Crumb! Mysticism, Psychedelics, and brain remodeling!

How do psychedelic substances work? One critical factor we know they share is mystical type experience, and it seems to underlie the drastic psychological and emotional remodeling.

So what is mysticism? In short, perception or interaction with a larger, you

know,

thing.

One framework says it includes a sense of internal unification, external oneness, release from time-space, internal experience and objectivity, contentment, joy, duality, and experience greater than words.

Previous brain imaging studies have shown psychedelics' mystical experiences take place while electrical signals change, notably with peak alpha frequencies decreasing in power during psychedelic use.

With reduction of peak alpha frequencies, the brain and nervous system finally relax, reducing hyperarousal connected with higher PTSD suffering and providing relief from that chronic stress state.

But because that aforementioned sense of connecting to something larger allows or forces... editing of rigid negative schema maladaptive core beliefs freeing the individual from the illness of the mind at the same time as they're relieved from the hyper arousal of the lower brain body this changes the overall perspective of the individual's life altering their self-narrative promoting new core beliefs to form and opening the door to long-lasting transformation after treatment but PTSD, trauma, and early life stress are also associated with high beta power, particularly in the frontal brain.

Frontal beta activity is correlated with maintaining cognitive and emotional states, causing them to stickily persist rather than passing by.

By doing what? stabilizing top-down control signals.

But Ibogaine changes this beta brain frequency, shifting it from the frontal region, your prefrontal control center that's always telling you no, no, no, to the posterior cortex.

including the occipital region, aka your sensory brain system is lit up, including your sight processor.

So instead of numbly replaying old narratives, the brain begins exploring sensory inputs.

presently and also predictively.

It starts to feel reality and anticipate positive changes in reality, presence and curiosity, rather than disassociation and terror.

One can also summarize this entire shift as moving from top-down to to bottoms-up functioning.

Psychedelics appear to temporarily free you from the small-s self, and what I call the self-sickness created by trauma, and instead allow you to tap into the big-s self.

An endogenous, mystical experience.