Sublime

prefrontal cortex of the new brain is the part of you that is conscious, alert, and in contact with your daily surroundings.

Crucial for understanding trauma, the frontal lobes are also the seat of empathy—our ability to “feel into” someone else. One of the truly sensational discoveries of modern neuroscience took place in 1994, when in a lucky accident a group of Italian scientists identified specialized cells in the cortex that came to be known as mirror neurons.8

The areas that showed a decrease in activity are the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulated cortex, which play important roles in the regulation of self-awareness,

is involved in thinking, decision-making, and controlling your movement.

Contemporary neuroscience identifies a particular part of the brain, sometimes called “the interpreter,” as the source of the familiar internal narrative that gives us our sense of self. Two prominent neuroscientists have recently characterized the quirky, undependable quality of the tale told by the interpreter. Antonio Damasio describes it this w

[I]t can make sense to think there exists, inside your brain, a society of different minds. Like members of a family, the different minds can work together to help each other, each still having its own mental experiences that the others never know about.”

Carhart-Harris’s working hypothesis was that their brains would exhibit increases in activity, particularly in the emotion centers. “I thought it would look like the dreaming brain,” he told me. Employing a different scanning technology, Franz Vollenweider had published data indicating that psychedelics stimulated brain activity, especially in the

two possibilities. One calls for actual neural projections from the “affect complex” to the “posterior sensory set” and vice versa. The other possibility calls for approximate simultaneity of activations in the two sets, resulting in the production of a time-based ensemble. In either option, the ultimate realization of a conscious mind depends on b