Andrew Gallimore

And so what I want to do is kind of understand, first of all, how that happens, what's actually going on in the brain to cause that transition and why that happens.

And you can't do that unless you have a decent understanding of the normal waking world.

So what is the normal waking world?

It's a model.

It's an interface generated by your brain.

So you have this...

world-building machinery on the outer layer of your brain called the cortex, and this is generating your world all the time.

All the features of the world that you're experiencing are represented within the cortex.

And that applies whether you are just normal waking life.

It applies in dreaming.

It even applies in the psychedelic state.

The world you experience is always constructed as a model by the brain.

And so what that means is that psychedelics, what they're doing is they're perturbing the brain.

They're manipulating the brain and altering that model.

Now, for example, with, let's say, psilocybin from magic mushrooms.

Psilocybin binds to this receptor in the brain called the 5-HT2A receptor, which you're probably familiar with, this serotonin receptor.

And so this is called an excitatory receptor.

It stimulates these neurons, which your cortex is constructed from, and makes them more excitable, makes them more likely to fire and share information to other neurons.

You get this kind of loosening up of the world model that your brain is constructing.

So the walls start to breathe.