs.

DMT has become well-known because it is the main psychotropic ingredient in ayahuasca, a plant extract used in the Amazon Basin to induce hallucinations.  DMT interacts with serotonin and dopamine receptors in the brain, and that seems to be the cause of its effects, which include euphoria, visual disturbances, and -- most strikingly -- the sensation of communicating with non-corporeal beings.

What the researchers did with the test subjects in this study is to administer DMT under controlled conditions, and not only monitored their physical and mental states, but asked them for their subjective experiences when they "sobered up."  And there was an amazing similarity between the DMT trips and reports of NDEs.

One test subject described a "tunnel" that she felt impelled to enter, and once she did so, the anxiety she'd felt evaporated completely.  She was "shown" various images, and they all appeared to her to be critical to understanding her life.  "One image I do remember is lots of books flipping open and rainbows zooming out," she said.  "I felt a presence lift my head and tell me to pay attention: 'You came to discover something.'  But it was a juxtaposition because I felt disembodied at the same time. It was a strange paradox...  The normal laws of physics didn't apply.  I was walking around my consciousness in a lucid dream.  Imagine dreaming and things morph and the normal laws of physics don't apply.  I was walking around my consciousness in a lucid dream."

What strikes me about all this is that if it's easy to simulate an NDE by altering your brain chemistry, maybe altering your brain chemistry is what causes an NDE.  As I tell my neuroscience students, if you monkey around with your neurotransmitters, you should expect bizarre things to happen; and, after all, since every experience we have is filtered through our neurotransmitters, it's bound to change your perception of the world.

It doesn't, however, mean that any of it is real.

There's also been a conjecture by more than one neuroscientist that endogenous (self-produced) DMT exists to protect our cells from the effects of oxygen starvation, so it's released in one big shot when our heart stops in a last-ditch effort to keep our brain cells alive.  If that's true, no wonder everyone experiences the same sorts of sensations in an NDE -- and their similarity to a DMT psychedelic trip.

So the DMT experiment is fascinating, but it seems to me not to bolster the case for an afterlife.  It does make me curious about the experience, however.  A friend of mine asked me whether I would take DMT or psilocybin if it was under controlled, safe circumstances, and I knew I wouldn't get arrested.  My answer was, "Absolutely."  The idea of creating the sensation of a transcendent experience sounds pretty appealing even if I don't believe it necessarily reflects any sort of external reality.

And, after all, my other alternative is to wait until I die, which strikes me as being less than optimal given that after having the transcendent experience, I'll be dead.

Kind of a downside, that.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one.  If you've never read anything by Mary Roach, you don't know what you're missing.  She investigates various human phenomena -- eating, space travel, sex, death, and war being a few of the ones she's tackled -- and writes about them with an analytical lens and a fantastically light sense of humor.  This week, my recommendation is Spook, in which she looks at the idea of an afterlife, trying to find out if there's anything to it from a scientific perspective.  It's an engaging, and at times laugh-out-loud funny, read.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Coffee, hallucinations, and Bing Crosby

A study done by Dr. Simon Crowe of La Trobe University in Australia, has found that coffee is hallucinogenic.

That it is psychotropic falls into the "Tell Me Something I Didn't Already Know" department.  I am barely civil before I've had at least two cups of coffee.  (Some days I'm barely civil afterwards, either, but that's another matter.)  For me, it's not the buzz I'm after; being a nervous, high-strung type to begin with, who gets up at five in the morning every day whether I have to or not, it's not like I really need anything to make me more wired than I already am.  Coffee seems to have the same effect on me that turning the focus wheel on a pair of binoculars does.  Everything suddenly seems to brighten up, have sharp outlines, make sense.  I feel like I'm seeing things clearly.

Now, I'm told, it might also make me hear things that aren't there.

Dr. Crowe's team tested 92 people with varying levels of caffeine.  The test was billed to the subjects as a hearing test, who were told that they'd be listening to a three minute clip of white noise, in which there might or might not be snippets of Bing Crosby singing "White Christmas."  They were instructed to press a buzzer when they heard a piece of the song.  In fact, the clip had no music in it at all.  The non-coffee drinkers did occasionally imagine that they heard Crosby's voice; but the coffee drinkers were three times as likely to press the buzzer.  The effect was even more pronounced with people who described themselves as "stressed" and who drank coffee.

"If you are stressed and have a high level of caffeine, you are more likely to notice things that aren't there, see things that aren't there," Dr. Crowe said.

[image courtesy of photographer Julius Schorzman and the Wikimedia Commons]

Me, I wonder.  I suspect that part of it is that after the caffeine equivalent of five cups of coffee (the standard for "heavy coffee drinking" used in the experiment), the test subjects' hands were simply shaking so badly that they kept setting the buzzer off.  Or, perhaps, sitting still and listening to white noise for three minutes was simply beyond their capacities.

I tend to be a little frustrated by the way that popular media presents medical (and other scientific) research findings.  Let's be clear about what Dr. Crowe found: he found that people who drank the equivalent of five or more cups of coffee were likely to think they were hearing music when they really weren't.  The headline, of course, didn't say that -- it said "Coffee Causes Hallucinations," which might lead the less careful reader to conclude that your average businessman stopping at Starbuck's for a cuppa joe in the morning was suddenly going to flip out on the bus and start seeing flying monkeys.

Frankly, I'm doubtful that caffeine is bad for you at all, at least when taken in reasonable amounts.  In the brain it acts as an antagonist to adenosine, a neural suppressant and signal for metabolic stress.  In studies, caffeine has been shown to decrease reaction time, increase endurance, reduce the risk of heart disease and kidney stones, increase short-term memory and ability to focus, and decrease the likelihood I'll strangle someone in my first period class.  These are some pretty significant benefits to health and happiness, and if because of it I occasionally hallucinate that I'm hearing clips from Bing Crosby songs, I guess I consider than an acceptable tradeoff.  (Now, if I started seeing Bing Crosby, that would be another matter entirely.)

In any case, I'm going to wind up this post with some general advice not to jump to conclusions based upon sensationalized reports of medical research in the press.  First, if you took every piece of medical advice that shows up in the media, you'd be living on bread and water (or just the water, if you're gluten-intolerant).

Second, the coffee's done brewing, and if I don't have a cup soon, I'm going to hurt someone.