A Small Furry Prayer (23 page)

45

Csikszentmihalyi uses the term
group flow
to describe the potent conjoining of consciousness and extremely heightened awareness that results from a bunch of individuals finding themselves in a flow state together. Basketball great Bill Russell, in his 1979 autobiography
Second Wind
, described it this way: “During those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and where the next shot would be taken. … My premonitions would be consistently correct, and I always felt that I not only knew all the Celtics by heart, but also all the opposing players, and that they all knew me.”

This can happen when a band plays a great show or an orchestra a great concert. When sports announcers talk about a team “coming together” or “momentum shifting” in a game, group flow is often responsible. And ever since Jimmy Johnson credited Csikszentmihalyi for the Dallas Cowboys' 1993 Super Bowl victory, this state has become one of the most sought after on earth. Both President Bill Clinton and Prime Minster Tony Blair have sung its praises. In 2007,
Fast Company
pointed out: “In the past few years … many major companies, including Microsoft, Ericsson, Patagonia, and Toyota have realized that being able to control and harness this feeling is the holy grail for any manager.”

Running up that wall felt just like group flow, except I wasn't sure it possible for the experience to cross species lines. A few days later I called Patricia McConnell to find out. She thought it more than possible. “Good herders find themselves in flow states with their dogs all the time,” she said. “It's most likely what makes them good herders.” Which, among other things, explains a great deal about what I'd seen with those cows in Patagonia. I next sent Csikszentmihalyi an e-mail asking what he thought. “Well,” he wrote back, “I don't see anything nonsensical about what you describe. I myself wrote about running circles with my dog as an example of how we found mutual flow.”

How group flow works is essentially face-reading writ large. Instead of needing to see faces, though, concentration is so peaked and the pattern recognition system so primed, that almost any bit of body language is enough to convey information. The best example of this comes not from group flow but from flocking. When a thousand geese all change direction simultaneously, this is flocking. Versions are found in bacteria, ants, bees, fish, and any animal that travels in herds, including humans in crowds. The problem was that when researchers looked for a way information was getting passed through the flock, the speed of group coordination significantly outpaced the speed of sensory communication. So how does a swarm of bees simultaneously bank left when they're turning faster than the signal can travel? How do a million individual fish react instantly, as a well-coordinated school, to the sudden appearance of a predator?

For a while the thinking was that animals might have a sense organ we don't, but in 1986 animator and computer modeler Craig Reynolds realized one might not be required. He built a computer simulation called Boids (bird-oids) by starting from the obvious idea that, as he told the
New York Times
, “the synchronization speed is pretty astounding. And since birds aren't mental giants, they can't be doing deep thinking as they fly along. They must use fairly simple rules.” So his Boids program used only three: separation, alignment, and cohesion. Separation is a short-range repulsion that helped individual boids, known as “agents” in complexity-speak, avoid their neighbors. Alignment meant these agents would steer toward the average heading of their neighbors, and cohesion mean they would also steer toward the average position of those neighbors. Three was all it took.

After seeing the simulation, author Bruce Sterling described the results this way:

individual boids meander around in an unmistakably lifelike, lively, organic fashion. There is nothing “mechanical” or “programmed-looking” about their actions. They bumble and swarm. The boids in the middle shimmy along contentedly, and the ones on the fringe tag along anxiously jockeying for position, and the whole squadron hangs together, and wheels and swoops and maneuvers, with amazing grace. … You might say that the boids simulate flocking perfectly—but according to the hard-dogma position of A-Life [artificial life] enthusiasts, it's not “simulation” at all. This is real “flocking” pure and simple—this is exactly what birds actually do. Flocking is flocking—it doesn't matter if it's done by a whooping crane or a little computer-sprite.

These three rules are now thought to be part of the genetic coding of any animal that needs to move in packs, but it's what those rules require that helps explain group flow. Each requires pattern recognition—the birds need to determine average distances, speeds, and motions—and body language reading—the only way to determine speed, distance, and motion is to notice what your neighbor is doing—and body mimicry—for flocking to work, the individual needs to do exactly what the group does. Since humans need to move in groups, these same rules are coded into our brains—which is what's responsible for the hypercoordinated movements I discovered during the Five-Dog Workout.

