The Laughing Gas Notebook

Nitrous Oxide and the Filmy Screens of Waking Consciousness

Sheets of lined stationery covered in hurried, deteriorating pencil scrawls lay across William James's desk in Cambridge after his self-experiments of 1881 and 1882. He had written the notes while inhaling pure nitrous oxide ($N_2O$) gas from a dentist's rubber bladder. The pages contained strings of seemingly absurd verbal equations: he equated mistakes with a kind of taking, paired nausea with a rhyming suffix, and linked sobriety and drunkenness into a single chain of astonishment. Another line announced in block letters that good and evil are reconciled in a laugh, and that no differences exist anywhere save differences of degree between different degrees of difference and identity.

James had been led to the laughing-gas bag by an eccentric thirty-seven-page pamphlet privately printed in Amsterdam, New York, in 1874. Its author was a mystical farmer and rail-splitter named Benjamin Paul Blood. Entitled The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, Blood's tract reported a peculiar cognitive phenomenon. During the fleeting seconds when a patient emerges from nitrous oxide or ether anesthesia, the mind passes through an overwhelming realization. All the ancient antinomies of philosophy—being and nothingness, self and other, joy and pain—dissolve into a single self-evident synthesis.

Trained as an empirical physiologist, James decided to test Blood's claim in his own nervous system. He published his initial findings as an appendix to his April 1882 Mind essay On Some Hegelisms. In modern neuropharmacology, nitrous oxide acts primarily as an uncompetitive antagonist of excitatory $N$-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) glutamate receptors across the cerebral cortex. That blockade temporarily disrupts the lateral inhibitory circuits that sharpen conceptual boundaries and keep opposing semantic categories distinct. While under the gas, James felt the exact philosophical rapture that followers of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel described in their dialectic. Every contradiction in the universe melted dynamically into a higher unity. A sensation of intense metaphysical illumination accompanied the shift.

As the gas cleared from his lungs over the next ten minutes, that rapturous sense of universal unity evaporated. Only the half-comical rhymes and tautologies remained on his desk. James refused to dismiss the experience as mere toxic delirium or worship the garbled notes as literal cosmic scripture. Instead, he used the nitrous-oxide trials—culminating in his Gifford Lectures at Edinburgh published as The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902—to formulate four principles of altered states:

1. 1. The Noetic Quality of Mystical States: Even though mystical and chemical raptures feel like emotions, they present themselves to the subject as states of acute intellectual insight (noetic states) into depths of truth unplumbed by discursive logic.
2. 2. Ineffability Across State Boundaries: Just as a person who has never tasted wine or heard a symphony cannot have the state communicated by words, the synthesis felt inside the nitrous-oxide state cannot be translated intact into the discrete grammar of sober waking prose.
3. 3. The Selective Filter Model of the Brain: Ordinary waking consciousness is not the whole of mentality. It is a specialized biological adaptation carved out by natural selection to help an organism hunt, avoid predators, and manipulate solid objects by suppressing ninety-nine percent of competing associations.
4. 4. Pluralistic Epistemology: As James argued in Lecture XVI of The Varieties, what we call normal rational waking consciousness is merely one specialized type of awareness, surrounded on all sides—and separated only by the filmiest of neural screens—by potential forms of consciousness that operate on entirely different terms.

When James sent a copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience to the aging Benjamin Paul Blood in Amsterdam, New York, in 1902, he followed it in June 1910—two months before his own death—with a final tribute. He called Blood's nitrous-oxide pamphlet the catalyst that had permanently broken his belief in a single monopolistic form of rationality.