If psychedelics do act on the brain to change predictive processing, it’s not clear how they do it. But in recent studies, researchers have found ways to approach these questions. One way to gauge changes occurring in brains on psychedelics is to measure something called Lempel-Ziv complexity, a tally of the number of distinct patterns that are present in, say, recordings of brain activity over the course of milliseconds using a method called magnetoencephalography (MEG). “The higher the Lempel-Ziv complexity, the more disordered over time your signal is,” says Seth.
To determine the degree of disorder of human brains on psychedelics, Seth’s team, in collaboration with Carhart-Harris, looked at MEG data collected by researchers at the Cardiff University Brain Research Imaging Centre in Wales. The volunteers were given either LSD or psilocybin, the hallucinogenic ingredient in “magic mushrooms.” On psychedelics, their brain activity was more disordered than it was during normal waking consciousness, according to an analysis of the MEG signals that was published in 2017. Seth says that while the increase in disordered brain signals does not definitively explain people’s psychedelic experiences, it’s suggestive. “There’s a lot of mind-wandering and vagueness going on,” says Seth. “The experience is getting more disordered and the brain dynamics are getting more disordered.” But he says there’s more work to do to establish a clear connection between the two.
More recently, Seth, Carhart-Harris and colleagues took another look at the brain on psychedelics, using a statistical metric called Granger causality. This is an indication of information flow between different regions of the brain, or what neuroscientists call functional connectivity. For example, if activity in brain region A predicts activity in brain region B better than the past activity of B itself does, the Granger causality metric suggests that region A has a strong functional connection to region B and drives its activity. Again, using MEG recordings from volunteers on psychedelics, the team found that psychedelics decreased the brain’s overall functional connectivity.
One possible interpretation of these Granger and Lempel-Ziv findings is that the loss of functional organization and increase in disorder is disrupting predictive processing, says Seth. Verifying that would involve building computational models that show exactly how measures of Granger causality or Lempel-Ziv complexity change when predictive processing breaks down, and then testing to see if that’s what happens in the brains of people on psychedelics.
In the meantime, evidence that psychedelics mess with functional connectivity is mounting.
- Psychedelics open a new window on the mechanisms of perception
In one way or other, for good or bad, psychedelics "open up" the minds of sapiens. The issue is most closed minded people don't want to try it as they don't want to the quintessential oxymoron and hence, impact of psychedelics cannot be captured more rigorously.
The people who believe in magic camouflaged under pseudonyms such as capitalism, markets, religion, socialism ad infinitum; need some profound wiring change to inhale reality as it it. I hope psychedelics help in seeing reality rather than instill different dimensions of magic. In machine learning and statistical lingo - reduced under-fitting and over-fitting.
I "think" that I am on the fat tail end of open-mindedness but who knows!
I for one not only think and believe but often write on this blog, living with Max for 13 plus years made me open-minded, live in present, adapt to change and live my life as my favorite quote - Mind as a River.
Understand: the greatest generals, the most creative strategists, stand out not because they have more knowledge but because they are able, when necessary, to drop their preconceived notions and focus intensely on the present moment. That is how creativity is sparked and opportunities are seized. Knowledge, experience, and theory have limitations: no amount of thinking in advance can prepare you for the chaos of life, for the infinite possibilities of the moment. The great philosopher of war Carl von Clausewitz called this "friction": the difference between our plans and what actually happens. Since friction is inevitable, our minds have to be capable of keeping up with change and adapting to the unexpected. The better we can adapt our thoughts to the current circumstances, the more realistic our responses to them will be....
Think of the mind as a river: the faster it flows, the better it keeps up with the present and responds to change. The faster it flows, also the more it refreshes itself and the greater its energy. Obsessional thoughts, past experiences (whether traumas or successes), and preconceived notions are like boulders or mud in this river, settling and hardening there and damming it up. The river stops moving; stagnation sets in. You must wage constant war on this tendency in the mind.
- The 33 Strategies of War by Robert Greene
But what if just constantly believing that story I tell myself (and others) makes me closed minded? Seeking an answer for that lingering question makes me want to try psychedelics.
To be precise, the question is:
Did living with Max for 13 plus years during the peak of my adulthood opened up so many windows as humanely possible and nothing more left to open up or is it just the tip of the iceberg?
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