The same things also happen during a group flow experience, only at a considerably more extreme level. A football team mounting a spectacular fourth-quarter comeback is a pretty good sign that group flow is at work. Think about what happens when the play breaks down and the receiver starts freelancing—running to any open spot on the field—and the quarterback still manages to get him the ball despite not being able to see him and without any real idea where he's going. This happens because the quarterback reads the body language of the person in front of him, whose body language is a reaction to another's, and so on across the field. In flocking, this keeps the group together; in football, it's how touchdowns are scored.

The same system could easily be responsible for shape-shifting. Shamanic ceremonies start with drumming, dancing, and singing—three practices known to create flow states—but move on from there. Most shape-shifting ceremonies next incorporate what Mircea Eliade called “the mystical imitation of animal behavior.” The Hopi do an antelope dance, the Huichol a deer dance, jungle tribes have tiger mimes, steppe peoples do wolf mimicry, and around 1895, when American composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk blended slave rhythms with contemporary instrumentation to create ragtime, the accompanying African dances had names like the “fox trot,” “chicken scratch,” and “snake dip” for the same reason. As Michael Harner reports in
The Way of the Shaman
: “The initiation of shamans … involves nighttime dancing during which the neophytes move in imitation of animals. This is part of a process of learning how to turn into animals.”

And it doesn't take much for the transformation to take place, as Andrew Newberg and Eugene D'Aquili found out when they interviewed Bill, a conservative, fifty-four-year-old businessman who went out one evening to hear some improvisational jazz sometime in the early 1990s. Bill was sitting in a pew in the gothic Calvary Episcopal Church in Pittsburgh, listening to the Paul Winter Consort play alongside the tape-recorded sounds of a howling pack of wolves. “It's enough to lift listeners out of their everyday lives, and into another world,” wrote the scientists in
Why God Won't Go Away
. “And as the wolf serenade reaches its emotional crescendo, that's exactly what's happening to Bill. Quietly, unconsciously, he has allowed himself to be absorbed into the song of the wolves, lulled by its haunting rhythms and the beauty of those wild voices. He feels deeply, serenely at peace. Then, suddenly, he is seized by a surge of excitement. It rushes up from the gut in a burst of joy and energy, and before he can think twice about it, Bill is on his feet, with his head thrown back, and he is howling from the bottom of his soul.”

And he had some company. As soon as Bill leaped to his feet, so did a half dozen others. In the seconds that followed, the rest of the congregation jumped up as well—more than a hundred people spontaneously and inexplicably on their feet and howling along with the wolves. The result was a profound experience of unity—with the wolves, the other members of the congregation, even the wider world, that felt, said Bill, “not
religious
, but definitely spiritual. It's hard to put into words, there's really no way to explain it.”

Actually, there might be. This process works because listening to rhythmic music focuses attention. Focus hard enough, concentrate long enough, and action and awareness merge. If you're a shaman, this is the entrance to the trance state; if you're a scientist, it's the start of a flow state, but there's really no difference. As the expansive empathy that is core to this state arrives, the boundary of self begins to expand. But flow states are progressive. Keep concentrating, keep focusing, boost the whole process by further adding in imitative behavior—an exercise that not only increases attention but further engages the whole of the mirror neuron system—and things begin pushing much closer toward unity.

So what flips that final switch is a little hard to say. As of yet, no one has firmly connected the mirror neuron system to the right parietal lobe, nor have we been able to observe exactly when the orientation association area stops sending out information, so the actual trigger for unity is not yet known. But V. S. Ramachandran believes there's a relationship between the mirror neuron system and self-awareness, and this could help explain it. He recently told the
New Yorker
: “One of the theories we put forward is that the mirror neuron system is used for modeling someone else's behavior, putting yourself in another person's shoes, looking at the world from another person's point of view. This is called an allocentric view of the world, as opposed to an egocentric view. So I made the suggestion that at some point in evolution this system turned back and allowed you to create an allocentric view of yourself. This is, I claim, the dawn of self-awareness.” But if this happened once—if the system turned in to look at itself once—what's to stop it from happening again?

