Particles and Waves

On Changing Your Mind

In May 2020, I was at the apartment of a guy I was seeing at the time (for the sake of this blog, let’s call him Sam). We had hooked up in late March after meeting on OKCupid, both looking for someone to kill time with during the lockdown, and had spent much of the previous two months discussing psychedelics, philosophy, and psychology, among other topics. He had been encouraging me to try magic mushrooms to help with some of my health issues (it worked!), and gave me a small bag to try for the first time. I returned to his place in a happy daze after my first couple of trips, rambling about a concept I’d seen in the patterns of the universe. He quickly named it for me: fractals. (One of the more humbling experiences of getting into psychedelics is finding out that your mind-blowing revelations have been had many times before).

A fractal is an infinitely complex mathematical pattern that self-repeats across different scales; you can see theme everywhere in nature, in the leaves of trees and the petals of flowers, in jagged shorelines and snowflakes, in the similarities between our brains and the universe, or our cells and neutron stars. The concept is reflected in Richard Dawkin’s observation that every organism is a microcosm of its environment, or in the microcosm-macrocosm analogy, or Darwin’s writing: "Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm - a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and numerous as the stars in heaven." (Darwin, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, 1868: 404). Fractal geometry is used in our technology and to help diagnose cancer.

(You can learn more about the concept in the one-hour documentary Sam showed me, Fractals: Hunting the Hidden Dimension, available for free on YouTube.)

The same night, Sam pulled up a video about the double-slit experiment and asked me if I was familiar with it.

The double-slit experiment was foundational in quantum mechanics; it demonstrates how light and matter work simultaneously as particles and waves. A photon of light acts as a wave until it is observed and recorded, upon which it collapses and acts as a particle.

The image has stuck with me, in particular when I think about how modern technology has impacted us psychologically and neurologically. Like many people, a sense of dread had been growing in me since the start of the pandemic.

Metaphorically—or, if you will, fractally—humans are waves, and when we are together in-person, we communicate as waves, constantly changing, adapting, evolving, and growing in interaction with our environment and other people. We mirror each other; we become more like the people we spend time with.

“Real, face-to-face encounters engage a host of painstakingly evolved social mechanisms for establishing rapport. Subconsciously, we register subtle cues, such as whether a person’s pupils are dilating to take us in, or if they are nodding almost imperceptibly as they agree with us. Our listeners’ breathing syncs up with our own as we establish rapport. This, in turn, activates the mirror neurons in our brain, which releases oxytocin into our bloodstream, bonding us as securely as a breastfeeding mother gazing into her infant’s eyes.” — Douglas Rushkoff

But by offering our ideas and bodies to be recorded via photography, videography, voice recordings and podcasts, and all forms of writing, we are creating “particles” of ourselves, snapshots of what we thought and what we looked like from a moment in time. When we communicate via particles, mirror neurons are not activated in the same way, affecting our ability to empathize and understand each other.

Since spring 2020, I’ve asked myself what happens when we start mirroring and attaching to particles of other people (their videos, pictures, social media posts, text messages etc) instead of real-life interactions? Do we become more particle-like ourselves? More static, black and white, more curated, edited—essentially, a persona, or mask, which one could argue makes the interactions inherently more autistic (controlling/changing behaviour and ways of speaking/writing to fit in socially, hiding “autistic traits”) and narcissistic (the creation of an idealized “false self”).

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I’ve always had an aversion to “particle-ing” myself. I hate having my photo taken, and as a child would duck out of frame when someone tried to include me in a picture. The same for video. I clam up when I know my voice is being recorded, and when I do talk, my voice wavers. It’s a classic case of the observer effect. All of us behave differently when we know we are being recorded, but I find the awareness of the observer overwhelming. It resonated when I heard that some Indigenous peoples supposedly thought photographs stole a part of your soul (I looked this up and it turns out, unsurprisingly, it’s a big over-simplification; here’s an interesting article).

While I’ve been working on it overcoming my aversion since I was a teenager, it’s not entirely irrational. Evidence is mounting that excess social media use is associated with higher levels of anxiety, loneliness, and other mental health issues, in particular for girls and women. “Journalists” routinely trawl through decades-old social media posts by public figures and call them hypocrites if their opinions have since changed. “Cancel culture” is rampant. When I think about all the poorly thought-out and impulsive particles I have scattered throughout the Internet, I wish I had heeded my aversion more, not less.

But at the same time, those particles are just that: particles. Snapshots of what I was thinking, feeling, looking, and acting like at the time the particle was recorded. And as I’ve read more, learned more, listened to more podcasts, spoken to more people, seen the world shattered by Covid-19 and the public response to it, and undergone the mind-altering effects of psilocybin mushrooms and then pregnancy and motherhood, I have wavered on many opinions I once particle-d.

