The Effects of Psychedelics on the Intermediation of Sensorial Experience

Outlining its implications for the phenomenology of consciousness

CC — Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins Medicine

Author: López, Franco Martín.

francomartinlopez@gmail.com

Abstract

Human brains possess subconscious structures to deal with senses and emotions on a daily basis in order not to get overwhelmed constantly by each experienced input of sensorial data of the moment. Psychedelics like LSD denaturalized those frameworks up to a point that leave the experience of sensorial perceptions and emotions to a more infant-like approach, letting the experience, instead of being interpreted as usual, be re-interpreted in forms of hallucination (emotional and perceptual) we are almost incapable to even consider. Usually, most information is dealt and pre-filtered before arriving to our conscious awareness of attention. Psychedelics erase the filters so the brain deals with all of the sensorial experience again as an infant usually does at the beginning of its life. Without frameworks of filters to structure experience, our consciousness gets disorganized raw data from sensorial input and things might, for example, distort while primitive innate mechanisms for similarities and pattern recognition work trying to provide meaning by transforming the data into useful information inter-associated along time and sensory channels, aided by memory. The same happens with non-perceptive sensorial experience (emotions), that appear different, new or not specifically attached to usual meaning.

Keywords: Psychedelics, experience, sensorial frameworks, sensory data, information, meaning, phenomenology, neurology, consciousness, brain, philosophy of mind.

Introduction

“To make biological survival possible, mind at large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet.”

Aldous Huxley

Since the advent of the use of psychedelic drugs, many theories about how these substances affect the brain and consciousness have developed. Huxley (Huxley, 2009 (1954)) termed his core idea “the valve theory”, from which he borrowed from 19th-century theorist the “filtration theory” that explained how consciousness is ordinarily filtered by biological and psychological selection processes that exclude sensorial material. Osmond (Hopkins Tanne, 2004), based on this approach, coined the term “psychedelic” (psyche -mind, delic -manifesting) to name these drugs because they allow to manifest the mind by inhibiting certain brain processes which normally perform constraints on conscious perceptions, emotions, thoughts and sense of self. In this essay we will explore these theories based on the phenomenological insights produced by psychedelics and aided by the latest scientific research. Our aim would be to understand the effects produced by drugs such as lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to the sensorial experience (of both perceptual and emotional feelings), specifically by transforming how we process sensorial data from reality.

Frameworks of intermediation for sensorial experience

Our consciousness is born into a complex world of unorganized data. Our brains initially only have some rudimental capacities to deal with the enormous amount of data that sensory experience provides to them through emotions and perceptions. Initially more energy, time or brain capacity is used to process that data and turn it to information by organizing it in meaningful ways that are useful for human existence and survival, thus impairing its use for any other kind of tasks.

With time, the initial rudimental brain pre-structures that are innate to the brain’s neuro-biology generate information filters. These are created by learning to focus attention in some parts of the sensorial data and not all. How could this be done? These pre-structures might have the capacity to recognize similarities, and with time, recognize patterns by repetition in time and extent of the sensorial space. These pre-structures allow categorizing sensorial data into information by recognizing key common aspects of the sensory input between the components of it and also could identify the similarities of the data with something already known and experienced and saved in the brain’s memory, so avoiding to reprocess it. With the years these filters become more and more perfected and complex and make up almost all of our sensorial experience by conforming true sensorial frameworks of meaning (where raw data becomes useful information).

We could say that what the brain is trying to do with the raw sensory data from experience is to create meaningful information out of it by recognizing similarities into coherent patterns of relations between the different sensory input data channels (that is to say, each different origin of perceptual and emotional data). This could be done by random data relation based on similarities in order to recognize patterns that are then logically tested in its coherence with the rest of the recognized patterns based on the rest of the data. With enough time, similar structures of data are not only recognized within a set of sensorial data (let’s say, for example, visual data) but along and through different sets of sensory data by association (between for example visuals and sound experience, or by learning to identify the order of succession in time between data sets within the very same sensorial channel).

To better understand this, an example can be useful. When we think we see on its full extent the realm we inhabit, we are really not seeing at all in those terms. Most of the data from our sensorial experience is scrapped out as junk and some units of data of it proceed to create a low-resolution representation of what resembles to anything we already know, and, only if something looks particularly new, we let it be detailed and processed in order to pay attention and study for adding it as new information and analyzing it. This happens with all senses, perceptual and emotional alike.

