The Impact of Psychedelics and Meditation on the Mind

Exploring the Ego Dissolution Effect

In a previous article, I compared the benefits of antidepressant pills and the good feeling from alcohol with the beneficial effects of classic psychedelic substances and meditation. I grouped psychedelics and meditation together, which might not seem like an obvious categorization. This article focuses on the effect of psychedelics on our minds, particularly in expanding the sense of unity between the individual and their environment. Additionally, I’ll discuss the parallels between this effect and the effects of meditation.

The primary effect we're examining is called the "dissolution of the ego." People who experience psychedelics often describe it with phrases like "I got rid of my ego," "I felt freed from the usual worries that oppress me," "I felt a connection to others and nature," and "I felt that my existence was transcendental and my existential anxiety dissolved."

Understanding the Self and Ego Dissolution

Discussing the dissolution of the ego necessitates acknowledging the extensive research on the sense of self's origin. While I can't cover this topic in its full complexity here, a simple definition of the phenomenological self is the ability to place oneself independently in time and space.

This definition might sound complex, but it’s actually quite intuitive. Think of any movie where a character finds themselves in another body, like in "Beauty and the Beast" or "Look Who's Talking." These scenarios illustrate the self's ability to recognize its own position in time and space. This sense of self combines visual, physical, and vestibular information (relevant to our location in space), along with the brain's predictions.

According to the Bayesian model of the brain, our brain functions as a machine to test hypotheses. It creates an internal model of sensory information sources, refining this model to avoid surprises through a combination of perception and action. This model includes the self as the most statistically logical explanation for overlapping sensory-motor stimuli.

Psychedelics and Perceptual Processing

So, how do psychedelic substances affect this process? Molecules like psilocybin or LSD seem to weaken our perception infrastructure's ability to make accurate predictions based on context or previous information. This results in more limited perceptual processing, which can be both beneficial and detrimental.

"For the worse," this processing becomes less reliable, causing uncertainty about what is perceived. "For the better," it improves operations where overactivity of our prediction machine hinders performance. For example, subjects on LSD are less sensitive to the "hollow mask illusion" and perform better in tasks requiring reduced binocular rivalry. This relates to how psychedelics make routine experiences feel new and exciting, and how insights gained under their influence are often labeled as "truth."

Meditation and Psychedelic Effects

Now, let’s explore the similarities between the brain's party under psychedelics and meditation. The feeling of unity is foundational to the mystical experience and emerges from reduced brain processes involved in establishing the self. Research shows that brain regions like the DMN (default mode network), which are involved in self-related processing, show decreased activity both during meditation and after taking psychedelics.

This decrease in activity and changes in communication between brain nodes and other targets related to associative and sensory processing reduce the projection of the self during mystical experiences. These changes align with the feeling of a lack of time and space framework that characterizes mystical experiences.

Both mindfulness meditation and psychedelics decrease the amplitude of spontaneous oscillations in the DMN. Additionally, during practices like Focused Awareness and Open Monitoring, brain activity in other areas also reduces or ceases. Normally, there's an inverse relationship between DMN activity and Task Positive Networks, which is weakened under psychedelics and non-dual meditation, contributing to the mystical experience.

Conclusion

These changes in brain activity explain the reported experiences of unity, where internal and external mental object representations merge, characteristic of mystical experiences. This unity is the foundation of the mental healing offered by both psychedelics and meditation.