A Scientist Explains Why Psychedelics Can Feel More Real Than Reality

And so kind of to give a little bit of background.

Yeah, go for it.

The way that we kind of perceive the world is not our just kind of raw perception of what's going on around you.

So we're getting this incoming sensory data from what we see and we smell and we touch.

But what actually makes it up to the level of perception is heavily modulated by our brain's prediction of what's going on.

If you kind of think about moving through the world on your drive home from work every day, there are going to be things that you see that are very predictable and kind of sometimes you get home from work and you're like, I don't even remember how I got here.

And that's because you go

into like autopilot mode on your way home.

You're like, oh, shit, I'm home now.

Exactly.

So why that happens is because your brain predicted that drive home so well.

And oftentimes the brain kind of filters out the well-predicted information.

And this is to conserve energy.

If we kind of perceived everything around us all the time, it would be extremely exhausting.

And so what the brain does is it kind of will filter out a lot of the well-predicted information and it'll light up if there is information from our environment that is not well-predicted stuff that's surprising so like if an elephant kind of jumped out in front of you on your drive home for example and that's so that you can respond and react accordingly to a potential threat kind of know how to navigate a novel situation and so we call that kind of predictive processing in the brain and what we found in our research was that psychedelics disrupted predictive processing so typically we've got these kind of top-down predictions coming from higher areas in the brain saying i i I think this is what that thing is or I think that's what that is.

And again, those kind of modulate our perception.

After psychedelics, we see kind of a weakening of these top-down signals.

So it's kind of like that sensory information is flooding in more strongly.

Sometimes things that would normally be filtered out are treated as if they are more novel.

So like what's happening in the brain that's creating those predictions and then what is getting the information now?

Yeah, so the whole idea is that we have these internal models of everything in the world.

And those models are built based on everything we've ever experienced, our knowledge and our beliefs as well.

And so these models are kind of kept in higher brain regions like our prefrontal cortex.

And then when we have some type of, you know,

in my