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On Deep History and the Brain 

In "On Deep History and the Brain," Daniel Lord Smail suggests that human history can be understood as a long, unbroken sequence of snorts and sighs and other self-modifications of our mental states. We want to alter our own moods and feelings, and the rise of man from hunter-gatherer and farmer to office worker and video-game adept is the story of the ever proliferating devices -- from coffee and tobacco to religious rites and romance novels -- we've acquired to do so. Humans, Smail writes, have invented "a dizzying array of practices that stimulate the production and circulation of our own chemical messengers," and those devices have become more plentiful with time. We make our own history, albeit with neurotransmitters not of our choosing. . . .

Three decades ago, in his influential study “Tastes of Paradise,” Wolfgang Schivelbusch argued that “the brain is the part of the human body of greatest concern to bourgeois civilization.” Coffee and tobacco, which spread through Europe in the 17th century, helped this reorientation, Schivelbusch said: “Coffee functioned positively, arousing and nourishing the brain. Tobacco functioned negatively, calming the rest of the body ... as was necessary for mental, i.e., sedentary, activity.”

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