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• The idea that psychedelic drugs might shed some light on the problems of consciousness makes a certain sense. A psychedelic drug is powerful enough to disrupt the system we call normal waking consciousness in ways that may force some of its fundamental properties into view.
• It does, because it demostrates that the disticition between mind and body is artificlial. It is really Mind-body. And neural activity changes in accordance with mental activity. Thus, when psychedelics interfear with neural functioning, it effects consciousness.
• True, anesthetics disrupt consciousness too, yet because such drugs shut it down, this kind of disturbance yields relatively little data.
• In contrast, someone on a psychedelic remains awake and able to report on what he or she is experiencing in real time. Nowadays, these subjective reports can be correlated with various measures of brain activity, using several different modes of imaging—tools unavailable to researchers during the first wave of psychedelic research in the 1950s and 1960s.

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References

• Pollan, Micheal. (2018). How to Change Your Mind What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence (Location 4034). New York, NY: Penguin Random House.

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