psychedelic neuroscience
Psychedelic-Assisted Therapy for Addiction
The use of psychedelic substances for treating addiction is simultaneously one of the oldest therapeutic practices in human history and one of the most promising frontiers of modern psychiatry. Indigenous cultures have used ayahuasca, peyote, iboga, and psilocybin mushrooms for healing addiction...
Holotropic Breathwork: Stanislav Grof and the Breath as a Portal to Non-Ordinary Consciousness
In 1975, Stanislav Grof had a problem. The Czech-born psychiatrist, who had conducted some of the most extensive and rigorous research on LSD-assisted psychotherapy in history — over 4,000 supervised sessions during his tenure at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague and later at the...
The Default Mode Network: The Brain's Operating System UI and What Happens When You Minimize It
In 2001, Marcus Raichle and his colleagues at Washington University in St. Louis published a paper that would fundamentally reshape neuroscience's understanding of the brain — and, by extension, of consciousness, ego, and the self.
Advanced Meditation Creates a Different Brain: 7 Tesla fMRI Reveals What 10,000 Hours of Practice Builds
The question of whether meditation physically changes the brain was settled over a decade ago — it does. But the question of how meditation changes the brain at the level of expert practitioners — those with 10,000 to 62,000 lifetime hours of practice — remained largely unanswered, limited by...
Psychedelic Neuroplasticity Breakthroughs: The Fastest Brain Rewiring Ever Observed
By 2025, the scientific evidence has become overwhelming: psychedelic compounds are the most powerful neuroplasticity inducers ever discovered. A single dose of psilocybin produces structural brain changes — new dendritic spines, new synaptic connections, reorganized neural networks — within 24...
Psychedelics for Disorders of Consciousness: Can You Reboot a Brain?
Here is the question that sits at the intersection of psychedelic science, consciousness research, and critical care medicine: if psychedelics are the most powerful known tools for increasing brain complexity, connectivity, and plasticity in healthy brains, can they restore consciousness in...
Ten Mind-Blowing Brain Discoveries of 2025: A Synthesis
The year 2025 may be remembered as the year consciousness science crossed from philosophical speculation into engineering-grade empirical investigation. Inspired by Scientific American's tradition of year-end discovery roundups, this synthesis examines the ten most consequential brain and...
Holotropic Breathwork: The Pharmacology of Air
There is a molecule so potent it can dissolve the boundaries of the self, reveal buried memories from infancy, and trigger mystical experiences indistinguishable from those described in the world's great contemplative traditions. This molecule is not synthesized in a laboratory.
The Most Important Research You Have Never Heard Of: Grof's Psychedelic Investigations
In November 1956, a young psychiatric resident at Charles University in Prague volunteered for an experiment that would redirect the course of his life and, arguably, the trajectory of Western psychiatry. The Sandoz pharmaceutical company in Basel, Switzerland -- the same company where Albert...
DMT: The Spirit Molecule, the Brain's Own Psychedelic, and the Doorway Between Worlds
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine — DMT — is the most potent psychedelic compound known to humanity. When smoked or injected, it launches consciousness into experiences so alien, so ontologically shocking, that even hardened materialist scientists struggle to dismiss them as "just hallucinations."...
The Default Mode Network: How Psychedelics, Meditation, and Shamanic States Dissolve the Ego
You have a storyteller living inside your skull. It runs constantly — narrating your life, reminding you who you are, comparing the present to the past, worrying about the future, maintaining the continuous narrative thread that you experience as "me." This storyteller is not a metaphor.
Psychedelics and Neuroplasticity: How Psilocybin, Ayahuasca, and DMT Rebuild the Brain
For most of the twentieth century, neuroscience operated under a grim assumption: the adult brain was essentially fixed. Once the critical periods of childhood development closed, the brain's wiring was set.
Psychedelic-Assisted End-of-Life Care: Psilocybin, Mystical Experience, and the Dissolution of Death Anxiety
In 2016, two landmark studies — one from Johns Hopkins University, one from New York University — reported results that would have seemed impossible a decade earlier: a single dose of psilocybin, administered in a controlled clinical setting with psychological support, produced rapid,...
The Eleusinian Mysteries: How Western Civilization May Have Been Founded on Psychedelic Initiation
For nearly two thousand years — from approximately 1500 BCE to 392 CE — the most important religious ceremony in the ancient Western world took place every September at a small town called Eleusis, thirteen miles northwest of Athens. The Eleusinian Mysteries, as they were called, initiated an...
The Marsh Chapel Experiment: When Science Proved That Psilocybin Produces Genuine Mystical Experience
On the morning of Friday, April 20, 1962 — Good Friday — twenty theology students from Andover Newton Theological School gathered in the basement chapel of Boston University's Marsh Chapel. Upstairs, a full congregation was assembling for the three-hour Good Friday service, with sermons, hymns,...
Terence McKenna's Stoned Ape Theory: How Psilocybin Mushrooms May Have Catalyzed Human Consciousness
Terence Kemp McKenna (1946-2000) was many things: ethnobotanist, psychonaut, author, lecturer, and the most eloquent spokesperson for the psychedelic experience that the English language has ever produced. But his most enduring contribution was a single hypothesis — an idea so radical that...
The Neurochemistry of the Dark Night of the Soul: Why the Path Through Darkness Has a Biological Basis
Every contemplative tradition describes it. Every serious practitioner encounters it.
