Modern psychologists say we use only one-tenth of our brains. The French philosopher Henri Bergson speculated that the human brain in its full force was capable of knowing all that was afoot in the universe at any given moment, but that in order to permit our cave-dwelling ancestors to get on with the woolly-mammoth hunting and other business at hand, our front-brains learned to automatically censor 90 percent of the perceptions they received lest we succumb to the stupefying Sensurround effect of information overload. The English philosopher Aldous Huxley—an enthusiastic LSD and mescaline fancier—speculated that if Bergson was correct, technological progress had evolved to the point where humans had the leisure to cultivate the neglected 90 percent, and therefore history had given us the gift of psychedelics in the twentieth century to help us climb back into inner space.