This economic capacity to filter out most irrelevant information from relevant one and be efficient in brain resources allows us as we grow old to use our brain for functions other than just understanding our sensorial experience. As we grow up, we stop almost having contact with most new sensorial unfiltered input, but rather start dealing almost exclusively with pre-filtered inputs that also come pre-processed according to our memory of past sensorial experience. Only marginally, on each new experience, we add a small number of units of new real sensorial data that does not fit to the previous patterns and filters under some ranges of tolerance. The slow development of a collection of filters designed to scrap data out of the sensorial input and saved memories of pre-experienced sensorial data to reconstruct with a low level of detail the missing irrelevant parts of the sensory data conform frameworks of experience that ultimately engulf most of our daily experience. These frameworks use pre-existing similarities and pattern recognition mechanisms not only to compare the data within a sensorial input and create filters, but also in comparison with pre-saved recollections of existing filters in an ever-improving process that constantly reforms the construct. Eventually we have almost no direct, non-intermediated experience with our own senses (this must not be confused with a direct experience of things that originate the sensorial experience that is, by definition, always mediated by the perceptual and emotional senses).

As with perceptual systems, there could be innate emotional mechanisms that allow, for example, to discern positive from negative feelings between different sensory inputs. What other basic emotional mechanisms there are is also for debate, but these could help, in combination with perceptual ones, to build complex constructs of multisensorial meta-frameworks for the intermediation of experience that not only filter out data but also transform it by overlapping a spectrum of strainers, distorters and sensations for the conceptualization of a variety of things that range from object’s depth and movement, to the experimentation of love and fear. It is important to note that, to the subject that matters in this particular discussion, it is not important for us if some sensorial experiences (like internal emotional ones) are a biological consequence of some other sensorial experiences (like external perceptual ones) to the extent that they are presented to our consciousness as simultaneous parts of a unified singular experience in contiguous sequences of instances ordered in time.

Man has been able to progress by using his brain to do many complex tasks. Among them, sensorial data management takes a big amount of neuronal capacity. Our efficiency on better handling sensorial information is done by pattern and similarities recognition with help of memory to manufacture filters to discard most data and only focus attention in new relevant or minimal sensorial data and divert the rest of our neuronal capacity to think about problems logically by representing in the present and at the very same time, in parallel to sensorial processing of the surrounding, situations using sensorial memories. Our pre structured innate simple mechanisms learn to create useful filters that are then saved in memory and improved over time. This theory resembles some concepts about cognition in ecological psychology regarding the existence of active and interrelated perceptual systems that produce our experience by reconstructing sensorial data into information of value for our survival and wellbeing (Gibson, 1966).

The described structure of frameworks of experience and its constitution into meta-frameworks (clustering frames that constitute experimental scenarios for each circumstance) that condition, mediate and conform our existence, transforming and simplifying it beyond the structural limits of perception and emotion already constrained biologically, can be paralleled to the construction of “Maps of Experience” that build up “Maps of Meaning” in the process described by Jordan Peterson. This also recalls the situation of “being-in-the-world” under each personal “Weltanschauung” proposed by Ludwig Binswanger in which meaning is intrinsic to the episodes of experience, with a-priori determinants as well as also learnt mechanism to interpret, feel and qualify our dasein. The last observation, regarding the possibility of creating frameworks within the limits of our inherited natural conditionings and possibilities, is easier to note when studying our perceptual experience related to external organs but becomes obscured if the subject redirects its attention to the emotional experience. This is frequently thought as detached from the body with few exceptions usually expressed in feelings attached to the guts. ¿Is it possible to feel without feeling in an organ? The answer appears to be negative, understanding that all emotions are internally felt inside our bodies, in organs we usually are not aware of.

Personal overlapping nested and simultaneous layers of motivations based on useful expectations allows us to select and apply dynamically from a wide range what meta-framework is it going to be used to process sensorial data patterns, modeling them into experienced meaningful information, allowing for variance between the very same presented external objective scenario under different internal subjective situations. Our brains help our minds ignore things in order to automatize most of our behavior in subconscious learnt experimentation and action, liberating conscious attention for meaningful experience and intentional motivated patterns of acts and thoughts based on our desires (derived out of the subjective value structure we have developed around the one we naturally inherited).

