More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
It was just horrible. And then suddenly the devolution of everything into the nothingness of pure force reverses course. One by one, the elements of our universe begin to reconstitute themselves:
“If one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”)
So that was my peace offering: to be more and do less.
Mystical Experience Questionnaires (MEQs)
Bazer described “being bathed in God’s love,” and yet she emerged with her atheism intact. How could someone hold those two warring ideas in the same brain? I think I get it now. Not only was the flood of love she experienced ineffably powerful, but it was unattributable to any individual or worldly cause, and so was purely gratuitous—a form of grace. So how to convey the magnitude of such a gift? “God” might be the only word in the language big enough.
mine owed to a chemical. Wasn’t that cheating? Perhaps not: it seems likely that all mental experiences are mediated by chemicals in the brain, even the most seemingly “transcendent.”
But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey.
When Huxley speaks of the mind’s “reducing valve”—the faculty that eliminates as much of the world from our conscious awareness as it lets in—he is talking about the ego.
So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.” Wonders (and terrors) we’re ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our senses can suddenly admit.
The gulf between self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. Whether we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. But it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.
All three molecules are tryptamines.
The most famous tryptamine in the human body is the neurotransmitter serotonin, the chemical name of which is 5-hydroxytryptamine.
the psychedelics resemble serotonin closely enough that they can attach themselves to this receptor site in such a way as to activate it to do various things.
there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists.
he would use psychedelic drugs and modern brain-imaging technologies to build a foundation of hard science beneath the edifice of psychoanalysis.
Grof’s grand claim that what the telescope was for astronomy, or the microscope for biology, psychedelics will be for understanding the mind.
she trepanned herself in 1970, boring a small hole in the middle of her forehead with an electric drill.
psilocybin reduces brain activity, with the falloff concentrated in one particular brain network that at the time he knew little about: the default mode network.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, or PNAS.
DMN variously as the brain’s “orchestra conductor,” “corporate executive,” or “capital city,” charged with managing and “holding the whole system together.” And with keeping the brain’s unrulier tendencies in check.
The achievement of an individual self, a being with a unique past and a trajectory into the future, is one of the glories of human evolution, but it is not without its drawbacks and potential disorders. The price of the sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation from others and nature.
“A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” psychologists identified a strong correlation between unhappiness and time spent in mind wandering,
It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity.
in the DMN “we’ve found the neural correlate for repression.”)
“The question,” as David Nutt puts it, “is why the brain is ordinarily so constrained rather than so open?” The answer may be as simple as “efficiency.”
The philosophical implications of “predictive coding” are deep and strange. The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories. Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent,
How is normal waking consciousness any different from other, seemingly less faithful productions of our imagination—such as dreams or psychotic delusions or psychedelic trips?
“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, because of its massive disparity with whatever mental state is habitual with you.”
While suppressing entropy (in this context, a synonym for uncertainty) in the brain “serves to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies,” at the same time this achievement tends to “constrain cognition” and exert “a limiting or narrowing influence on consciousness.”
Once upon a time, Carhart-Harris writes, the human or protohuman brain exhibited a much more anarchic form of “primary consciousness,” characterized by “magical thinking”—beliefs about the world that have been shaped by wishes and fears and supernatural interpretation.
the psychological “disorders” at the low-entropy end of the spectrum are not the result of a lack of order in the brain but rather stem from an excess of order.
research indicating that this debilitating state of mind (sometimes called heavy self-consciousness or depressive realism) may be the result of a hyperactive default mode network, which can trap us in repetitive and destructive loops of rumination that eventually close us off from the world outside.
“Distinct networks became less distinct under the drug,” Carhart-Harris and his colleagues wrote, “implying that they communicate more openly,” with other brain networks. “The brain operates with greater flexibility and interconnectedness under hallucinogens.”
One way to think about this blooming of mental states is that it temporarily boosts the sheer amount of diversity in our mental life.
A key question that the science of psychedelics has not even begun to answer is whether the new neural connections that psychedelics make possible endure in any way, or if the brain’s wiring returns to the status quo ante once the drug wears off.
Certainly by middle age, the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.
petrifaction of thought. Think of it as predictive coding on the scale of life; the priors—and by now I’ve got millions of them—usually have my back, can be relied on to give me a decent enough answer, even if it isn’t a particularly fresh or imaginative one.
The closest we can come to visiting that foreign land as adults may be during the psychedelic journey.
distinction between the “spotlight consciousness” of adults and the “lantern consciousness” of young children.
Drawing on its wealth of experience, the adult mind performs low-temperature searches most of the time.
there are learning problems that four-year-olds are better at solving than adults.
“Each generation of children confronts a new environment,” she explained, “and their brains are particularly good at learning and thriving in that environment.
as we reach adolescence, most of those connections get pruned, so that the “human brain becomes a lean, mean acting machine.”
“If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.” Or drop a tab of LSD.
“The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”
shake people out of their usual patterns of thought—“lubricate cognition,”
Robin told me about one severely depressed woman in the trial whom over the course of several meetings he had never once seen smile. As he sat with her during her psilocybin journey, “she smiled for the very first time. “‘It’s nice to smile,’ she said.
he describes psychedelic therapy as a form of “applied mysticism.”
Pharmaceutical companies are no longer investing in the development of so-called CNS drugs—medicines targeted at the central nervous system.
only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment.