The Mystical Experience Questionnaire: Measuring the Most Subjective Human Experience with Scientific Rigor
How do you measure a mystical experience? How do you take the most subjective, most ineffable, most personally transformative event a human being can undergo and reduce it to a number on a questionnaire that can be analyzed with statistics, compared across individuals, and published in a...
The Neurochemistry of Ego Dissolution: The Chemical Pathway from "I" to "No-I"
There is a moment — accessible through psychedelics, through advanced meditation, through spontaneous grace — when the sense of being a separate self dissolves. The boundary between "me" and "everything else" becomes transparent, then permeable, then irrelevant.
Microdosing Psychedelics: The Nootropic Frontier Between Placebo and Neuroplasticity
In the sprawling landscape of cognitive enhancement, no practice generates more controversy, more enthusiasm, and more methodological confusion than microdosing — the regular ingestion of sub-perceptual doses of psychedelic compounds, typically psilocybin or LSD, for the purpose of enhancing...
5-MeO-DMT: The God Molecule and the Toad
5-MeO-DMT (5-methoxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine) is the most powerful naturally occurring psychedelic known to science. A single inhaled dose of 5-15 mg produces, within seconds, a complete dissolution of ordinary consciousness — the total annihilation of the self, the boundary between observer and...
Critical Period Reopening: Psychedelics as Time Machines for the Brain
In June 2023, Gul Dolen's laboratory at Johns Hopkins University published a paper in Nature that may be the most important discovery in psychedelic science in a decade: psychedelic compounds reopen critical periods of social learning in adult mice. Critical periods are time-limited...
Ayahuasca: Traditional and Clinical Perspectives
Ayahuasca is a psychoactive botanical preparation originating from the Amazon basin, traditionally brewed from two primary plants: the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, which contains beta-carboline alkaloids (harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine) that act as monoamine oxidase inhibitors (MAOIs), and...
Ibogaine and Addiction Interruption
Ibogaine is an indole alkaloid derived from the root bark of Tabernanthe iboga, a shrub native to the rainforests of Central West Africa, particularly Gabon and Cameroon. Among all psychedelic compounds, ibogaine occupies the most unusual pharmacological and therapeutic position: it acts...
Indigenous Psychedelic Wisdom and Reciprocity: The Ethics of Plant Medicine
The psychedelic renaissance has a shadow that its brightest advocates often fail to acknowledge: virtually every psychedelic compound that Western science is now studying, patenting, and commercializing was discovered, developed, and held sacred by indigenous peoples for centuries to millennia...
MDMA-Assisted Therapy
MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine), commonly known as ecstasy or molly in recreational contexts, occupies a unique position in the psychedelic therapy landscape. Pharmacologically classified as an entactogen or empathogen rather than a classic psychedelic, MDMA produces its therapeutic...
Microdosing: Science and Practice
Microdosing — the practice of consuming sub-perceptual doses of psychedelic substances on a regular schedule — has emerged as one of the most culturally visible and scientifically contested phenomena in the modern psychedelic renaissance. Popularized by James Fadiman's 2011 book The Psychedelic...
The Neuroscience of Psychedelics
The scientific study of psychedelic compounds has undergone a remarkable renaissance since the early 2010s, producing some of the most significant advances in our understanding of consciousness, neural connectivity, and brain plasticity in modern neuroscience. Classic psychedelics — psilocybin,...
Psychedelic Integration and Ethics
The psychedelic experience itself — however profound, healing, or transformative — is only the beginning. Integration is the process by which the insights, emotions, bodily sensations, and shifts in perspective catalyzed during a psychedelic session are woven into the fabric of daily life,...
The Psychedelic Renaissance in 2025: A Complete Map of the Field
The psychedelic renaissance — the resurgence of scientific and clinical interest in psychedelic compounds after decades of prohibition — has by 2025 matured from a fringe movement into a legitimate biomedical field with billion-dollar valuations, FDA breakthrough therapy designations, published...
REBUS and the Entropic Brain: How Psychedelics Rewrite Reality
In 2019, Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston published what has become the most influential theoretical paper in psychedelic science: "REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics" in Pharmacological Reviews. The paper synthesizes two frameworks —...
Set, Setting, and Psychedelic Safety
The maxim that the psychedelic experience is shaped by "set and setting" — the mindset of the individual and the environment in which the substance is consumed — is perhaps the single most important practical principle in psychedelic science and practice. First articulated by Timothy Leary,...
The Great Pyramid as Acoustic Chamber: Resonant Frequencies and Consciousness Amplification
For over four thousand years, the Great Pyramid of Giza has been the most analyzed, most debated, most theorized-about structure on Earth. Egyptologists have catalogued every stone.
Breathwork as Somatic Therapy: From Pranayama to Polyvagal Regulation
Category: Somatic Therapy / Breathwork | Level: Serpent (South) to Eagle (East) — Medicine Wheel
Ego Death and Spiritual Emergence
Before anything can die, it must first be alive. The ego — your sense of being a separate, continuous "I" with a name, a history, a personality, and preferences — is not a mistake.
Carl Jung's Synchronicity: The Acausal Connecting Principle That Rewrites the Operating System of Reality
Carl Gustav Jung sat in his consulting room in Zurich, listening to a patient describe a dream. She had dreamed of being given a golden scarab — a costly piece of jewelry.