Flow states, exactly like flocking, exactly like consciousness itself, appear to be emergent phenomena—a more coherent level of order formed out messy randomness. But what happen if you were in a flow state, if the mirror neuron system was working overtime trying to pattern match, and the system flipped again? What happens when allocentric perception turns back to look at itself after empathy has expanded our boundary of self beyond the confines of skin, when the answer to “Who am I?” suddenly depends on how far that boundary has moved? Across the football field and it's a touchdown; beyond the species and it's shape-shifting; across the universe and it's cosmic unity.

And never mind my miniature experience with shape-shifting—if animals themselves are capable of flow states, this alone has profound ramifications. It takes a combination of things—endorphins, anandamide, serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, luck, mirror neurons, pattern recognition, face reading, body language reading, right parietal lobe, whatever—to produce group flow, which means that dogs have all these parts and know how to use them. It also takes this same whatever to produce every mystical experience neuroscientists have yet examined. As far as anyone can tell, there's no difference between flow states and mystical states, and like all other peak experiences, they engage the mirror neuron system and involve a chain of empathy leading towards unity. And once I figured this out, you know, being me, this was when I started wondering if dogs believe in God.

46

Wondering if dogs believe in God was perhaps a little farther afield than I had ever intended to travel, but the question no longer struck me as nonsensical. The list of similarities between our two species is considerable and why not consider this possibility as well. After all, dogs clearly have moods. They have personal preferences, ecstatic experiences, and even vices. And while these things might not sound like the typical foundation for faith, they turn out not to be a bad place to start.

In his 1983 book
From Chocolate to Morphine
, University of Arizona physician Andrew Weil points out that children spin in circles to change their consciousness, while adults do the same thing with booze and drugs. So instinctive does this behavior appear that, Weil suspected, perhaps humans aren't the first species to actively pursue altered states. As these things go, he was correct in his suspicions. In 2006, Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff visited the Mona Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Spain. They met a chimp named Marco who dances during thunderstorms with such abandon that, as Bekoff explains it, “he appears to be in a trance.” Goodall has witnessed other chimps, usually adult males, enacting the same rituals near waterfalls. According to an article Bekoff wrote for
New Scientist
: “She described a chimpanzee approaching one of these falls with slightly bristled hair, a sign of heightened arousal. ‘As he gets closer, and the roar of the waterfall gets louder, his pace quickens, his hair becomes fully erect, and upon reaching the stream he performs a magnificent display close to the foot of the falls,' she describes. ‘Standing upright, he sways rhythmically from foot to foot, stamping in the shallow, rushing water, picking up and hurling great rocks. Sometimes he climbs up slender vines that hang down from the trees high above and swings out into the spray of the falling water. This “waterfall dance” may last 10 or 15 minutes.' ” But dancing, while an effective method for altering one's consciousness, is perhaps the long way round.

In October 2006, National Public Radio's
All Things Considered
considered Lady, a cocker spaniel spending a suspicious amount of time down by the backyard pond. “Lady would wander the area, disoriented and withdrawn, soporific and glassy-eyed,” Laura Mirsch, Lady's owner and an NPR intern, said. Then there was that one night when Lady wouldn't come back. Eventually she staggered back from the cattails and opened her mouth like she was going to throw up. She didn't throw up. Instead, recalls Mirsch, “out plopped this saliva-covered, frothy, disgusting toad.” The toad was
Bufo alvarius
, a Colorado River toad whose skin contains two different tryptamines—the same psychoactive found in “magic mushrooms”—and licking
Bufo
produces heady hallucinations.

And toad-tripping dogs are just the beginning. Everywhere scientists have looked, they have found animals who love to party. Bees stoned on orchid nectar, goats gobbling magic mushrooms, birds chomping marijuana seeds, rats on opium, also mice, lizards, flies, spiders, and cockroaches on opium, elephants drunk on anything they can find—usually fermented fruit in a bog hole, but they're known to raid breweries in India as well—felines crazy for catnip, cows loco for loco grass, moths preferring the incredibly hallucinogenic datura flower, mandrills taking the even stronger iboga root.

So prevalent is this behavior that researchers now believe, as UCLA psychopharmacologist Ronald Siegel wrote in his 1989
Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances
, “the pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in the behavior of organisms.”

Siegel thinks the taste for intoxication is acquired and not inborn, though once acquired, look out.

Unlike other acquired motives, intoxication functions with the strengths of a primary drive in its ability to steer the behavior of individuals, societies, and species. Like sex, hunger, and thirst, the fourth drive, to pursue intoxication, can never be repressed. It is biologically inevitable.