In evolutionary terms our brains developed, instead of problem-solving specific mechanisms that were adapted to a limited expression of the environment, a more general system that allowed for a generic performance of such task. While the hypothalamus expresses and frames emotional and perceptual sensations, the cortex represents these as sensorial information and thoughts, that help evaluate states and instruct actions as well as inhibit some hypothalamus impulses to action in order to extract consequentially the larger quantity of positive emotions along variable time ranges that can be shorter or longer depending on the subject’s value structure and the environmental situation. The former requires not only building a complex sensory and action systems, but also two different parallel ones. In one hand thoughts revealed themselves as internal simulations that offered different possible outputs for action. But the selection of the best pattern of action based on the sensorial data could already be automatically done by storing prearranged patterns of action matched to stored patterns of sensory data. The reason why that procedure is done mostly unconsciously and is only reserved for some limited set of situations is that it requires rigid and extensive systems that are particularly specific. So, then the question would be ¿why does a general problem-solving mechanism emerges? It seems that having one could increase the probability of success, specially under dynamic environments. The issue then becomes how to develop a generic adaptative problem-solving system. Then is when consciousness becomes relevant and useful, because by introducing motivational through desire to avoid negative experiences and experiment positive ones, it creates a mechanism to deal with new environmental situations and changes, extracting meaningful information out of sensorial data, valuating the represented alternatives and acting accordingly to the incentive structure that uses negative punishing and positive rewarding experience as generic signals to not only perform the former process in an approximately useful way (for the biological demands guided by evolution) but also correct the patterns of behavior, though and sensorial experience by learning along time. The motivational structure is a nesting of a principal and primordial motivation that generates sub-sets of aims and goals at different scales in space and time that are transformed by the obstacles and tools we encounter along the way. This mechanism does not only functions to avoid creating a permanent circuit for every situation by allowing to analyze them momentarily and decide, as well perform the same procedure for new situations, but also permits to operate under uncertainty of the correct pattern of action that must be performed. The chemical signals that generate positive emotions when a desired and pursued outcome is obtained reform the neural structure of the brain in order to increase the probability that the used circuits are used again in the future, and the opposite happens when negative emotions operate after not getting the desired state. Why this process is felt and does not operate in the “dark” remains unclear.

In this, the experimental (experience side) of consciousness plays a key role by recognizing coherent patterns across the board of sensory inputs (sound, view, emotions, touch, etc.) in order to save those most coherent and discard the most incoherent ones in a constant process that perfects the filters by using sensorial data, filtering it, taking in the outliers, and adjusting the filter and saving it in the memory. That is how all human experience ends up being mediated. It is crucial to understand the role of consciousness in this sensorial efficiency mechanism, by logic or randomization at the first scale of similarities and pattern recognition.

Consciousness could be a mental space onto which sensorial experiences (perceptual, emotional and memorial) are reproduced to extract inter-coherent patterns of similarities and structures of information in order to create ever improving filters of information saved in memory so the rest of the brain can be used for other tasks. But, that space not only needs to be experimental from an inter-sensory integrated perspective, it also requires to be able to deploy primitive mechanisms of information structuring. The simple initial mechanism by similarities between pairs of data selection and process iteration to recognize patterns and similarities and its coherent structures across sensorial experiences does not only needs to use logical testing but also could employ randomness for initial assignment of comparative pairs or groups of data. The role of logically testing coherence and randomly assigning comparative pairs of inter-sensorial information might serve as a proxy for consciousness delimitation.

How volition works in our brains might, or might not, be a complex deterministic process constrained by sensorial information in which the processing filters of our personal history have developed, framed by biological tendencies to build them in certain ways. Decisions could be eventually modified by restructuring of the external data received or by reforming the frameworks applied to the sensorial experience.

These frameworks of experience could be discarding information completely or learning what to direct to the brain’s right hemisphere processing for complex novel data analysis and what can be diverted to the left hemisphere for regular known and probably lower resolution (scrapped out of units of information) data automated subconscious processing. In other words, this could also be a split-brain (McGilchrist, 2009) instrument for sensorial information specialization between hemispheres.

One way or another, it should be studied how this process structures the five elements of conscious experience: involuntary sensorial perception, involuntary sensorial emotion, semi-voluntary behavioral action, semi-voluntary representative memory and semi-voluntary representative analytical imagination.

