7 ms·

One of the strangest, open questions about ayahuasca, is how indigenous people in the Amazon managed to figure out the formulation needed to orally activate the

One of the strangest, open questions about ayahuasca, is how indigenous people in the Amazon managed to figure out the formulation needed to orally activate the DMT with MAOI, given the ~50,000 or more species of plants in that region.

bagacrap 6y ago
lots of plants are made into tea, although most don't have a psychotropic effect. Seems entirely plausible that two separate teas were brewed and consumed which, in combination, caused quite a notable effect.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  MAOIs have a mild effect on their own, based on what I have read.
  - duozerk 6y ago
    Not so mild. The harmal alkaloids in question can induce full on psychedelic trips.
    - CameronNemo 6y ago
      I find that hard to believe considering they do not contain any actual serotonin receptor affecting compounds. Do you have any sources or experience reports? I would be interested to learn more. Perhaps they make naturally occurring DMT or other hormones more effective.
      - duozerk 6y ago
        My apology for the late response; my "source" is the vivid trip I experienced taking a 4g seeds syrian rue tea (and nothing else; the trip was also accompanied by strong nausea, though there are ways to mitigate that). That included vivid open-eyes visuals. Beyond that, I'm struggling to find reports on erowid that do not include other substances but I can tell you there are tens of similar reports on the DMT nexus. Also, you talk about naturally occuring DMT, but be aware that there is absolutely no scientific proof that DMT is contained in any amount sufficient to provoke a trip in the human body, even with a MAOI; it's there, yes, but in minute amounts and almost certainly as a byproduct of the synthesis of something else. Maybe you're right on the other hormones, but if that's the case it's not due to the MAOI properties of harmals either, since we're not seeing people using pharmaceutical MAOIs tripping.
soperj 6y ago
Sort of similar to how did the Chinese & Japanese get the right combination of aspergillus(which can cause all sort of skin & ear lesions, as well as ulcers in humans, and is also what is known as black mold) along with a yeast to produce sake.
daenz 6y ago
The same way humans figured out how to harness any resource: accident + observation + attempts to reproduce + time
Alex3917 6y ago
Lots of plants contain DMT and lots of plants contain MOAI. They probably found a weaker or less pleasant combination by accident first, and then once they knew what they were looking for kept experimenting until they found the best version.
- ta988 6y ago
  There is no "best version" there are many reported with variations of the MAOI or DMT source and with other additives. Species of the Solanaceae familly, such as Brugmansia, being the most commons. But there are also some Ilex species containing caffeine for example.
alextheparrot 6y ago
I always love some of the “Letters to my lord” regarding willow bark (aspirin). > There is a bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders. About six years ago, I accidentally tasted it, and was surprised at its extraordinary bitterness One letter, which I couldn’t readily find, eventually reduced to “My lord, I had a tooth ache and was chewing on random things in the forest. Willow bark made me feel better” [0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.0033 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.003...
stevenjohns 6y ago
Considering other groups, at the time, were circumnavigating the world, forging steel and blasting each other with gun powder it’s not hard to believe that an equally intelligent and able group of people that put their attention to something else could figure out how to get high from a plant. Perhaps this is due to European destruction of the native history of the Americas - they’re seen as primitive groups with little social complexity. I think that if their histories were better preserved we’d be less surprised that they had an understanding of the native plants around them.
- sammalloy 6y ago
  This is my thinking as well. There are surviving remnants of pre-Columbian pharmacopoeia for the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, as only three examples. I wonder if the ingredients and instructions for the brew were previously recorded in a similar manner, but then reduced to an oral tradition once religious people like Diego de Landa showed up and started burning anything that might have challenged the new gods.
  - mensetmanusman 6y ago
    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli I have wondered if these skull walls were part of their methods...
  - Guthur 6y ago
    Non of these actions are uniquely European or religious. You'll find similar outcomes throughout history and the world. Whether it's nationalism, communism, religion, tribalism or what ever. Us and them dynamics are constantly being created and exploited by various groups throughout our collective history.
    - sebmellen 6y ago
      FYI I don't think you're getting downvoted because anyone disagrees, just because it's off topic. No one said such actions are uniquely European or religious.
mceoin 6y ago
Or perhaps they just listen for the right resonance on a full moon... (13:32) https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_cultures/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_...
orange8 6y ago
Same question, different scenario: A pregnant woman will often crave the foods that contain just the nutrients her body requires at the time. Has she figured out exactly what her body needs and what foods contain it?
- jml7c5 6y ago
  AFAIK the idea that cravings represent desires for specific nutrients has been largely debunked. Do you know of any material that supports the theory?
  - orange8 6y ago
    Debunked by whom and where. I'd be interested in getting your sources too. In terms of material supporting the theory, google "pregnant cravings nutrients" and you will get hundreds of results... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#1 https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#...
    - UShouldBWorking 6y ago
      Why are people trying to ruin the narrative that woman are mythical creatures with special inborn knowledge available only to them? Shesh!
- nondeveloper 6y ago
  Are you maybe thinking of pica? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
  - lopmotr 6y ago
    Surely you'd have heard about it from friends or family if it was common for pregnant women to have cravings for nails and bottle caps and that their bodies need the nutrition from them?
hx2a 6y ago
