How to make beautiful nonsense
As I wrote about last time, I spend a good chunk of my free time with my friends who have kids.
Last summer I was drinking an icy beer on a warm afternoon in my friend’s backyard. His girls, then 5 and 2 1/2, were drawing with chalk on the patio. The younger one demanded I trace her hand and I obeyed. After, she lifted up her hand to see our creation, looked at the chalk hand, and exclaimed, “That’s not my hand!”
My work was sloppy. Let’s try it again. Again, “That’s not my hand!!!” I mean… if it were anyone’s hand it was definitely her’s, but she made a pretty compelling and impassioned case that it wasn’t her hand.
It made me think about how adults’ and kids’ minds process the world radically differently. And then, about psychedelics.
In 2018 I was on a surf trip in Mexico with a couple guys, one of whom I hadn’t met until the trip. He’s a chemist who does pharmaceuticals research and had a wealth of knowledge about how our bodies react to many things, including LSD. (Whether anyone cited in this story ingested any substances is impertinent to this post.)
The simplest way I understand it is that LSD does the opposite of what drugs like Xanax do to our brain. Rather than calm us down, it decreases the order through which we see the world.
A Yale study explains it in more scientific terms: “The new data indicate that LSD triggers a reduction of functional connections between regions of the brain governing cognitive processes and increases connectivity in brain networks associated with sensory functions.” We feel more and think less.
To mature, well-adapted (and chemically unaltered) brains, the world is full of shapes and sounds that have meaning. A square thing with rectangular holes and a triangle on top is a house. The bipedal things inside it are a family. A much smaller rectangle covered in metal and glass is our portal to the world’s information. A rhythmic, repetitive piece of music means someone inside that rectangle wants us to answer it.
Things we encounter cue other things. We need that order to manage our everyday lives.
Like kids, adults on psychedelics lack the capacity (or will?) to performing what most of us consider basic tasks: cooking, driving, forming a cogent sentence, hearing music without becoming fully entranced. But they’re much better at letting the world just… be. I think we can learn something powerful from that.
Surrealistic artists use an immersive technique called “automatism” to express the workings of lesser-tapped part of their brains. It requires “coming in without a plan” and “focus on instinct and instantaneous happenings.”
In a podcast interview, the composer Hans Zimmer relayed an illustrative fable about the perils of letting our minds take on too much orderliness: “A child says ‘Mommy, when I grow up I’m going to become a musician.’ And the mother says, ‘Oh darling I’m so sorry, you can’t do both.’” (Shout/ out to Ricardo Munoz for the episode tip).
Retaining a disorderly mind is key to creativity, allowing us to habitually create new connections between things that orderly minds simply overlook, in the arts or otherwise.
I’m not here to recommend experimenting with drugs (though I do recommend reading How To Change Your Mind). But I do recommend finding ways to resist placing order where it may not need to exist. Say yes to something you normally wouldn’t — where your mind screams RISK rather than MAYBE.
The easiest way to do it is to approach something like a kid would.
If you have kids in your life, get on the ground to play with them and just follow their lead. There might not be words or sentences but it’ll be clear which instrument they want you to play in their multi-sensory orchestra. They’ll already be covered in dirt and now you will be too. They’ll take a few things that don’t belong together and have them interact with elements of a house or yard (that they don’t know/ care the name of) in a way that makes no sense. It’ll all happen out of order and it’ll blow your mind how fun it is.