The effects of psychedelics over sensorial frameworks

This structure of mediation between our consciousness and attention disposal and our senses is what is impaired or even canceled under the influence of psychedelics. The current section delves into this aspect building upon scientific studies and a phenomenological analysis of psychedelics, this last strategy specifically referred to the effects of LSD. Similar but usually more intense experiences are lived while under the influence of psilocybin and DMT.

Psychedelics like LSD reduce substantially, momentarily, the capacity of the brain to use this year’s long built-up filter structure of frameworks that not only scrap most information aside but also pre-assemble the information it allows to enter into our attention in order to understand it in terms of something known, memories, something learnt. When these filters disappear, our brain is now flooded with sensorial, not filtered data. That is why it is easy to “feel the moment” during the use of these substances, because the brain has to process raw sensory data instead of being able to use its capacity for other conscious tasks. Then is when the pre-structured mechanism of the brain that recognizes similarities and patterns, some primitive circuits not learnt by experience, start working with not just new and never seen units of data that stand out but all sensorial data again as in early infancy.

At that moment, this similarities and pattern recognition mechanism start trying to organize sensorial data poorly, without the help of frameworks that structure it into meaningful information, and on its transformations and re-organizations is that hallucinations occur. Because it is not something external that pollutes perception, but rather the raw extreme level of sensorial data that this primitive mechanism is trying to deal with which produces sensorial experiences different to the ones we have grown accustomed to and look “real”. The distortions we see and feel are no more and no less distorted than everyday experience, only we have developed not to identify regular experience as such, and these “hallucinations” are just tests of these mechanisms to learn how to organize best sensorial data into information.

This trial-and-error mechanism built along the years is what during early childhood allows us to construct our filters and frameworks. Momentarily impaired by psychedelics like LSD, this mechanism looks rather like random distortions and creation of patterns based on sensory inputs. During this moment, the brain is trying to understand if things are moving, or if our selves are moving, the difference between sound and image, depth, shapes, color, the possibility of temporal superposition of different sensory inputs and the impossibility of that superposition on the very same channel of input at the same time, among many other relevant aspects that we need in order to structure sensorial data. Of course, psychedelics like LSD do not always completely annul these filters, but rather impaired them in different levels and degrees. The combination of which frameworks or/and filters are impaired and up to which point are they allowed to still function is what constitutes the particular personal experience on psychedelics like LSD.

A good example of this process is the typical distortion of human faces under the influence of LSD. This particular hallucination is one of the most commonly reported along with the enhancement of colors, movement tracing lag, grids, apparent motion and the apparition of auras around objects. It is well established in the literature (Kanwisher, Nancy; Yovel, Galit, 2009) the notion of an innate specialized mechanism for perceiving faces. The activation of this primitive mechanism and it’s functioning using tending-to-raw data from sensorial input might explain the distortion of faces experienced by LSD users, as well as face detections in shapes and objects where there are none as one of the most common and initially experienced hallucinations. Which are the specific primitive innate mechanisms that remain as a last resource system for sensorial data organization under the disappearance of constructed experience frameworks is a subject for future investigation. Each one could be an evolutionary product naturally selected by its capacity to reorganize sensorial data into correctly coherent patterns correspondent to real structures present on the original source of the data, thus enhancing the capacity of the mechanism to produce useful information.

This very same possibility to experience perceptual sensorial experience almost as raw as it can be experienced, and restructure it momentarily while trying to make sense of it, is what also happens to non-perceptual (emotional) sensorial experience. The impairment of the emotional filters and frameworks to understand sensorial emotional data constitutes a true de-construction of experience that also allows to de-naturalize emotive experiences as well as happens with perceptual ones.

This is the de-naturalization of experience that, on one hand allows for “hallucinations” in the form of primitive mechanism of the brain to try to organize large unfiltered new perceptual data, but, on the other hand, also allows to re-interpret emotions we have naturalized in order to re-arrange them in our personality. Part of our personality are the emotional filters and frameworks we create to understand the emotional and perceptual data we sense, for example, to know when to feel danger as some key set of sensory input appears. But this can be much more complex up to extremely difficult levels of emotions and thoughts that make up our understanding of the world.

When LSD allows this to disappear, it shows us the relativity of them, and enables us to eventually at least know that we can reassemble them. Through what we could call “emotional hallucinations”, or the experience of emotional sensorial data without a framework or with a relatively impaired one, profound insights commonly described by psychedelics users can be explained. As well as happens with perceptual sensory hallucinations, the re-experience of emotional sensorial data appears new, distorted and as experienced from new “perspectives” or “points of views” the subject usually suppressed or repressed by filtering and reconstructing them using the years-long built-up frameworks.