There was a relevant conversation on HN about this over a year ago that you might be interested in: How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely? https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912 Bottom line, it is trial and error, an evolution of ideas and culture over many generations.
BurningFrog 6y ago
The general answer to these questions is that before Industrialism, all of humanity lived on, or one mishap away from, the famine line. "How did my ancestors ever think of trying to eat X"? Well, they were dying anyway, so they didn't have much to lose. My main message is, you and me are so incredibly lucky to live in this era of wealth, health and progress. We should try to appreciate it.
- jbay808 6y ago
  Amazingly, this doesn't seem to be the case for most other animals.
  - aristophenes 6y ago
    This could probably be explained by the fact that most other animals have predators, and humans don’t (at least not successful ones). It is true of apex predators (that are not themselves killed by humans).
- ergwwrt 6y ago
  Depends where you live. Research what happened to the Aral Sea in the last 50 years..
thelittleone 6y ago
Recounting a tale from a Shipibo curandero (healer) with an unbroken lineage: It's a relatively new phenomena that the patient drinks the medicine. Traditionally, before Westerners, the curandero would drink alone in the presence of the patient. And earlier still the curandero drank a medicine derived solely from ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi). That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions. It was not needed for visions and to heal. Chacruna was added in the 1900s due to the impact of westernization in the region and the negative affect on the curanderos' natural connections. So it isn't necessarily that a formula of two plants was magically discovered at the very beginning. EDIT: add to this that when you cut the vine, a rich colored liquid / sap forms on the cut part. It tastes quite sweet. It's not a stretch to imagine the first person simply cut a vine, tasted it and decided to do an extraction in hot water.
- duozerk 6y ago
  > That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions Indeed, but harmal alkaloids - those contained in b. caapi - are not only selective, reversible MAOIs but also full on psychedelics by themselves, as anyone having taken a significant amount of them (usually either through b. caapi or a peganum harmala seeds tea) could tell you. You get "visions" with them too.
victorbstan 6y ago
I thought “Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” was a pretty good book.
hyperpallium2 6y ago
Like a needle in a haystack. But what if there are many needles, and this is just the one that was found?
- tt433 6y ago
  Lots of monkeys banging away on typewriters, too
  - hyperpallium2 6y ago
    About 3 keys gives over 50,000 combinations, so not really comparable, IIUYC. And once something is found, humans do hill climbing to refine.
samatman 6y ago
So it looks like an O(n^2) search, to try all combinations of two plants where you have to get the intersection right. However, banisteriopsis caapi is orally active on its own: a brew of just the vine will change perception. So it's an O(n) search to find the ayahuasca vine, then another O(n) to find DMT bearing plants (there are several), which go with it. A typical preparation of the medicine will have a dozen or more plants in it, with two or three recognized as "active" by the standards of Western pharmacology. So it's plausible to imagine the curanderos adding a bit of this, a bit of that, as guided by the spirits (or intuition, whatever looked good, your choice), then hitting on the combination. This might sound like I'm being dismissive of what was most likely a directed search for medicinal plants, which isn't my intention. Just simplifying and glossing over that part, to point out that it's a two-stage discovery, and you don't need both plants in a brew to start using one of them.
- meowface 6y ago
  I'm also guessing any plant with a substance that acts as a MAOI would probably potentiate the effects of lots of other substances. So my guess is that it may not have taken that long for at least one person (or maybe multiple people independently) to discover that this plant seemed to alter the effects of other plants. Then at that point some adventurous people may have just started trying combining it with every other plant they knew about and every future one they discovered, including plants that they otherwise believed had no effect. They probably would've stumbled upon a lot of interesting combinations. And if they determined it had a strange ability to seemingly "unlock" "dormant" plants and if they spread that knowledge, maybe some people were trying it with absolutely every non-poisonous plant out there. And since DMT-bearing plants are pretty common (as you mention), multiplied across a whole society it may not have taken very long at all. And it would take just one MAOI plant for them to get the idea that other plants might have this unlocking ability, and just one DMT-rich plant to discover other plants might have similar effects, so maybe they iterated through combinations of MAOIs and serotonergics until they found one they felt had a good balance of maximal power and minimal undesired side effects. So the bottleneck might be the first instance of someone ever discovering any kind of MAOI plant (this vine or any other). After that barrier is passed, I suspect it might be almost inevitable that something like this particular combination would be found pretty quickly (just blindly speculating, but potentially within a generation or two?).
mikro2nd 6y ago
One of the strangest open questions about Tomatoes is: How did indigenous people in Mesoamerica look at a small, green, somewhat poisonous and awful-tasting berry and think, "I'll bet I could make something of this if I give it a few hundred generations of selective breeding." Same question, really.
- KronisLV 6y ago
  I mean, it seems no less interesting to me when you put it like that. Sure, the process might have been a bit ad hoc at times and they might not necessarily have known about the particulars of what they'd end up with, but the history of farming and agriculture seems pretty interesting!
throwaway_pdp09 6y ago
MAOIs are not uncommon. Just off the top of my head, tobacco plants and st. john's wort. If this is credible, and I'm not saying it is, a decent list https://www.botanical-online.com/en/medicinal-plants/depression-natural-mao-inhibitors https://www.botanical-online.com/en/medicinal-plants/depress... [0] Anyway, they're not rare. [0] that list looks a bit dodgy, how much maoi is in turmeric for example?
comeondude 6y ago
The author of Cosmic Serpent asked this question. They replied “the plants told us”

