Could the phenomenon described in the post explain why people find psychedelics useful for self-development?
There is the random perturbation—seeing music, hearing thoughts, …
The authority of an old sage performing divinations is replaced in psychedelics with direct experience of the perturbation. And the perturbation is amplified by the feeling of detachedness from one-self, people often have on a trip.
I don’t have any experience with psychedelics, though, so I’m just theorizing.
According to the REBUS and the Anarchic Brain model, the self-developmental benefits of psychedelics would be due to a temporary relaxation of the hierarchical information processing of the brain.
Normally our top-down processes suppress very low-prior bottom-up signals as noise. Psychedelics selectively inhibit the top-down network, allowing anomalous bottom-up signals to propagate. If a lot of anomalies had been suppressed by strongly-held high-level beliefs, this can cause large updates.
Note that these updates are not necessarily correct and the new beliefs can also become sticky, so I wouldn’t recommend untutored experimentation.
Could the phenomenon described in the post explain why people find psychedelics useful for self-development?
There is the random perturbation—seeing music, hearing thoughts, …
The authority of an old sage performing divinations is replaced in psychedelics with direct experience of the perturbation. And the perturbation is amplified by the feeling of detachedness from one-self, people often have on a trip.
I don’t have any experience with psychedelics, though, so I’m just theorizing.
According to the REBUS and the Anarchic Brain model, the self-developmental benefits of psychedelics would be due to a temporary relaxation of the hierarchical information processing of the brain.
Normally our top-down processes suppress very low-prior bottom-up signals as noise. Psychedelics selectively inhibit the top-down network, allowing anomalous bottom-up signals to propagate. If a lot of anomalies had been suppressed by strongly-held high-level beliefs, this can cause large updates.
Note that these updates are not necessarily correct and the new beliefs can also become sticky, so I wouldn’t recommend untutored experimentation.