Aldous Huxley predicts Adderall and champions alternative therapies

Just want to echo someone else's sub-thread: Adderall is not at all similar to Huxley's description of Soma. Soma was about feeling good and not having to think of the evil things that make the BNW society possible, not efficiency.

That's also what I thought - Wasn't Soma more of a way to make people question less and just remain in a blissed out but maybe sort of out of it state at all times ? Seems very different than amphetamines

The link (including the transcript of Huxley’s lecture) doesn’t seem to be about Soma, unless I’m missing something. Huxley produced a lot of work outside of Brave New World, lots of it concerned with drugs and altered states of consciousness (so much so that personally I don’t think I’ve done enough drugs to understand his perspective, as I find him distinctly, and almost uniquely among such high-profile authors that I’ve tried, unreadable)

Guess more of us should have read the link more carefully..... oops !

You are vey correct—the talk and link have nothing to do with Soma.

I can only presume, based on timing of the talk being 1960, that his thoughts here link to mescaline and the practical utopia he talks of in Island, whose inhabitants make use of a local psychedelic. So whatever he must have said here had more to do with his later perspectives than his feelings around the island.

So kind of like our social media feeds then?

I would've said like marijuana.

Fair enough, but I have read Island, The Doors of Perception, and BNW, and none of those books described using uppers or anything about efficiency. Island was psychedelics (fantastic book in my opinion).

Sounds more like opiates (5000 BCE) or benzos (1950s).

Not Soma! From a talk by Huxley:

> ... I have talked to pharmacologists about this matter, and a number of them say that it’s probably quite possible that it may be possible to, by pharmacological means, which will do no harm to the organism as a whole, to increase the span of attention, to increase the powers of concentration, perhaps to cut down on the necessity for sleep, and the various other things which may lead to a very considerable increase in general mental efficiency.

https://www.organism.earth/library/document/realizing-human-...

Also, Huxley's Soma is very close to the medicine Soma (Carisoprodol), in my experience. It's a beautiful, relaxing, euphoric high. Probably highly addictive.

I was surprised to see the mention of ritual drink of Vedic people.

It turns out to refer to a drug in fiction which is named after the Vedic ritual drink.

Original Vedic "soma" is indeed more like a drink of inspiration and ecstasy, with myths similar to the norse "Mead of poetry".

"somasya tA mada indraS cakAra" - "In the exhilaration of soma, Indra has done these great deeds" - is a rig-vedic refrain.