McCartney Times

Cruising what used to be called the Information Superhighway recently, I took a wrong turn somewhere and found myself briefly lost on a weird section of Route 66. Or more precisely, it was the year 1966, in which I landed via an archived interview from Playboy magazine with the psychologist Timothy Leary: then notorious for his advocacy of mind-expanding drugs.Among other things, the piece revealed Leary to be very interested in his ancestral origins (French and Irish, mostly). That of course is not an unusual interest for Americans, then or now. The eccentric part is that he was researching his family history via LSD trips, which he was convinced could recover centuries of memory encoded in his DNA. If the interview can be believed, the results were more dramatic than anything you’d find in the National Library. The Gallic section of his ancestral recall was dominated by one particular figure, from about 300 years before: a “French-appearing man with a black moustache, a rather dangerous-looking guy.” But the Irish side, interestingly, was where most of the sexual memories seemed to be stored.

Source: Trips Down Memory Lane – An Irishman’s Diary about Timothy Leary, John Lennon and LSD