Turns Out We Exist Because Our Ancestors Ate Magic Mushrooms

Did eating magic mushrooms really give birth to human consciousness, visual abilities, and survival prowess?

Terence McKenna was an ethnobotanist from UC Berkeley. He studied shamanism, psychedelics, and folk culture most of his life. The more he researched, the more convinced he became that humans' thinking, visual, and survival capabilities resulted from consuming psilocybin.

Psilocybin is a hallucinogenic compound that over two hundred mushrooms produce. When people talk about magic mushrooms, they refer to those containing psilocybin.

Eating magic mushrooms can cause many effects, depending on the dose:

• Depersonalization

• Psychedelic experience

• Altered perception of time

• Hallucinations involving mind and body

• Emphasize pre-existing moods (e.g., happy to manic)

Humans have consumed magical mushrooms for millions of years. Early hominids grew and ate them after discovering them in cattle manure. Shamans from the Upper Paleolithic used them to enter trance states. So they could focus on symbols, meaning, and ideas and not on how they "should" or "should not" see the world. Today, scientists use these mushrooms to treat anxiety, depression, and other mental disorders.

I'm unfamiliar with the literature around consciousness, hominids, and psilocybin. But, as any scientist should, I'll try to prove or disprove three of McKenna's hypotheses from his book, Food of the Gods. My arguments resulted from researching scientific literature and talking to a psilocybin consumer and Psychedelic Therapist.

Claim 1: "Psilocybin improved visual acuity."

McKenna says eating mushrooms with psilocybin improves visual acuity.

At first, he only talked about a short-term visual enhancement effect. He says ancient hunter-gatherers made magic mushrooms part of their diet when they discovered them.

But McKenna later argued that the visual benefits remained. Hunters who ate magic mushrooms were likelier to survive hunts because they could better react in battle. The tribes that consumed psilocybin, he says, outlived those that did not. Current humans are descendants of this first group.

The psilocybin consumer I talked to said his vision had changed since becoming a regular user. There are more anomalies—things he didn't see before consuming magic mushrooms. "[Anomalies] are most intense in the days after a trip, returning to baseline after a few weeks," he says.

Scientists have proven that psilocybin changes what we see. Researchers from Oceania gave pure psilocybin or a placebo to nine individuals with good physical and visual health. People had to report visual and motion changes in an image. Subjects said surfaces, computers, and monitors showed detailed, dynamic patterns. Thus, psilocybin causes visual anomalies.

The question is: are these anomalies prevalent across time?

While the psilocybin consumer thinks they are, no studies back his view. Other psilocybin consumers, however, report long-term changes in what they see.

"I've never stopped tripping," says the psychedelic therapist. She believes she sees a visually enhanced world after her first psilocybin experience. The colors are brighter, and the details of animate and inanimate "things," such as flower petals, are more defined. "A friend of mine describes taking mushrooms as a similar experience to putting his prescription glasses on," she says. The world is clearer and sharper.

After reading the paragraph above, one of my wonderful editors shared, "I've had a similar experience." "But it's not an always-on thing for me." In her case, she can perceive a brighter and sharper world if she meditates, relaxes, or is in a high emotional state. She didn't see the world this way before she consumed psilocybin. And now, she does, even if she's not under its effects.

Claim 2: "Psilocybin improved our problem-solving skills."

The ethnobotanist claims we process more data while in a trance state.

He doesn't share the percentage of reality that magic mushrooms unlock. But he means that if non-consumers see one-tenth of reality, consumers see at least two-tenths. With more data to process and experience, says McKenna, our ancestors (and now us) learned to process more of it and self-reflect.

While studying the idea of consciousness, researcher Carhart-Harris shares updated data backing McKenna's claim:

"Psychedelics alter consciousness by disorganizing human activity. "They increase the amount of entropy in the brain, so the system reverts to a less constrained mode of cognition." It's not that one system drops away," he says, "but that an older system emerges." "That older system is primary consciousness, a mode of thinking in which the ego temporarily loses its dominion and the unconscious, now unregulated, "is brought into an observable space."

