Among animals, humans stand out in their consummate propensity to self-induce altered states of mind. Archaeology, history and ethnography show these activities have taken place since the beginnings of civilization, yet their role in the emergence and evolution of the human mind itself remains debatable. The means through which modern humans actively alter their experience of self and reality frequently depend on psychoactive substances, but it is uncertain whether psychedelics or other drugs were part of the ecology or culture of ancient hominins. Moreover, non-human great apes in captivity are currently being retired from medical research, rendering comparative approaches thus far impracticable. Researchers from the University of Warwick and the University of Birmingham circumvented this limitation by harnessing the breadth of publicly available YouTube videos to show that apes engage in rope spinning during solitary play; when spinning, the apes achieved speeds sufficient to alter self-perception and situational awareness that were comparable to those tapped for transcendent experiences in humans, and the number of revolutions spun predicted behavioral evidence for dizziness.
Seeking altered mental states is seemingly a human universal, historically and culturally.
The biological and behavioral precursors of such experiences are, however, unclear, notably because it is challenging to confidently confirm if substance use was viable within the highly diversified ecological and cultural human paleobackdrop.
Whether altered state experiences within the hominid family shaped the emergence and evolution of the modern human mind remains one of the major and most thought-provoking unknowns in cognitive science.
Wild primates consume fermented foods with alcoholic content. Consumption of these foods typically depends on natural availability and the opportunistic use of scarce resources.
Though consumption of fermented foods by primates suggests that they may indeed experience drunkenness, consumption may be primarily driven by the high caloric content of alcohol, and thus a side-effect and unavoidable consequence of frugivory.
Medical research has also focused on drug- and alcohol-related behaviors in primates, but has primarily focused on substance abuse and addiction, where subjects are externally administered these substances.
Evolutionary interpretation is, thus, tenuous at best.
“Every culture has found a way of evading reality through dedicated and special rituals, practices, or ceremonies,” said Dr. Adriano Lameira, a researcher at the University of Warwick.
“This human trait of seeking altered states is so universal, historically, and culturally, that it raises the intriguing possibility that this is something that has been potentially inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.”
“If this was indeed the case, it would carry huge consequences on how we think about modern human cognition capacities and emotional needs.”
Like humans, great apes voluntarily seek and engage in altered experiences of self-perception and situational awareness. Image credit: We-o.
To test and provide a proof of concept for the assumption that spinning induces altered mental states in great apes, and potentially did so as well in human ancestors, Dr. Lameira and his colleague, University of Birmingham’s Dr. Marcus Perlman, searched YouTube for publicly posted and publicly available videos of great apes spinning.
They used image-based measures to quantify rotational speeds and rotational duration.
They focused on rope spinning, which in their sample mainly occurred as solitary play without evident causes or goals beyond the act itself.
Through analyzing over 40 online videos, the authors found that on average the primates revolved 5.5 times per episode of spinning, with the average speed 1.5 revolutions per second and the primates did this on average three times.
They compared great ape spinning speeds and found that they can spin while holding on a rope as fast as professional human dancers and circus artists, as well as Dervish muslims who take part in whirling ceremonies to achieve a spiritual trance.
“Spinning alters our state of consciousness, it messes up with our body-mind responsiveness and coordination, which make us feel sick, lightheaded, and even elated as in the case on children playing in merry-go-rounds, spinner-wheels, and carousels,” Dr. Lameira said.
“What we wanted to try to understand through this study is whether spinning can be studied as a primordial behavior that human ancestors would have been able to autonomously engage in and tap into other states of consciousness.”
“If all great apes seek dizziness, then our ancestors are also highly likely to have done so.”
“We asked ourselves what role these behaviors play when it comes to the origins of the human mind,” he said.
“The apes were doing this purposefully, almost as if they were dancing — a known mechanism in humans that universally facilitates mood regulation, social bonding and heightens the senses and is based on rotation movements.”
“The parallel between what the apes were doing and what humans do was beyond coincidental.”
In many of the videos, the primates were using ropes or vines to spin, and it was in these videos where they were spinning the fastest and for the longest amounts of time.
The researchers analyzed the videos and compared it to videos of purposeful human pirouettes, for example, ballet dancing, traditional Hopak (Ukrainian folk dance), whirling dervishes and aerial silks performances.
They then self-experimented spinning at these speeds and times and found it difficult to achieve the third bout of spins at these speeds, as great apes did.
Apes were noticeably dizzy at that point in the videos, and they were likely to lose their balance and fall down.
“This would indicate that the primates deliberately keep spinning, despite starting to feel the effects of dizziness, until they are unable to keep their balance any longer,” Dr. Perlman said.
Further research is needed to understand primates’ motivations for engaging in these behaviors, to understand why our own ancestors might also have been driven to seek out these spinning and mind-altering experiences.
“There could be a link to mental health here, as the primates we observed engaging in this behavior were mostly captive individuals, who may be bored and trying to stimulate their senses in some way,” Dr. Lameira said.
“But it could also be a play behavior. If you think about a child’s playground, almost all the playground apparatus — swings, slides, seesaws and roundabouts or merry-go-rounds — they are all designed to challenge your balance or disrupt the body-mind responses.”
“There are some interesting parallels that should be investigated further, in order to understand why people are motivated to engage in these behaviors.”
“It could very well be that we have been seeking and engaging in mind-altering experiences before we were even modern humans.”
A paper describing this research was published in the journal Primates.
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A.R. Lameira & M. Perlman. Great apes reach momentary altered mental states by spinning. Primates, published online March 14, 2023; doi: 10.1007/s10329-023-01056-x