One particular example of this is the experience of “ego dissolution”. Ego dissolution is the incapacity to neurologically conscious operate, or the severe impairment of this, beyond sensorial raw data processing. This must be understood considering that brain activity should be classified among three different groups: from conscious aware attention in which we all usually experience our existence, past the mental area of subconscious activity beyond the constant reach of conscious attention but onto it can eventually move by focusing on parts of it (like when we pay attentions to a task we are automatically performing, let’s say typing letters), up to the most distant level of unconscious autonomous regions that operate automatically as naturally programmed into which our conscious aware attention cannot enter. Some have demonstrated (Tagliazucchi, Enzo and Others, 2016) that high-level cortical regions and the thalamus show increased connectivity under LSD and that correlates with ego dissolution scores.

To understand the levels of impairment the framework systems can suffer, and the effects this produces, we can recall usual users of psychedelics such as LSD experiences under a varied range of doses. While microdosing tends to foment new associations of ideas, higher doses enhance perception in the form of subtle color brightness and sensorial quality improvement and at even higher ones more complex hallucinations like image distortion start to occur. Past this point hallucinations start to become more intense and perceptual sensorial channel differentiation constructed barriers provided by frameworks start to disappear, diluting usually differentiated senses like sight, taste, touch and sound into confused synesthetic experiences. Upon reaching final states of the process, we can approach a point experienced by many users of high doses of psychedelics that report a complete dissolution of ego into an indistinguishable mixture of sensorial experiences in which it becomes impossible, or almost impossible, to discern between sight, sound, emotions, and many other sensory inputs.

This primordial unified state of sensorial unhampered experience could be a close resemblance of an infant’s experience that has still to discern between sensorial channels and use its data to create meaning out of information still to be produced by filtering and processing done by our innate similarities and pattern recognitions mechanisms that allow for the organization of the sensorial data into the structures that will construct frameworks.

The scientific evidence behind a theory of regression to an unfiltered state of sensory overload

This theory is consistent with current scientific knowledge. Researchers have proposed (Gopnik, Alison and others, 2004) that infant brains utilize specialized cognitive systems to recover an accurate, abstract, coherent and learned representation of the causal relations among events they experience and that these causal inferences are consistent with (Gopnik, Alison; Schulz, Laura, 2004) particular learning algorithms. Other scientists have scanned (Carhart-Harris, Robin L. and others, 2016) the brains of people using LSD and found the drug allows the brain to become less compartmentalized and more like the mind of an infant. They concluded that while normally the brain works on independent networks performing separate functions such as vision and hearing, under LSD the compartmentalization of these networks breaks down and leads to a more unified system under the scanning of functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography to monitor blood flow and electrical activity. For example, when the volunteers in the experiment took LSD, many extra brain areas and not just the visual cortex, contributed to visual processing in a more intense and interconnected way.

As explained in a 2020 study (Varley, Thomas F. and others, 2020), serotonergic psychedelic drugs (LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, among others) share a bonding activity for a punctual serotonin receptor known to be involved in modulating a variety of behaviors. These neurons serve as outputs from one region of the cortex to another, and the studied serotonin receptor acts as an excitatory receptor increasing the probability that a given neuron will fire. This suggests a primitive model of that receptor role in neural information processing: it serves as an information gate. When a psychedelic is introduced to the brain, it binds to the receptor, exciting the associated neuron and decreasing the threshold required to successfully transmit information through the neuron. During normal waking consciousness, areas of the brain that are physically connected by those neurons may not be functionally connected because the signal threshold required to trigger an action potential is too high but when a psychedelic is introduced, that threshold goes down allowing novel patterns of information flow to occur.