bagacrap 6y ago

lots of plants are made into tea, although most don't have a psychotropic effect. Seems entirely plausible that two separate teas were brewed and consumed which, in combination, caused quite a notable effect.

CameronNemo 6y ago
MAOIs have a mild effect on their own, based on what I have read.
- duozerk 6y ago
  Not so mild. The harmal alkaloids in question can induce full on psychedelic trips.
  - CameronNemo 6y ago
    I find that hard to believe considering they do not contain any actual serotonin receptor affecting compounds. Do you have any sources or experience reports? I would be interested to learn more. Perhaps they make naturally occurring DMT or other hormones more effective.
    - duozerk 6y ago
      My apology for the late response; my "source" is the vivid trip I experienced taking a 4g seeds syrian rue tea (and nothing else; the trip was also accompanied by strong nausea, though there are ways to mitigate that). That included vivid open-eyes visuals. Beyond that, I'm struggling to find reports on erowid that do not include other substances but I can tell you there are tens of similar reports on the DMT nexus. Also, you talk about naturally occuring DMT, but be aware that there is absolutely no scientific proof that DMT is contained in any amount sufficient to provoke a trip in the human body, even with a MAOI; it's there, yes, but in minute amounts and almost certainly as a byproduct of the synthesis of something else. Maybe you're right on the other hormones, but if that's the case it's not due to the MAOI properties of harmals either, since we're not seeing people using pharmaceutical MAOIs tripping.

soperj 6y ago

Sort of similar to how did the Chinese & Japanese get the right combination of aspergillus(which can cause all sort of skin & ear lesions, as well as ulcers in humans, and is also what is known as black mold) along with a yeast to produce sake.

daenz 6y ago

The same way humans figured out how to harness any resource: accident + observation + attempts to reproduce + time

Alex3917 6y ago

Lots of plants contain DMT and lots of plants contain MOAI. They probably found a weaker or less pleasant combination by accident first, and then once they knew what they were looking for kept experimenting until they found the best version.