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Loneliness, and oxytocin deprivation is as dangerous to your health as smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Oxytocin, which is released when we connect to others, promotes bonding (among other things) and works in opposition of cortisol (stress hormone); as our oxytocin levels go up, our cortisol levels go down and vice versa. In other words, when you lack healthy connections, you lack oxytocin, and are more vulnerable to the various adverse effects of chronic stress, including weakened immunity to viruses.

While Sam and I were initially “physically” exclusive (while continuing to online date other people), by May 2020, both of us were hanging out with others in-person. While I respected other people’s social distancing boundaries, after a few doses of magic mushrooms, I had few boundaries of my own.

I was convinced the government response to lock everyone down and tell people to isolate themselves in their homes would result in more death, disability, and chronic illness in the long term, a position that was controversial then, but is considerably less so now.

It seemed to me that coming into contact with Covid-19 was inevitable—and I did eventually catch a mild case in January 2023—and the best approach was to try to be as healthy as possible so I could fight it off when I did encounter it, and for that I needed healthy food, sunlight, and moderate exercise, but I also needed friends and family, I needed in-person laughter, and I needed hugs. I needed oxytocin, and not the “drugified” version that comes from online interactions.

I needed to interact with other people as waves, needed to be a wave, instead of exchanging particles on our computers and cell phones. Over the course of 2020, I spent less and less time online, eventually deleting the Twitter account I had wasted so many hours cultivating a following on.

The online discourse was driving me mad. It was upsetting to see people who had presented themselves as anti-establishment or critical of Western culture in some way or another (“leftist”, broadly) turn into aggressive, shaming enforcers of government policies that I (and many others) thought were misguided at best and evil and dangerous at worst.

I stopped writing for a while, though I continued to research in earnest. The mushroom afterglow left me temporarily inarticulate, thinking and speaking largely in metaphors (or fractals, as I insisted) and off trip-inspired hunches I hadn’t yet accumulated scientific evidence for.

(Most of these hunches were already being discussed or had been discussed historically, so I’m not claiming any innovative thought here, more that the mushroom trips helped break me out of rigid thought patterns and make new connections and observations which directed my research. The one unique contribution I felt I had to the Covid discussion—my belief that medicinal psilocybin use combined with other plant medications was preventative against the virus and had the potential to alleviate symptoms of “Long Covid”—was rejected by all three publications I pitched to, and I abandoned the article because I was exhausted from pregnancy and then early motherhood, and, well, it seemed futile in 2020 and 2021 to point this sort of thing out. I’m only now starting to feel like “myself” again. It took nearly three years for mainstream outlets to report case studies of people with Long Covid recovering after a big dose of magic mushrooms, and these failed to gain much traction. I’ll get into this in detail in a future post.)

By the summer, with the help of mushrooms and my now-husband, Zach, I had broken out of my depression into a state of quasi-hypomania, posting impulsive and poorly-worded rants on social media and contacting friends and family to encourage them to change their diets and get out in the sun and continue socializing, for the sake of their health and well-being. As depressing as it was to see media backlash and censorship of anyone who was critical of lockdowns (etc) and projects like The Great Barrington Declaration (which I signed as a layperson), I quickly realized my fears were somewhat unfounded. I was far from the only person who reacted to Covid lockdowns by realizing how important many of my relationships were to me, and prioritizing them. I was not the only person who began investing in my health in other ways, instead of heeding the government and mainstream media. It turns out lots of people saw what I saw, especially when I got off the Internet and had conversations with friends, family, and strangers in person.

While walking with a friend who worked in healthcare I told her about an online backlash I’d seen to a video (or pictures, can’t recall) of young people dancing on the beach. She asked why they were angry, since dancing outside in the summer was a relatively safe activity (we knew back in 2020 that Covid is not easily spread outside). I told her that the people who were angry said that dancing on the beach was disrespectful to healthcare workers and frontline workers.

She burst out laughing and said, “Who did they think was dancing on the beach?”

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I will say this for myself: I have mostly throughout my life tried to act in “ethical” ways, though I have been at various points misguided or naive about what that means in practice. I have been guilty of black-and-white thinking in this area, which one could argue is an “autistic” trait of mine (essay on this to come), but I think, or at least hope, is/was more a product of immaturity.

This project is an attempt to rectify that, to share some of the research I’ve been accumulating since 2019, and to provoke discussions about some difficult topics regarding mental health and personality disorders, child development and “neurodivergence”, Western history (in particular the history of parenting), and related subjects. Psychedelics, in particular magic mushrooms, will be discussed intermittently. Other topics may be sprinkled in. I am not currently planning any paywalled / paid-subscribers-only content, but that may change and I’ll give readers a heads up if it does.

I don’t expect to get everything “right,” and I hope readers will let me know if I make a mistake, miss something, or misinterpret something so I can look it up and potentially fix any errors. However, this blog will focus less on *my* ideas and more on curating, comparing, and analyzing the ideas of others. Pattern recognition has been a strength of mine since I was a mathematically precocious child, and pattern recognition, more than sweeping conclusions, is what I am attempting here.

