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that one could bring back useful and verifiable knowledge that was otherwise unobtainable. This proved to me that it was possible to reconcile these two apparently distinct worlds.
    I also felt that I needed to improve my defocalization skills in order to succeed. I live not far from a castle that belonged to the family of Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes investigations. During my youth, I had often admired the famous detective’s “lateral” methods, where he would lock himself into his office and play discordant tunes on his violin late into the night—to emerge with the key to the mystery. In the wintry fogs of the Swiss plateau, I started following Holmes’s example. Once the children were in bed, I would go down to my office and get to work with hypnotically dissonant music playing in the background. 1
    Some evenings I would go further. Given that walking makes thinking easier, I would dress up warmly and go for strolls in the misty darkness with my tape recorder. Accompanied only by the rhythm of my boot heels, I would think aloud about all the imaginable solutions to the enigma that was beginning to obsess me. The following day I would transcribe these nebulous soliloquies looking for new perspectives. Some passages truly helped me understand where I was trying to go: “You must defocalize your gaze so as to perceive science and the indigenous vision at the same time. Then the common ground between the two will appear in the form of a stereogram. ...”
    My social life became nonexistent. Apart from a few hours in the afternoon with my children, I spent most of my time reading and thinking. My wife started saying I was absent even when I was in the room. She was right, and I could not hear her because I was obsessed. The more I advanced with this unusual methodology, the fresher the trail seemed.
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    FOR SEVERAL WEEKS, I went over the scientific literature on hallucinogens and their supposed effects on the human brain.
    Here is a fact I learned during my reading: We do not know how our visual system works. As you read these words, you do not really see the ink, the paper, your hands, and the surroundings, but an internal and three-dimensional image that reproduces them almost exactly and that is constructed by your brain. The photons reflected by this page strike the retinas of your eyes, which transform them into electrochemical information; the optic nerves relay this information to the visual cortex at the back of the head, where a cascade-like network of nerve cells separates the input into categories (form, color, movement, depth, etc.). How the brain goes about reuniting these sets of categorized information into a coherent image is still a mystery. This also means that the neurological basis of consciousness is unknown. 2
    If we do not know how we see a real object in front of us, we understand even less how we perceive something that is not there. When a person hallucinates, there is no external source of visual stimulation, which, of course, is why cameras do not pick up hallucinatory images.
    Strangely, and with few exceptions, these basic facts are not mentioned in the thousands of scientific studies on hallucinations; in books with titles such as Origin and mechanisms of hallucinations, experts provide partial and mainly hypothetical answers, which they formulate in complicated terms, giving the impression that they have attained the objective truth, or are about to do so. 3
    The neurological pathways of hallucinogens are better understood than the mechanisms of hallucinations. During the 1950s, researchers discovered that the chemical composition of most hallucinogens closely resembles that of serotonin, a hormone produced by the human brain and used as a chemical messenger between brain cells. They hypothesized that hallucinogens act on consciousness by fitting into the same cerebral receptors as serotonin, “like similar keys fitting the same