The standard antidepressants, we know what they do. Brain imaging studies show they very rapidly turn down the danger center in the brain. So you wander around for a few weeks, feel better about things, you smile a little bit more, and then people smile back at you. The downside of that, though, is that if they chill things out too much, you go flat, you go numb. People wander around saying, “I’m not feeling as horrible, but I’m not feeling as much of anything.” There’d been a depth of feeling that was erased with it.
Now, psychedelics are really the opposite. They ramp everything up. They make emotions more salient. So either you face your problems, feel your feelings fully, accept the difficulties of life, be grateful you’re alive, or you take a pill, feel better. It’s the difference between face it and change or chill out and just roll with it.
It’s the difference between face it and change or chill out and just roll with it.
Why can a single psychedelic experience have such long-lasting effects six months later, a year later, a lifetime later? Is that rewiring the brain? Or you’ve just had this experience and somehow the experience has caused you to see the world in a new way?
From a purely scientific view, consciousness arises from brain function. Your feelings arise from brain function, your behavior arises from brain function. So if you are different six months from now, there’s got to be some physical substrate for that difference. What that substrate is, of course, is the holy grail. Everybody wants to know.