People with rigid habits may benefit from psychedelics ability to disrupt habitual patterns of thought and behavior
Perhaps psychological “disorders” characterized by excessive rigidity are not the result of a lack of order in the brain but rather stem from an excess of order. When the grooves of self-reflective thinking deepen and harden, the ego becomes overbearing. This is perhaps most clearly evident in depression, when the ego turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality. Research indicates that this debilitating state of mind may be the result of a hyperactive default mode network, which can trap us in destructive ruminative response styles that eventually close us off from the world outside. People suffering from a wide range of disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thought—including addiction, obsessions, and eating disorders as well as depression—stand to benefit from the ability of psychedelics to disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior by disintegrating the patterns of neural activity upon which they rest.
So it may be that some brains could stand to have a little more entropy, not less. This is where psychedelics come in. By quieting the default mode network, these compounds can loosen the ego’s grip on the machinery of the mind, lubricating cognition where before it had been rusted stuck. Psychedelics alter consciousness by disorganizing brain activity. They increase the amount of entropy in the brain, with the result that the system reverts to a less constrained mode of cognition. The ego temporarily loses its dominion and the unconscious, now unregulated, is brought into an observable space. This is the heuristic value of psychedelics to the study of the mind, though their may be therapeutic value as well.
References
- Pollan, Micheal. (2018). How to Change Your Mind Chapter 5. The Neuroscience of Your Brain on Psychedelics (Location 4275). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.
Metadata
Type:🔴 Tags: Biology / Neuroscience / Psychology / Neuropsychology / Biochemistry / Neurochemistry / Pharmacology Status:☀️