The theory of sensory overload as an explanation of the psychedelic experience induced by drugs like LSD is supported by scientific research. A paper published in January 2019 (Preller, Katrin H. and others, 2019) suggests that LSD alters how a specific region of the brain that helps consciousness make sense of sensory information works. The thalamus works as a sensory gatekeeper. As sensory information from the environment is received, the thalamus filters out the unimportant data, allowing the brain to process and react appropriately to what is filtered as relevant data. Already in a 2008 paper (Geyer, Mark A.; Vollenweider, Franz X., 2008), researchers proposed that psychedelic drugs like LSD interfere with the thalamus’ filtering abilities, causing the brain to sensory overload. In the 2019 paper, the researchers found that the drug reduces the activity in a neural circuit, specifically the striatum’s influence on the thalamus. That process increased effective connectivity from the thalamus to the posterior cingulate cortex and decreased effective connectivity from the ventral striatum to the thalamus, altering effective connectivity within the cortico-striato-thalamo-cortical circuit’s pathways that have been implicated in the gating of sensory and sensorimotor information to the cortex. A 2018 study (Preller, Katrin H. and others, 2018) concluded that LSD reduced associative, but concurrently increased sensory-somatomotor brain-wide and thalamic connectivity.

Experience of conscious suppression of feelings of cold reported by subjects under the influence of psilocybin suggest that the impairment of hypothalamic functions could, for example, allow for a greater inhibitory control of it by the cortex beyond the normal cortical control we usually are able to perform.

Of all the perceptual senses, the olfactory one seems to be the only not intermediated by the thalamus (van Hartevelt, T.J. and Kringelbach, M.L., 2015). This could be a specific aspect to study considering the previously described processes. In any case, all these aspects present an interesting situation regarding the multisensorial side of many perceptual experiences like the taste-olfactory perception. While taste derives from a different circuit that travels from the tongue, esophagus, and palate to the medulla in the brainstem and from there the signals go to the thalamus and then to the primary gustatory cortex, the experience of taste (technically delimited to only five basic distinctions) is experienced in a much more complicated way. When we taste, the olfactory sense combines smells with tastes in order to provide aromas to the experience that is, of course, impossible to detach from other senses like touch.

An article in Scientific American (Halberstadt, Adam; Geyer, Mark, 2012) explains that evidence suggests drugs like LSD enhances perception by inhibiting parts of the brain. Research has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception. According to this, hallucinogens reduce activity in specific “hub” regions of the brain, potentially diminishing their ability to coordinate activity in downstream brain regions. In effect, for example psilocybin appears to inhibit brain regions that are responsible for constraining consciousness within the narrow boundaries of the normal waking state.

Paradoxically, it appears that the subjective “psychedelic” experience of hallucinations could be achieved only by sensory overload. A 2006 study (Ludwig, 2006) concluded that normal subjects exposed to sensory overload (consisting of increased light and sound stimulation) reported a variety of subjective “psychedelic” effects pertained to perceptual distortions, disturbances in sense of time, “otherworldly” feelings, feelings of loss of control and somatic effects among others.

In relation to other psychedelics, in 2020, a paper (Barrett, Frederick S. and others, 2020) detailed how psilocybin acutely alters the functional connectivity of the claustrum with brain networks that support perception, memory, and attention. Psilocybin, according to the researchers, significantly decreased functional connectivity of the right claustrum with auditory and default mode networks, increased right claustrum connectivity with the fronto-parietal task control network (FPTC), and decreased left claustrum connectivity with the FPTC. This disrupts claustrum activity and functional brain connectivity in humans. Given the connectivity of the claustrum with sensory cortices, it is possible that the claustrum may contribute to psilocybin-induced disruptions in sensory experience.

Also, a 2012 research article (Carhart-Harris, Robin L. and others, 2012) explained that “psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain’s key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition”. And according to a 2014 study (Carhart-Harris, Robin L. and others, 2014) on psilocybin, the “psychedelic state is considered an exemplar of a primitive or primary state of consciousness that preceded the development of modern, adult, human, normal waking consciousness. Based on neuroimaging data with psilocybin, a classic psychedelic drug, it is argued that the defining feature of “primary states” is elevated entropy in certain aspects of brain function, such as the repertoire of functional connectivity motifs that form and fragment across time. Indeed, since there is a greater repertoire of connectivity motifs in the psychedelic state than in normal waking consciousness, this implies that primary states may exhibit… a transition zone between order and disorder… This suggests that entropy is suppressed in normal waking consciousness, meaning that the brain operates just below criticality. It is argued that this entropy suppression furnishes normal waking consciousness with a constrained quality and associated metacognitive functions, including reality-testing and self-awareness”.