I am not affiliated with any institution and I am not a mental health professional. I am an independent researcher and writer, and my background is primarily in fiction, playwriting, and poetry, not journalism. I do, however, have a bachelors of science with honours in psychology as well as some relevant work and “lived” experience.

In Prometheus Rising, Robert Anton Wilson wrote:

"When we meet somebody whose separate tunnel-reality is obviously far different from ours, we are a bit frightened and always disoriented. We tend to think they are mad, or that they are crooks trying to con us in some way, or that they are hoaxers playing a joke. Yet it is neurologically obvious that no two brains have the same genetically-programmed hard wiring, the same imprints, the same conditioning, the same learning experiences. We are all living in separate realities.”

I have read widely on all the topics I will discuss, including sources from both the left and right of the political spectrum, and this project can be thought of as a sort of “reality tunnel collage”. Just because I cite someone as a source in a particular area (and imply that I think they are correct), doesn’t mean I endorse all or even the bulk of their ideas. Generally speaking, I do not think any one individual, myself included, is ever correct all the time or wrong all the time. I will cite people that are upsetting to some. This is necessary, and, anyway, I do not believe in censorship, suppressing inconvenient information or research findings, or throwing babies out with the bathwater. I have issues with even my most revered sources, such as Iain McGilchrist’s failure (other than a couple of sentences in his 1,500-page The Matter With Things) to consider the role of parenting in mental illness and developmental disorders, or Robert Sapolsky’s belief that humans do not really have free will.

There is a well-known Indian parable about a group of blind men and an elephant. The Wikipedia article (November 15, 2023) describes it this way:

“A group of blind men heard that a strange animal, called an elephant, had been brought to the town, but none of them were aware of its shape and form. Out of curiosity, they said: "We must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable". So, they sought it out, and when they found it they groped about it. The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, "This being is like a thick snake". For another one whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan. As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree-trunk. The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant, "is a wall". Another who felt its tail, described it as a rope. The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth and like a spear.”

In some versions of the story the men accuse each other of lying and come to blows, in others the men resolve their disagreements and work together to develop a fuller picture of the elephant.

The point is that people come from different vantage points, and in a situation where everyone disagrees about an objective reality, people can be in disagreement but still all telling what they believe is the truth. This is what I mean by “reality tunnel collage”: I will cite sources assuming that the author is being honest about their observations, from their perspective, but in many cases I disagree with or am ambivalent about their interpretation of these observations. While it will be impossible for me to always do so accurately, I will try to identify when I believe sources are speaking from an ideological script, lying, or bullshitting instead of recording their observations honestly. In this sense, this project is politically and academically homeless, as I will cite and discuss perspectives from across the political spectrum and across academic disciplines.

I’ve always struggled with titles, and am still unsure about the one I’ve chosen for this blog: The Cassandra Complex. A “Cassandra Complex” is a reference to the Cassandra of Greek mythology, who was blessed with the ability to foresee the future and cursed so that no one would believe her. I’ve liked Cassandra since I was a child and read Clemence McLaren’s Inside the Walls of Troy, and have come to relate to her more as I procrastinated on starting this blog, and continued to obsessively research and take notes and accumulate evidence for various essay topics. It is a nod to the fact that I while I have never been one to hold my tongue, I have been holding my fingers, and I regret this. I have been guilty of conflict-avoidance, and, as Mother Ayahuasca told me last year, of letting my desire to be seen as good get in the way of doing and saying what I believe is right. Putting the particles before the waves.

The “Cassandra Complex” is also a reference to “Cassandra Syndrome”, a controversial folk diagnosis used to describe the relational trauma of spouses and children of autistic people, in particular autistic men. (The term is controversial because many women who identify with Cassandra Syndrome over-generalize and imply all autistic people are abusive, while many of their autistic critics broadly paint all the Cassandras as “ableist” and a “hate group”, and ironically tend to demonstrate the lack of empathy, DARVO tactics, and utter lack of self-awareness that the Cassandras complain about).

It is also an acknowledgement that, like Cassandra, I am somewhat of a mad princess.

I realize this is ambitious, but I hope to at least start assembling different perspectives to help piece together clearer pictures of some elephants in the (proverbial) room.

— Meghan Bell

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Random Aside:

I started listening to the audiobook of NeuroTribes by Steve Silberman while finishing this essay and was amused to learn that Henry Cavendish, a brilliant natural philosopher and scientist who is one of the earliest (well-known) suspected cases of high functioning autism, absolutely hated to sit for portraits in a very similar way that I detest cameras (I would also hate sitting for a portrait, that sounds like pure hell).

Anyway, it turns out this is another one of those things I thought was just me being weird but is actually somewhat common.

I suck it up for group shots (etc) but still sometimes duck out of frame if I notice a camera on me, to the amusement of my loved ones. I don’t mind candids, but don’t let me see the camera or my brain will short circuit.