Abstract

The Dutch artist Frederick Franck said, “what I have not drawn I have never really seen, and when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle.” I would push this insight further and suggest that image making is not just a way of perceiving but also a unique and powerful way knowing, a way of sense making.

Image making on psychedelics may be a special kind of exploration, or as I suspect a merely amplified form of universal creative imagination. Drawing helps us make sense of our world, constructing and exploring forms in nature and in ourselves. Didactic drawing is instructive as a finished image map or representation of reality, but also as a kinetic drawing process –a form of sense-making that capitalizes on the embodied simulation system that we share with other mammals. In my view, images can act as forms of thinking in four ways: (1) they boost morphological insight (understanding of form and formative process, (2) they act as gestalt-like networks of affordances or use-scaffolds, (3) they act as inferential/prediction structures for analogical reasoning and prototype classification, and (4) they capture, and retain somatic evaluative content.

However, didactic drawing –aimed at categorizing– is unraveled during psychedelic experiences, and we relish the deconstruction of stereotyped forms and form-making. Like language, images are stimulus-independent signals, decoupled from perception and free for novel recombination. Indeed, I would argue that image making is a much older semantic and syntactical system than language. The psychedelic experience often heightens the decoupling and the novel recombination of imagery. In this talk I will explore the empirical tradition of drawing on psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, and other agents. I’ll also describe my own phenomenological explorations of drawing on psychedelics. Finally, I will explore some of the implications of this research for philosophy of mind and cognitive science.