In a 2016 study (Lebedev, A.V. and others, 2016), researchers concluded that overall, LSD had a pronounced global effect on brain entropy, increasing it in sensory and hierarchically higher networks across multiple time scales. A 2017 paper (Schartner, Michael M. and others, 2017) concluded that the findings suggest that the sustained occurrence of psychedelic phenomenology constitutes an elevated level of consciousness measured by neural signal diversity. A 2020 scientific (Barnett, Lionel and others, 2020) paper used source-localized, steady-state magnetoencephalography recordings to describe changes in functional connectivity following the controlled administration of LSD, psilocybin and low-dose ketamine, as well as the (non-psychedelic) anticonvulsant drug tiagabine for comparison. The researchers observed a general decrease in directed functional connectivity for all three psychedelics throughout the brain. The conclusion was that the “data supported the view that the psychedelic state involves a breakdown in patterns of functional organization or information flow in the brain. In the case of LSD, the decrease in directed functional connectivity is coupled with an increase in undirected functional connectivity, which (was measured) using correlation and coherence”.

All these findings allow us to understand that psychedelics might be acting as inhibitors of regular suppression and structuring neural processes (specifically, between the limbic system and the cerebral cortex) that filter and organize information processing, thus allowing for greater stages of brain activity under larger randomness levels performed by unconstrained innate data interpretation mechanisms. This conclusion appears compatible with the initial hypothesis regarding the effect of psychedelics in suppressing life-long constructed frameworks of sensorial intermediation of the experience.

The expansion of the frameworks of experience into all conscious realms

The same framework could be working for action. Let’s assume originally, we are in conscious control of each motor action our brain has not already automatized in some primitive circuit or part as involuntary responses. As in an early infant’s case, we have to dedicate all our attention capacity to every specific muscle motion. By creating patterns of movement and matching them with sensorial experience (again, perceptual and emotional) we are able to design action programs (the equivalent to sensorial filters) and save them in memory in order to act more efficiently. In this case, instead of being able to scrap out information, the most efficient programmed action is saved by contrasting it to sensorial experience (perceptually and also emotionally informative). These programs then are delegated to left hemisphere processing for its automatic initiation or at least its automatic performance once they are commanded. These programs could constantly be improved by this iterative process of reprogramming by trial-and-error learning. If initial motor experimentation is solely derived out of primitive mechanisms that combine actions in random and or pre-structured ways, free volition becomes more obscure to current phenomenological experience.

The role of memory in archiving these frameworks and programs in one or another hemisphere and the capacity to rewrite the recollections, discard them, as well as transfer them between hemispheres, especially during dreaming, is a crucial aspect for further analysis.

More challenging is the case of memory, regarding its usually autonomous capacity to work, but presenting eventual episodes of apparent volitional information requests. For this, imagination could be particularly relevant, instead of acting, recalling sensorial experience memories by similarities based on saved experience as sensorial frameworks (to think in images, sounds, etc.). Its concatenation could be randomly, or intentionally, arranged and eventually logically tested by comparing the arrangements to existing frameworks that are similar to the currently constructed one but not necessarily equal.

These three simplified original spaces of sensorial experience, action and imagination, reduced to its original form previous to all framework creation, could help define and understand the role, nature and limitations of consciousness by narrowing what it encompasses. In this problem, attention, that is to say the conscious (non-subconscious and non-unconscious) processing of information and action, appears almost as a synonym. Consciousness could also serve as a randomness or intentional generator that allows for a decision to be made under incomplete or contradictory information after all filters have processed sensorial experience. This proposal requires further analysis.

It is important to understand that if all sensorial experience is taken into account (emotions included), consciousness would only act as an intermediary between externally defined raw perceptual data, and internally pre-defined basic emotional responses that are also felt, only creating coherent paired states (emotional and perceptual) from which actions are implicitly derived in an automatic way, or intentionally assigned, triggered by emotional impulses depending on the association developed between perceptual and emotional states. From the coherent and functional slow assembly of all of this sensorial information (perceptual and emotional) is that all human behavior can be inferred once enough time to improve the filters for pattern matching and recognition has been given so greater frameworks have developed.

