Observability and pharmacological calibration in psychoactive ethnobotany: ceremony duration, admixture selection, and the discovery of ayahuasca
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) May 21, 2026 Elliot Allan
Traditional psychoactive plant ceremonies across 11 indigenous traditions on five continents show a near-perfect log–log correlation (r = 0.977) between ceremony duration and the pharmacokinetic duration of the active compounds, spanning seven pharmacological classes including DMT, mescaline, psilocybin, ergolines, salvinorin, ibogaine, and GABA-A-active compounds. A catalogue of 118 Amazonian admixture plants reveals that pharmacologically active species cluster at the extremes of purpose observability, while candidate plants concentrate in the middle. Agent-based simulations indicate that guided iterative search, not random trial-and-error, could realistically discover the DMT plus MAO-I combination within centuries to millennia in the Amazonian flora.