ta988 6y ago
There is no "best version" there are many reported with variations of the MAOI or DMT source and with other additives. Species of the Solanaceae familly, such as Brugmansia, being the most commons. But there are also some Ilex species containing caffeine for example.

alextheparrot 6y ago

I always love some of the “Letters to my lord” regarding willow bark (aspirin). > There is a bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders. About six years ago, I accidentally tasted it, and was surprised at its extraordinary bitterness One letter, which I couldn’t readily find, eventually reduced to “My lord, I had a tooth ache and was chewing on random things in the forest. Willow bark made me feel better” [0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.0033 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.003...

stevenjohns 6y ago

Considering other groups, at the time, were circumnavigating the world, forging steel and blasting each other with gun powder it’s not hard to believe that an equally intelligent and able group of people that put their attention to something else could figure out how to get high from a plant. Perhaps this is due to European destruction of the native history of the Americas - they’re seen as primitive groups with little social complexity. I think that if their histories were better preserved we’d be less surprised that they had an understanding of the native plants around them.

sammalloy 6y ago
This is my thinking as well. There are surviving remnants of pre-Columbian pharmacopoeia for the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, as only three examples. I wonder if the ingredients and instructions for the brew were previously recorded in a similar manner, but then reduced to an oral tradition once religious people like Diego de Landa showed up and started burning anything that might have challenged the new gods.
- mensetmanusman 6y ago
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli I have wondered if these skull walls were part of their methods...
- Guthur 6y ago
  Non of these actions are uniquely European or religious. You'll find similar outcomes throughout history and the world. Whether it's nationalism, communism, religion, tribalism or what ever. Us and them dynamics are constantly being created and exploited by various groups throughout our collective history.
  - sebmellen 6y ago
    FYI I don't think you're getting downvoted because anyone disagrees, just because it's off topic. No one said such actions are uniquely European or religious.

mceoin 6y ago

Or perhaps they just listen for the right resonance on a full moon... (13:32) https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_cultures/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_...

orange8 6y ago

Same question, different scenario: A pregnant woman will often crave the foods that contain just the nutrients her body requires at the time. Has she figured out exactly what her body needs and what foods contain it?

jml7c5 6y ago
AFAIK the idea that cravings represent desires for specific nutrients has been largely debunked. Do you know of any material that supports the theory?
- orange8 6y ago
  Debunked by whom and where. I'd be interested in getting your sources too. In terms of material supporting the theory, google "pregnant cravings nutrients" and you will get hundreds of results... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#1 https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#...
  - UShouldBWorking 6y ago
    Why are people trying to ruin the narrative that woman are mythical creatures with special inborn knowledge available only to them? Shesh!
nondeveloper 6y ago
Are you maybe thinking of pica? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
- lopmotr 6y ago
  Surely you'd have heard about it from friends or family if it was common for pregnant women to have cravings for nails and bottle caps and that their bodies need the nutrition from them?

hx2a 6y ago

There was a relevant conversation on HN about this over a year ago that you might be interested in: How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely? https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912 Bottom line, it is trial and error, an evolution of ideas and culture over many generations.

BurningFrog 6y ago

The general answer to these questions is that before Industrialism, all of humanity lived on, or one mishap away from, the famine line. "How did my ancestors ever think of trying to eat X"? Well, they were dying anyway, so they didn't have much to lose. My main message is, you and me are so incredibly lucky to live in this era of wealth, health and progress. We should try to appreciate it.

jbay808 6y ago
Amazingly, this doesn't seem to be the case for most other animals.
- aristophenes 6y ago
  This could probably be explained by the fact that most other animals have predators, and humans don’t (at least not successful ones). It is true of apex predators (that are not themselves killed by humans).
ergwwrt 6y ago
Depends where you live. Research what happened to the Aral Sea in the last 50 years..

