Giorgio Samorini

Giorgio Samorini is an Italian ethnobotanist whose hypothesis of psychedelics as a depatterning factor recasts altered behavior as a possible source of evolutionary variation. The book presents his idea as deliberately speculative, then turns it toward humanity: if old responses cease to serve in a time of crisis, radical departures from them might create possibilities for adaptation.

Identity and Work

Samorini is introduced through his book Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness. Its central proposal is not that psychedelic behavior reliably benefits animals, but that, under certain conditions, a small number of departures from established behavior could prove useful. The hypothesis therefore treats altered consciousness as a possible evolutionary factor rather than simply an individual experience.

The Depatterning-Factor Hypothesis

In Samorini’s account, rapid environmental change or crisis can make a group’s accustomed responses inadequate. A few members may then abandon conditioned patterns and experiment with radically different behavior. Most such novelties, he suggests, would be disastrous and disappear through natural selection; some, however, might help an individual, a group, or even a species adapt. The proposal rests on that uneven distribution of outcomes: innovation is risky, but its occasional usefulness could matter when established behavior no longer works.

Samorini calls this possibility a “depatterning factor.” Psychedelics may, in his hypothesis, loosen habitual perception and behavior, introducing a neurochemically induced source of variation into a population. The idea links an individual shift in consciousness to a much larger process of adaptation, while remaining a possibility rather than a demonstrated account of evolution.

Application to Humanity

The book’s narrator explicitly marks the theory as speculative before considering what it might mean for Homo sapiens. The question is whether humanity has reached a period of crisis in which mental and behavioral depatterning might be called for. From that perspective, psychedelic molecules appear not only as substances that alter individual experience but as potential catalysts for departures from patterns that no longer serve human survival. The book leaves this as an open, provocative question—whether nature has sent these molecules now for that reason—rather than resolving it as fact.