Psychic Shit Happens All The Time

Just realized I don't really talk about psychedelics anymore because I learned to meditate (and I use that term loosely—what I'm referring to is actually more like a cluster of skills that can be summed up as "sink into and trust my felt senses, which when listened to carefully, reveal vital information about how I take in the world and feed it thr... See more

There are several ways this temporary rewiring of the brain may affect mental experience. When the memory and emotion centers are allowed to communicate directly with the visual processing centers, it’s possible our wishes and fears, prejudices and emotions, begin to inform what we see—a hallmark of primary consciousness and a recipe for magical th

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that feeling of transparency we associate with ordinary consciousness may owe more to familiarity and habit than it does to verisimilitude. As a psychonaut acquaintance put it to me, “If it were possible to temporarily experience another person’s mental state, my guess is that it would feel more like a psychedelic state than a ‘normal’ state, becau

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Uncertainty is a complex brain’s biggest challenge, and predictive coding evolved to help us reduce it. In general, the kind of precooked or conventionalized thinking this adaptation produces serves us well. But only up to a point. Precisely where that point lies is a question Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues have explored in an ambitious an

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My education, as well as the influence of the media, caused me to be skeptical about all claims involving the paranormal, psychics, and other unconventional phenomena. The media had presented all these topics as being due to hoaxes and hallucinations. But as I investigated more deeply, I was amazed at how many top-quality researchers, M.D.s and Ph.

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