Psilocybin desynchronizes our brains during ego dissolution

From Siegel et al (open source).:

A single dose of psilocybin, a psychedelic that acutely causes distortions of space–time perception and ego dissolution, produces rapid and persistent therapeutic effects in human clinical trials^1,2,3,4. In animal models, psilocybin induces neuroplasticity in cortex and hippocampus^5,6,7,8. It remains unclear how human brain network changes relate to subjective and lasting effects of psychedelics. Here we tracked individual-specific brain changes with longitudinal precision functional mapping (roughly 18 magnetic resonance imaging visits per participant). Healthy adults were tracked before, during and for 3 weeks after high-dose psilocybin (25 mg) and methylphenidate (40 mg - a placebo in the form of methylphenidate, (Ritalin)), and brought back for an additional psilocybin dose 6–12 months later. Psilocybin massively disrupted functional connectivity (FC) in cortex and subcortex, acutely causing more than threefold greater change than methylphenidate. These FC changes were driven by brain desynchronization across spatial scales (areal, global), which dissolved network distinctions by reducing correlations within and anticorrelations between networks. Psilocybin-driven FC changes were strongest in the default mode network, which is connected to the anterior hippocampus and is thought to create our sense of space, time and self. Individual differences in FC changes were strongly linked to the subjective psychedelic experience. Performing a perceptual task reduced psilocybin-driven FC changes. Psilocybin caused persistent decrease in FC between the anterior hippocampus and default mode network, lasting for weeks. Persistent reduction of hippocampal-default mode network connectivity may represent a neuroanatomical and mechanistic correlate of the proplasticity and therapeutic effects of psychedelics.

The Ooze is Growing

In case you haven't seen enough pessimistic predictions about the next ~10-20 years, I pass on the following clips from a recent installment of my email subscription to Venkatesh Rao's "breaking Smart" news letter: 

...world affairs are effectively on autopilot now, running on what in the control engineering world are called bang-bang laws. Bang-bang laws drive a control mechanism from one extreme to another discontinuously, like steering a car with only hard right/hard left limit steers, and regulating speed only with hard braking and floored accelerators. Or electing two opposed sets of wingnuts to govern in loose alternation...Bang-bang laws can often have nice properties like time-optimality, and making good use of limited control authority that “saturates.” And they’re simple and robust, like your thermostat, a bang-bang controller that’s in Chapter 1 of most control engineering textbooks.

...I don’t think the state of the world today is one that can be governed by the bang-bang control laws being applied to it by opposed tribes of wingnuts everywhere. It’s not the right sort of problem for the strategy. Nevertheless, it’s the strategy we’ve adopted, because it happens to be the only option available right now. Instead of an Overton window within which politics as an art and science of the possible operates, we have two narrow slits representing the bang-bang limit positions, separated by a stretch of impossible positions. This situation has been contrived by people who don’t like to think very much or at all. So we have control laws that don’t actually work in the current planetary condition...weird out-of-control behaviors unfold if you apply an ill-conceived bang-bang strategy to a system unsuited to it...you brace for weird fallouts. Just as if you’re a passenger in a car being driven in a bang-bang way, you brace for a crash...You prepare for a world that will go out of control when the bang-bang strategy fails. It’s a question of when, not if.

The world is becoming ungovernable even as visions and attempts to govern it are getting ever more outlandishly delusional and ineffective.

The only conclusion we can reach is that we’re in for a period of increasingly ungoverned anarchy. Sure, some sort of theater of governance will continue everywhere. There will be bang-Left and bang-Right theaters piously strutting about on their respective stages pretending to govern, to captive audiences desperate to believe they are being governed, confined within ever-shrinking and increasingly exclusionary islands of stable prosperity, secured with growing amounts of low-grade localized boundary-integrity-maintaining violence. Lots of individual lives will get destroyed in the process. There will also be marquee showcase things built just so there are things to point at as examples of governance doing something, even if not well. The facade will last longer than we expect, even if you’re expecting it.

But all around, the ooze will grow. The ungovernability will grow.

But the ooze is not inevitably good or bad. What will make it good or bad is the quality of the attention and care we bring to thinking and feeling our way into it. It only feels shitty-shitty right now because we are attending to it in bang-bang ways, blinded by too-simple ideas and a fear of words.

How do you ignore and sidestep the bang-bang governance theaters, and feel and think your way into the ooze, to begin co-evolving with it? That’s the question. Fortunately, it’s mostly not a question for you or me, but for the next generation.

How we got to where we are

In the beginning was the cosmos, fundamentally as incomprehensible to our human brains as quantum chemistry is to a dog’s brain.

What our human brains can understand is that our ultimate emergence from countless generations of less complex organisms can be largely explained by a  simple mechanism that tests the reproductive fitness of varying replicants.

Systems that try to predict the future and dictate whether to go for it or scram - from the chemotaxis of bacteria to the predictive processing of our humans brains - have proved to be more likely to survive and propagate.

Modern neuroscience has proved that our experienced perceptions of sensing and acting are these predictions.  They are fantasies, or illusions, as is our sense of having a self with agency that experiences value, purpose, and meaning. Everything we do and experience is in the service of reducing surprises by fulling these fantasies. An array of neuroendocrine mechanisms have evolved to support this process because it forms the bedrock of human culture and language.

We are as gods, who invent ourselves and our cultures through impersonal emergent processes rising from our biological substrate.

Personal and social dysfunctions can sometimes be addressed by insight into this process, as when interoceptive awareness of the settings of  our autonomic nervous system's axes of arousal, valence, and agency allows us to dial them to more life sustaining values and better regulate our well-being in each instance of the present.

We can distinguish this autonomic substrate from the linguistic cultural overlay it it generates, and allow  the latter to be viewed in a more objective light. This is a deconstruction that permits us to not only let awareness rest closer to the 'engine room' or 'original mind' underlying its transient reactive products, but also to derive from this open awareness the kind of succor or equanimity we once found in the imagined stability of an external world.

Hopefully the deconstruction that takes us into this metaphorical engine room makes us more able to discern and employ illusions that enhance continuation rather than termination of our personal and social evolutionary narratives. 

(The above is MindBlog's 10/25/23 post, repeated here and given a new title.)