The therapist said she wanted and could learn more information after consuming psilocybin. After her first trip, she returned to school after four years, read a lot, and published a book in six months. Her relationships, friendships, and business have also improved. All because she can now better process her emotions.

According to her, the founders she works with have also improved their thinking. "[They now] spend their 9-5 thinking completely outside the box," she says.

After her first psychedelic trip, she returned to school after four years, read a lot, and published a book in six months.

I will separate these post-psilocybin events into two phases.

First, there is what I call the motivation phase. It covers the Psychedelic Therapists' educational achievements. I do not think psilocybin improved her critical thinking, as she could write a book before consumption. Maybe the psilocybin, mixed with her therapy skills, helped her overcome challenges and commit to education.

Then we have the emotion processing and (founder) improved thinking phases. I believe psilocybin might have influenced them. 

In 2021, scientists found correlations between creative thinking and consuming psilocybin. They assembled sixty healthy participants that had experimented with magic mushrooms before but hadn't done it in the last three months. Thirty participants took a dose; thirty didn't. Every subject had to do various creative tasks, such as:

• Solving questions that had one answer

• Listing as many potential use cases for household items under a time constraint

• Ideating as many alternative answers to a question as possible

It appears their findings support the psychedelic therapist's observations.

The study found that seven days after consuming psilocybin, subjects had more ideas about how to use everyday objects. They also felt they had generated more original ideas than usual. However, scientists later found that the "novel" ideas from the psilocybin group were as common as those from the placebo group.

So, the founders working with the Psychedelic Therapist might believe they are thinking outside the box. But this might be a feeling and not a reality.

A more optimistic read of these findings suggests that psilocybin consumers have a higher chance of having novel ideas. Their chances of generating novel ideas are the same as those of a non-user. But, since they have more ideas than average people, they might generate them faster.

Claim 3: "Psilocybin encourages reproduction."

The Berkeley alum says consuming psilocybin helped our species reproduce.

It increased alertness while hunting, which made us more likely to live long enough to have kids. McKenna also says that magic mushrooms trigger sexual arousal. If true, psilocybin-using tribes were also more likely to mate.

I couldn't find studies supporting the claim that consuming psilocybin is a significant cause of our population size. But there's evidence of the link between psilocybin and sexual arousal.

Members of a leading European psychology research center found a link between altered states of mind and sexual responsiveness after surveying more than a hundred adults. Subjects who were more aware of their bodies lost track of time and experienced more sexual satisfaction, arousal, and desire. But, given that even alcohol alters the mind, this is insufficient evidence. If it were enough, Chinese booze from 7,000 years ago would also have some sort of role in our survival rates.

Neither of the two people I talked to experienced increased sexual drive after consuming psilocybin. "During and after the day of a psilocybin trip," says the consumer, "I have decreased sexual appetite.

But in line with the study I shared, the therapist has observed changes in how her body behaves. "Once, my partner spoke to me while I was on mushrooms," she recounts." "I felt his words impact my body physically." "[They] made me feel like my sexual organs were lighting up, like an orgasm, even though the conversation wasn't even sexual."

"Psychedelics are illegal not because a loving government is concerned that you may jump out of a third-story window," says McKenna. Psychedelics are illegal because they dissolve opinion structures and culturally laid down models of behavior and information processing. They open you up to the possibility that everything you know is wrong."

After days of writing and researching for this piece, I'm only slightly less unfamiliar with psilocybin.

I'm unsure of its role in the birth of our current visual, reproductive, or thinking capabilities. But so is modern science. So, until neuroscientists, anthropologists, evolutionists, biologists, and other fields reject the claims of the millions of psychedelic users, which include bright minds like Alan Watts, Steve Jobs, and Richard Feynman, I will, as you should with any untested theory, treat some of McKenna's claims like potential truths.