thelittleone 6y ago

Recounting a tale from a Shipibo curandero (healer) with an unbroken lineage: It's a relatively new phenomena that the patient drinks the medicine. Traditionally, before Westerners, the curandero would drink alone in the presence of the patient. And earlier still the curandero drank a medicine derived solely from ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi). That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions. It was not needed for visions and to heal. Chacruna was added in the 1900s due to the impact of westernization in the region and the negative affect on the curanderos' natural connections. So it isn't necessarily that a formula of two plants was magically discovered at the very beginning. EDIT: add to this that when you cut the vine, a rich colored liquid / sap forms on the cut part. It tastes quite sweet. It's not a stretch to imagine the first person simply cut a vine, tasted it and decided to do an extraction in hot water.

duozerk 6y ago
> That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions Indeed, but harmal alkaloids - those contained in b. caapi - are not only selective, reversible MAOIs but also full on psychedelics by themselves, as anyone having taken a significant amount of them (usually either through b. caapi or a peganum harmala seeds tea) could tell you. You get "visions" with them too.

victorbstan 6y ago

I thought “Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” was a pretty good book.

hyperpallium2 6y ago

Like a needle in a haystack. But what if there are many needles, and this is just the one that was found?

tt433 6y ago
Lots of monkeys banging away on typewriters, too
- hyperpallium2 6y ago
  About 3 keys gives over 50,000 combinations, so not really comparable, IIUYC. And once something is found, humans do hill climbing to refine.

samatman 6y ago

So it looks like an O(n^2) search, to try all combinations of two plants where you have to get the intersection right. However, banisteriopsis caapi is orally active on its own: a brew of just the vine will change perception. So it's an O(n) search to find the ayahuasca vine, then another O(n) to find DMT bearing plants (there are several), which go with it. A typical preparation of the medicine will have a dozen or more plants in it, with two or three recognized as "active" by the standards of Western pharmacology. So it's plausible to imagine the curanderos adding a bit of this, a bit of that, as guided by the spirits (or intuition, whatever looked good, your choice), then hitting on the combination. This might sound like I'm being dismissive of what was most likely a directed search for medicinal plants, which isn't my intention. Just simplifying and glossing over that part, to point out that it's a two-stage discovery, and you don't need both plants in a brew to start using one of them.

meowface 6y ago
I'm also guessing any plant with a substance that acts as a MAOI would probably potentiate the effects of lots of other substances. So my guess is that it may not have taken that long for at least one person (or maybe multiple people independently) to discover that this plant seemed to alter the effects of other plants. Then at that point some adventurous people may have just started trying combining it with every other plant they knew about and every future one they discovered, including plants that they otherwise believed had no effect. They probably would've stumbled upon a lot of interesting combinations. And if they determined it had a strange ability to seemingly "unlock" "dormant" plants and if they spread that knowledge, maybe some people were trying it with absolutely every non-poisonous plant out there. And since DMT-bearing plants are pretty common (as you mention), multiplied across a whole society it may not have taken very long at all. And it would take just one MAOI plant for them to get the idea that other plants might have this unlocking ability, and just one DMT-rich plant to discover other plants might have similar effects, so maybe they iterated through combinations of MAOIs and serotonergics until they found one they felt had a good balance of maximal power and minimal undesired side effects. So the bottleneck might be the first instance of someone ever discovering any kind of MAOI plant (this vine or any other). After that barrier is passed, I suspect it might be almost inevitable that something like this particular combination would be found pretty quickly (just blindly speculating, but potentially within a generation or two?).

mikro2nd 6y ago

One of the strangest open questions about Tomatoes is: How did indigenous people in Mesoamerica look at a small, green, somewhat poisonous and awful-tasting berry and think, "I'll bet I could make something of this if I give it a few hundred generations of selective breeding." Same question, really.

KronisLV 6y ago
I mean, it seems no less interesting to me when you put it like that. Sure, the process might have been a bit ad hoc at times and they might not necessarily have known about the particulars of what they'd end up with, but the history of farming and agriculture seems pretty interesting!

throwaway_pdp09 6y ago

MAOIs are not uncommon. Just off the top of my head, tobacco plants and st. john's wort. If this is credible, and I'm not saying it is, a decent list https://www.botanical-online.com/en/medicinal-plants/depression-natural-mao-inhibitors https://www.botanical-online.com/en/medicinal-plants/depress... [0] Anyway, they're not rare. [0] that list looks a bit dodgy, how much maoi is in turmeric for example?

comeondude 6y ago

The author of Cosmic Serpent asked this question. They replied “the plants told us”