Psychedelic experience

A prominent element of psychedelic experiences is visual alteration.[5] Psychedelic visual alteration often includes spontaneous formation of complex flowing geometric visual patterning in the visual field.[6] When the eyes are open, the visual alteration is overlaid onto the objects and spaces in the physical environment; when the eyes are closed the visual alteration is seen in the "inner world" behind the eyelids.[6] These visual effects increase in complexity with higher dosages, and also when the eyes are closed.[6] The visual alteration does not normally constitute hallucinations, because the person undergoing the experience can still distinguish between real and imagined visual phenomena, though in some cases, true hallucinations are present.[5] More rarely, psychedelic experiences can include complex hallucinations of objects, animals, people, or even whole landscapes.[5] Visual alterations also include other effects such as afterimages, shifting of color hues, and pareidolia.

A number of studies by Roland R. Griffiths and other researchers have concluded that high doses of psilocybin and other classic psychedelics trigger mystical experiences in most research participants.[7][8][9][10] Mystical experiences have been measured by a number of psychometric scales, including the Hood Mysticism Scale, the Spiritual Transcendence Scale, and the Mystical Experience Questionnaire.[10] The revised version of the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, for example, asks participants about four dimensions of their experience, namely the "mystical" quality, positive mood such as the experience of amazement, the loss of the usual sense of time and space, and the sense that the experience cannot be adequately conveyed through words.[10] The questions on the "mystical" quality in turn probe multiple aspects: the sense of "pure" being, the sense of unity with one's surroundings, the sense that what one experienced was real, and the sense of sacredness.[10] Some researchers have questioned the interpretation of the results from these studies and whether the framework and terminology of mysticism are appropriate in a scientific context, while other researchers have responded to those criticisms and argued that descriptions of mystical experiences are compatible with a scientific worldview.[11][12][13]

A group of researchers concluded in a 2011 study that psilocybin "occasions personally and spiritually significant mystical experiences that predict long-term changes in behaviors, attitudes and values".[14]

Some research has found similarities between psychedelic experiences and non-ordinary forms of consciousness experienced in meditation[15] and near-death experiences.[16] The phenomenon of ego dissolution is often described as a key feature of the psychedelic experience.[17][18][19]

Individuals who have psychedelic experiences often describe what they experienced as "more real" than ordinary experience. For example, the psychologist Benny Shanon, after observing ayahuasca trips, referred to "the assessment, very common with ayahuasca, that what is seen and thought during the course of intoxication defines the real, whereas the world that is ordinarily perceived is actually an illusion."[20] Similarly, the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof described the LSD experience as "complex revelatory insights into the nature of existence… typically accompanied by a sense of certainty that this knowledge is ultimately more relevant and 'real' than the perceptions and beliefs we share in everyday life."[21]

A "bad trip" is a highly unpleasant psychedelic experience.[5][22] A bad trip on psilocybin, for instance, often features intense anxiety, confusion, and agitation, or even psychotic episodes.[23] Bad trips can be connected to the anxious ego-dissolution (AED) dimension of the APZ questionnaire used in research on psychedelic experiences.[5] As of 2011, exact data on the frequency of bad trips are not available.[23] Some research suggests that the risk of a bad trip on psilocybin is higher when multiple drugs are used, when the user has a history of certain mental illnesses, and when the user is not supervised by a sober person.[22]

In clinical research settings, precautions including the screening and preparation of participants, the training of the session monitors who will be present during the experience, and the selection of appropriate physical setting can minimize the likelihood of psychological distress.[24] Researchers have suggested that the presence of professional "trip sitters" (i.e., session monitors) may significantly reduce the negative experiences associated with a bad trip.[25] In most cases in which anxiety arises during a supervised psychedelic experience, reassurance from the session monitor is adequate to resolve it; however, if distress becomes intense it can be treated pharmacologically, for example with the benzodiazepine diazepam.[24]

The psychiatrist Stanislav Grof wrote that unpleasant psychedelic experiences are not necessarily unhealthy or undesirable, arguing that they may have potential for psychological healing and lead to breakthrough and resolution of unresolved psychic issues.[26] Drawing on narrative theory, the authors of a 2021 study of 50 users of psychedelics found that many described bad trips as having been sources of insight or even turning points in life.[25]

Researchers studying mescaline in the early twentieth century and LSD in the mid-twentieth century took interest in these drugs as producing a temporary "model psychosis" that could assist researchers and medical students in understanding the experiences of patients with schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.[27]

Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond applied the pre-existing ideas of filtration theory, which held that the brain filters what enters into consciousness, to explain psychedelic experiences (and it is from this paradigm that the term psychedelic is derived).[6] Huxley believed that the brain was filtering reality itself and that psychedelics granted conscious access to "Mind at Large," whereas Osmond believed that the brain was filtering aspects of the mind out of consciousness.[6] Swanson writes that Osmond's view seems "less radical, more compatible with materialist science, and less epistemically and ontologically committed" than Huxley's.[6]

Psychoanalytic theory was the predominant interpretive framework in mid-twentieth-century psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy.[6] For instance, Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof characterised psychedelic experiencing as "non-specific amplification of unconscious mental processes", and he analysed the phenomenology of the LSD experience (particularly the experience of what he termed psychospiritual death and rebirth) in terms of Otto Rank's theory of the unresolved memory of the primal birth trauma.[28]

Entropic brain theory is a theory of consciousness proposed in 2014 by neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris and colleagues that was inspired by research on psychedelic drugs.[29]

Integrated information theory is a theory of consciousness proposing to explain all forms of consciousness, and has been applied specifically to psychedelic experiences by Andrew Gallimore.[30]

Sarit Pink-Hashkes and colleagues have applied the predictive processing paradigm in neuroscience to psychedelic experiences in order to formalize the idea of the entropic brain.[31]