But from an evolutionary perspective, this is a difficult inevitability to explain.

Many animals engage these plants, or their manufactured allies, despite the danger of toxic or poisonous effects. The stupefied bees quickly become victims of predation. The carcasses of “drunken” birds litter the highways. Cats pay for their addiction to pleasure plants with brain damage. Cows poisoned with range weeds may eventually die. Inebriated elephants destroy much property as well as the lives of other animals. Disoriented monkeys ignore their young and wander from the safety of the troop. Human beings are no different.

According to Italian ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini, in his 2001
Animals and Psychedelics
, the risk is worth it because intoxication promotes what psychologist Edward de Bono once called
lateral thinking
—problem solving through indirect and creative approaches. Lateral thinking is thinking outside the box, without which a species would be unable to come up with new solutions to old problems, without which a species would be unable to survive. De Bono thinks intoxication an important “liberating device,” freeing us from “rigidity of established ideas, schemes, divisions, categories and classifications.” Both Siegel and Samorini think that animals use intoxicants for this reason and do so knowingly.

Just like us, animals take specific drugs for specific purposes. Among the Navajo, the bear is revered for teaching them about
osha
, a root effective against stomach pains and bacterial infections. Wild carrot, as we learned from birds, repels mites. Horses in pain will hunt for willow stems because they contain salicylic acid, the substance aspirin comes from. In the Gombe National Forest in Tanzania, chimps with digestive troubles swallow sunflower leaves whole. When Michael Huffman, from Kyoto University in Japan, took a closer look he found the hairs on sunflower leaves scrape worms from digestive tracts. These days, when companies such as Shaman Pharmaceuticals sends researchers into the Amazon to study the “old ways,” what they're really after is medical information originally gleaned from watching animals.

Hallucinogens are no different. Psychedelics are really chemical defenses—toxins manufactured by plants to avoid predation. Fungi, among our most prolific source of psychedelics, evolved six hundred million years ago, not coincidentally at the same time as plant-eating animals. Herbivores may have first ingested these psychoactives when the threat of starvation gave them no other choice, but later on sought them out for different rewards. “For example,” writes Siegel, “morning glories, which contain the same alkaloids as ergot [the basis for LSD], are eaten by rats, which feed regularly on the plant's vines and fruits. The rodents tend to avoid the larger concentrations of alkaloids in the seeds. Yet, when disturbed by severe weather conditions, a rat will occasionally snack on a single seed, then display the characteristic head-twitches of intoxication.” He also noted mandrills eating the hallucinogenic iboga root and then waiting two hours for the effects to kick in before picking a territory fight with a rival. Even Lady knew what she was doing. After her initial spate of toad-licking addiction, she learned to party only on the weekends.

Tune in, turn on, and drop back even further, and we can also thank animal planet for the Age of Aquarius. The animals taught us to trip and, to borrow a phrase from Oscar Wilde, “we never had the courtesy to thank them for it.” In Mexico, the Huichol Indians often use the same word for “peyote” as for “deer,” which also explains the fourth-century ceramic pipe found in Guatemala—in the shape of a deer, with a peyote button between its teeth. The shaman of the Russian steppe, from where the word
shaman
descends, have a fondness for
Amanita muscaria
—a serious psychedelic mushroom that the reindeer turned them on to. From watching reindeer eat piss-soaked snow, these shaman also learned to drink urine after taking mushrooms to boost the high. And, perhaps, going from the sublime to the ridiculous,
A. muscaria
is red and white and looks like a chubby, bearded guy poured into a mushroom costume. Scholars have pointed out that Santa Claus, flying reindeer, pine trees, and the giving of gifts were the original components of an
A. muscaria
harvest festival. Christmas may have become Christ's birthday, but it began as Siberian Woodstock—except, you know, with no Jimi Hendrix and plenty of reindeer.

Meanwhile, jaguars in the Amazon chew the bark and leaves of the
yaje
vine, better known as ayahuasca and containing DMT, arguably the most powerful hallucinogen on earth.
Yaje
also makes you puke violently—so why did anyone bother following this example? Shamans, writes Siegel, teach that “by using the vine they too will be transformed into a jaguar.” Which means the animals taught us to trip and we tripped to become animals—which, from a psychological perspective, is one surefire cure for loneliness. But there is one psychological problem far worse than loneliness, far worse than all others, a problem that requires significantly more lateral thinking than anything else we must confront—and this, it appears, may be the real pull of hallucinogens.

