Sublime

(Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014, was a brilliant chemist who held a DEA license allowing him to synthesize novel psychedelic compounds, which he did in prodigious numbers. He also was the first to synthesize MDMA since it had been patented by Merck in 1912 and forgotten. Recognizing its psychoactive properties, he introduced the so-called

What they do share is the fact that I have bombarded my ears and brain with them, and the musical “circuits” or networks in my brain have been supersaturated, overcharged, with them. In such a supersaturated state, the brain seems ready to replay the music with no apparent external stimulus. Such replayings, curiously, seem to be almost as

Intriguingly, psilocybin and ayahuasca tend to slow down brain waves, not speed them up, and they appear to shut down areas of the left hemisphere of the brain. Also, acquired savant syndrome—extraordinary mathematical or other mental abilities that suddenly appear after traumatic brain injury—usually occurs after damage to the left hemisphere.

Christian Keysers, The Empathic Brain

Music drawn from memory, he writes, “has many of the same effects as real music coming from the external world.”