We can think that, every of the many minimal unitary elements into which in each instant of the experience (perceptual and emotional) can be subdivided into, when filtered and deformed by sensorial framework’s system generates a structure of positive or negative valuation state (pleasant or painful in different degrees) that is imprinted on each of the many minimal unitary elements the action system can be divided in, activating or not each of these to a greater or lesser degree. The relationship between associative combinations of unitary minimal elements of the experience, their positive or negative valuation state and the consequence of action of this is in some aspects biologically determined and, in others, constructed in a learning process based on the accumulation of previous combinations recalled in memory and evaluated a posteriori in a relational way and concatenated along time in a causal way. There, it is assumed that the subsequent sensorial and valuational states are partially produced, influenced, by the sensory states experienced and the actions performed previously. The innate biological associative mechanism is basic, more simple and automatic and evolved by random mutation and natural selection maximizing the probabilities of survival and reproduction, while the learned associative mechanism (also a product of the same evolutionary process) is more complex and works by using memory and temporal causal relational reasoning by trial and error learning with the aim of achieving the greatest number of positive valuational states (and as pleasant as possible) as a product of the innate biological mechanisms themselves originally producing positive states. Basically, what the second system tries to produce is a pleasant activation of the first one. While the first system ensures certain general behaviors, the second system allows specific adaptations of the latter to the environment, perfecting between them (in terms of reproduction and survival) the behavior of a living being in circumstances with relatively stable conditions that present temporal and local variations. In this way, the system of learned mechanisms is built upon the original biological system with the aim of serving it over time and maximizing the states of pleasant positive valuations, thus creating a meta-system that coordinates sensorial states of experience with the actions performed mediated by the valuative states, resulting in an increase in the probabilities of reproduction and survival. Through this iterative process every new experience, valuation and action is constrained and directed by the previous instances that have been lived and thus stored in memory as well as in the structural changes as the result of living them performed over the meta-system of experimentation-valuation-action. It becomes not surprising then that as the subject ages, first lived situations imposed over a more virginal structure generate more relevant impact over the meta-system that regulates sensorial experience, wellness evaluation and acts of behavior, than those processed by a more refined and complete system.

Although this explains the need for a complex web of sensors, signals and actuators, it does not resolve the question about why this process cannot be computed or calculated “blindly” instead of being experienced, valuated and even acted upon, as consciousness constantly does. Perhaps it can be intuited that the necessity of functioning in the face of incomplete or contradictory, to some extent even incomputable, information in a deterministic process, or some kind of tendency to increase the efficiency of functioning, may play a role in solving this problem by deriving part of the process to a parallel related system governed by completely different rules. Or else, maybe all of reality is divided between an existential and an experiential aspect as two sides of the same coin.

Discussion

The evidence for and against the three models regarding psychedelics effect on the brain, the relaxed beliefs under psychedelics model (with increased levels of entropy in brain activity generated, correlating to more diversity and vividness in subjective awareness), the cortico–striato–thalamo–cortical model (explaining that psychedelics impede sensory gating functions of the thalamus, allowing increased sensory and interoceptive information flow from thalamus to cortical regions) and the claustro-cortical circuit model (altering the functional connectivity of the claustrum with brain networks, like the sensory cortices, that support perception, memory, and attention) should be studied in more depth in order to generate more testable hypotheses regarding key aspects of subjective experience, including affect and elements of cognition (Yaden, David B. and others, 2021).

The main recent theories of psychedelic drug effects, entropic brain theory (EBT), integrated information theory (IIT), and predictive processing (PP), share the common conclusion that psychedelic drugs perturb universal brain processes that normally serve to constrain neural systems central to perception, emotion, cognition, and sense of self. As Link R. Swanson details (Swanson, 2018): “psychedelic drugs produce their characteristic diversity of effects because they perturb adaptive mechanisms which normally constrain perception, emotion, cognition, and self-reference”. In this point EBT, IIT, and PP seem consistent with each other and with earlier valve and filtration theories and psychoanalytic accounts. Certain descriptions of neural entropy-suppression mechanisms in EBT, cause-effect information constraints in IIT, or prediction-error minimization strategies in PP, are consistent with Freud’s ego and Huxley’s cerebral reducing valve.

As Swanson comments, psychedelic science has yet to approach a unifying theory linking the diverse range of phenomenological effects with pharmacology and neurophysiology for the explanation of internal subjective experimentation by consciousness of objective external reality, leading the path to narrowing and helping define also what we are under the experience of existence.

“I, I love the colorful clothes she wears.

And the way the sunlight plays upon her hair.

I hear the sound of a gentle word.

On the wind that lifts her perfume through the air.

…I’m pickin’ up good vibrations.

She’s giving me excitations…

Close my eyes.

She’s somehow closer now.

Softly smile, I know she must be kind.

When I look in her eyes.

She goes with me to a blossom world.”

Good Vibrations, The Beach Boys

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