Employed as "biological microscopes", entheogens are ostensibly "technologies" that have, for countless millennia, enabled "primitive" shamans to operate at the molecular level of plant chemistry and biology, writes Narby. Having studied the paradoxically complex plant knowledge and ritual techniques of Amazonian shamans, as well as documenting their oral narratives, Narby concludes that their detailed and exhaustive pharmacopeia is, by their own detailed testimony, derived from intensive and intuitive knowledge about complex plant combinations and their uses gleaned under the influence of hallucinogens. These combinations –some of which contain a bewildering variety of plant species from different jungle habitats– baffle pharmacologists who, armed with high-end laboratory equipment and a detailed scientific knowledge of plants, are stunned that pre-modern people intuitively know about coupling “specific brain hormones with specific monoamine oxibase inhibitors” in order to produce particular effects in the nervous system (1998:68). Through hallucinogenic trance, writes Narby, "shamans claim to have discovered, for example, the recipes for over forty different sources of muscle paralyzers whereas modern pharmacology has only been able to imitate their plant-derived formulas".