How Psychedelics Work: Illuminating the Hidden Mind

There’s no agreed upon definition of “psychedelic” yet its etymology suggests that it is principally an adjective for describing altered states characterized by increased access to the mind’s ordinarily hidden content. This talk offers a model for how this occurs, centered on the “entropic brain principle” (EBP)— that the entropy of spontaneous brain activity encodes the depth or richness of experiential content. It explains how the EBP relates to the impact of psychedelics on the mind-and-brain’s basic predictive mode of operation, decreasing the influence of encoded assumptions, a phenomenon referred to as “Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics” or “REBUS”. Finally, I’ll discuss how both EBP and REBUS can shed light on the nature of mental illness as well as how psychedelics can be used to treat it.