“After a 40-year virtual ban on research involving psychedelic drugs, scientists look anew at their potential in treating pain and anxiety“. This Boston Globe piece highlights the resurgent interest in psychedelics for therapeutic purposes. Current research includes claims that the powerful South American hallucinogen ibogaine is a quick fix for addictions and that MDMA (Ecstasy) can ease a fearful and pain-ridden dying.

The occasion for the Globe‘s interest is a research grant awarded to Harvard psychiatrist John Halpern, which the article observes

“…represents a chance to reduce the stigma hanging over the field. Back in the 1960s, Harvard professor Timothy Leary helped spur the backlash against psychedelic drugs with ethically questionable experiments and by advocating recreational LSD use to ”turn on, tune in, drop out.” Halpern, by contrast, is a respected researcher…”

This in my opinion is an irresponsible attack on Harvard faculty colleagues Leary and Richard Alpert, who were interested in systematic disciplined use of LSD as a learning tool. Mind expansion with psychedelics was never promoted as “recreational” as much as profoundly exploratory and revelatory. It is absurd to blame the victims — who were drummed out of academia — for the prejudicial backlash against hallucinogenic drugs, given the fundamental challenge they represented to the dominant paradigms.

It is no surprise, either, that psychedelic research got quickly assimilated to the social change movement which was simultaneously mounting equally profound challenges in areas including sexuality, peace, freedom and social structure. It really was a long time ago, and perhaps younger observers can be forgiven if some of the more dramatic manifestations of change in the ’60’s and early ’70’s are seen only as foolish and absurd when decontextualized as they so often are. Forget the times and you forget the real reasons no one is talking about changing society through psychedelics today. Some would say that the backlash has been utterly successfully in making us forget and decontextualize. As I wrote in the despairing days after Bush was returned to the White House for a second term in 2004, the only effective way I could see to speak truth to that obscene power was to create a fullscale countercultural backlash again, not a challenge narrowly confined to the political process.

It would be interesting to know if it is the Globe reporter’s take, or Dr. Halpern’s political attempt to distance himself from his forebears. An organization that closely and responsibly tracks these issues is the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. In this article, MAPS founder Rick Doblin similarly distances himself from Leary’s position that psychedelic use will change society. I suppose that, in the Age of Bush, it would be hard enough getting dispassionate research funded without appearing to be an advocate. So Leary ends up being a convenient straw man.

Conservative British psychiatrist and curmudgeon Theodore Dalrymple (which I have just learned is the pseudonym of Anthony Daniels (Wikipedia )) writes in the Wall Street Journal that he is not impressed about the difficulties of withdrawing from narcotics:

I largely agree that withdrawal from opiates is highly overrated, and that addicts have a hard time being honest with those of us to whom they come for assistance. However, I am not sure, except for sampling errors introduced by the fact that Dalrymple works in the penal system, how he quickly makes the leap from their histrionics, manipulativeness and inadequacy to any conclusions about criminality. It is probably what stops him from being more compassionate toward these unfortunate individuals who have so little in the way of coping mechanisms that they have reduced all the diversity of life’s challenges to one — copping their drug and feeding their jones — and, correspondingly, pitifully, all life’s distress to one mind-numbing feeling of unrequited craving.

“Emotions, Like Germs, Are Easily Transmissible. The Trick Is Passing and Receiving the Right Ones” (Washington Post). Emotional contagion occurs in milliseconds, entirely beyond our awareness. We unconsciously mimic the facial expressions, posture and gestures — body language — to which we are exposed; the phenomenon can be gauged experimentally by measuring the tone of the muscles of facial expression, for example. Incremental changes in these muscles may help trigger the associated emotion in the bearer. Modulation of speech tone is also matched and mimicked. Of course, some people are better than others at infecting those around them with their moods, and others are more sensitive to people’s emotions. The article does not mention the mirror neuron concept, one of the darling new paradigms of neuropsychology (which I have followed and written about here for several years), which almost certainly underlies and shapes this emotional contagion. It makes sense that a mechanism for emotional contagion developed, given the adaptive value of the role it plays in social cohesion. This also bears a relationship to why it is largely unconscious and automatic, and why it operates most strongly in our most intimate social contexts. That does not mean, of course, that those aware of the infectious nature of their moods cannot attempt to exercise some control. (However, beware the new light this casts on Machiavelli’s dictum that, if you cannot both be loved and feared, it is better to be feared than loved.)

On the surface of it, despite the need for Bush to appeal to his base as his ratings plummet, it is an odd time for a renewed stand on the sanctity of marriage, just when speculation is mounting about marital tension in the White House over his supposed affair with Condoleezza Rice. But, since the man does not understand the meaning of the word hypocrisy, he may feel that now is a particularly good time for that very reason…

I am using the latest Windows version of iTunes (6.042) under WinXP SP2. Apart from those of you who are going to advise me to deal with my frustration by moving to Linux or MacOS, I am interested on feedback on the following scenario.

My iTunes library is around 6000 songs. Recently, I found a wonderful program that satisfied my obsessional needs to attach album art to each and every cut in my collection. The latest version of this program, iArt, has the added ability to go through my library and build a list of those songs which have multiple pieces of artwork attached to them, which is an annoying problem with iTunes that needlessly increases the storage space of the songs both on my desktop computer and on my iPod. So I went through that list and deleted the extraneous duplicate artwork. It turns out that 1800 of my songs had had multiple pictures attached to them (!), so I ended up saving between 2-3 gigs of space on both my hard drive and my iPod.

And that was where the problem began. I have my iPod set to auto-synchronize every time it is plugged into its cradle. But despite numerous attempts, with reboots of both the desktop and the iPod, the attempt to update more than 1800 songs would crash somewhere around the 700th file, giving me a message along the lines of, “The instruction at xxxxxx referenced memory at yyyyyy. The memory could not be ‘read’.” One of the problems was that, with the synchronization process crashing, those 1800 songs were erased from my iPod (or at least their index entries were) and, no matter how I tried, could not be resynch’ed onto the iPod.

To jump to the punchline, I finally solved this by changing the synchronization method from automatic to manual; building four or five playlists of around 400 songs each from the group of 1800 (fortunately, you can sort your iTunes library by last modified, so all the songs whose artwork I had modified last night were grouped together at the top of the sort), and synchronizing the missing songs by dragging these smaller playlists onto the iPod one by one.

So the problem was solved (the only abiding annoyance being that, after I changed back to automatic synchronization, the blinking “do not disconnect” message on the iPod screen now never goes away, even when synchronization has completed, until I reboot the iPod), but it leaves me with three questions. (1) what would someone have done who knows less than I do how to problem-solve such a scenario? I wouldn’t even bother calling Apple phone support (or any other phone support, for that matter), since I know all they would have told me would be to uninstall and reinstall iTunes; wipe the iPod clean and start from scratch; and finally, if that didn’t work, to reinstall Windows XP. I was worried about wiping the iPod and starting from scratch because it seemed that this was an issue of iTunes’ synchronization system choking on a certain volume of data, and of course I would expect it to choke around 700 songs if it were trying to transfer my entire library. One can never get access to anyone by calling tech support who really knows the innards of the program and can talk as intelligently as an intelligent and curious consumer would like, it seems to me.

(2) What woudl someone have done who knows more than I do how to problem-solve such a scenario? Some of you readers out there must have some thoughts, or even some similar experiences.

(3) Why does this particular Microsoft error message put the word “read” in quotation marks? What exactly is so ironic about the concept of trying to ‘read’ memory??