In 1963 Aldous Huxley asked for an injection of LSD on his deathbed, believing the drug could facilitate a “good death.” The next year Stanislav Grof found that psychedelics reduced existential anxiety in late-stage cancer patients. Most of this research ended when Nixon declared war on drugs, but lately scientists have picked up the thread. There are currently a half dozen ongoing studies at major institutions such as Harvard and UCLA using hallucinogens for the same purpose. Most were initiated after researchers at Johns Hopkins University conducted a four-year investigation into the similarity between psilocybin and mystical experiences (published in the journal
Psychopharmacology
in 2006 with a follow-up in 2008), which also found that psychedelics could be a fantastic tool for alleviating existential anxiety.

Relief comes, according to Bill Richards, one of the scientists involved in the study, because trips tend to follow the same three-stage process. The first stage is what people typically associate with the drugs, a swirl of lights and colors and sounds. The second stage is a catalogue of faiths—users see Jesus, Buddha, Greek gods, Egyptian gods, and so many others that this stage has become known as the “archetypal realm.” But it's what comes next that make psychedelics so effective against mortal terror. “After the archetypal realm comes the mystical state,” says Richards. “There's a dimension of awesomeness, of profound humility, of the self being stripped bare. In the psychology of religion, mystical experience is well-described—unity, transcendence of time and space, noetic knowledge, sacredness, ineffability … It's the sacred dimension of revelation, but it can be what Kierkegaard called ‘fear and trembling'—incredibly profound and powerful terrain to travel.” Hallucinogens then do the same job as religion—they provide proof of unity, which is still the only known cure for fear of death.

So if you want to know if animals believe in God—that is, whether they seek the comfort of unity—you need to answer two questions: Do animals share our fear of death? And do they actively seek ways to assuage that fear? As far as the second question, Ronald Siegel once saw a mongoose chewing morning glory seeds not as a routine part of his diet but rather as a reaction to the death of his mate. “Morning glory seeds are used by modern Mexican Indians to console themselves in times of trouble; perhaps the animals are doing the same,” he says. But morning glory seeds are a potent psychedelic known by the nickname “heavenly blue” for a reason, so maybe that mongoose wasn't just trying to numb his grief temporarily; maybe he was trying to nullify it completely, seeking in psychedelics the same thing we seek in psychedelics—proof of membership in infinite collective, proof that death is not the end.

We can also say for sure that animals know this end is coming. In her
Coming of Age with Elephants
, biologist Joyce Poole describes a mother elephant grieving for a stillborn baby—crying, slumped over, days on end spent desperately trying to revive her child. On another occasion she saw a troop moving through the forest when one of them fell over and died. The elephants spent a long time trying to revive their companion before moving off into the jungle, only to return the next day for further ceremony. Marc Bekoff has observed both magpies and llamas grieving. Chimpanzees too go through elaborate, multiday rituals with the corpses of dead relatives—though they casually discard those relatives once they start to rot. In 2008, the Internet was flooded with photos of Gana, an eleven-year-old gorilla at the Münster Zoo in Germany, who refused to let go of the dead body of her infant son for several days, prompting
New York Times
science writer Natalie Angier to explain: “Gorillas, and probably a lot of other animals as well, have a grasp of their mortality and will grieve for their dead and are really just like us after all.”

It was a dog named Foghat who settled the issue for me. As for her name, well, she had stringy white hair that stuck straight out from her head and—you guessed it—made her look like a dog wearing a hat made of fog. This was gallows humor for certain. Foghat was a mostly feral dog far beyond saving. She was a Rancho de Chihuahua special, utterly untouchable, blind and deaf and arthritic, could barely walk, had dementia, barked at phantoms, bit everyone and everything that brushed her fur. I once watched her attack the couch after accidentally bumping into it. All the other dogs just stayed out of her way, and she returned the favor. As for the humans, neither Joy nor myself was entirely certain she'd even met our species before. It wasn't just that Foghat ignored us; it was that she lived in a world where we didn't exist.