PSYCHEDELICS - Sciencemadness.org

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____________________________________________________ Psychedelics
sion" with their LSD subjects, none of whom were psychiatric
patients. On the other hand, Morgens Hertz, a Danish physician,
described a patient whose long-standing stuttering condition
disappeared following LSD treatment (Stafford &
Golightly, 1967, p. 113). An American team of researchers
found that schizophrenic children became more communicative
following LSD treatment (Bender, Goldschmidt, and
Siva Sankar, 1956). As with the other types of language, the
alteration of expressive language under LSD can take a variety
of forms, depending on how it happens to mesh with other
aspects of the psychedelic experience.
One research team (Lennard, Jarvik, and Abramson, 1956)
studied the effects of LSD on group communication, using
both an experimental group of subjects and a control group.
The subjects in the control group increased their verbal out-
put during the observation period, while among those who
had taken LSD there was a reduction in word output. In ad-
dition, the subjects who took LSD asked more questions
and made more statements pertaining to orientation (e.g.,
"What's happening?" "Where am I?") than those in the con-
trol group. These findings are consistent with the typical re-
actions of subjects at the sensory level when traditional time-
space orientation is lost.
Another reason for reduced verbalization during psyche-
delic sessions may be the presence of visual imagery. When
an individual becomes involved in "the retinal circus," he
often loses interest in speaking. Finally, relaxation and leth-
argy often mark a subject's first experiences with the psyche-
delics. In these instances, the speech muscles would be in-
operative, and verbalization would be reduced still further.
E. S. Tauber and M. R. Green (1959) have discussed the
difficulty in talking about visual imagery and trying to com-
municate it to someone else. Not only is there a difficulty in
translating one's own private world into meaningful public
symbols, but there is also a kaleidoscopic piling up of many
different images and meanings. Speech is the vocal expression
of one's experiences and feelings in verbal symbols; wherever
communication involves much more than language can ade-
quately express, there is a high probability of serious gaps,
misunderstandings, and improper inferences. Tauber and