Neural Mechanisms and Psychology of Psychedelic Ego Dissolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Neuroimaging studies of psychedelics have advanced our understanding of hierarchical brain organisation and the mechanisms underlying their subjective and therapeutic effects. The primary mechanism of action of classic psychedelics is binding to serotonergic 5HT2A receptors. Agonist activity at these receptors leads to neuromodulatory changes in synaptic efficacy that can have a profound effect on hierarchical message passing in the brain. Here, we review the cognitive and neuroimaging evidence for the effects of psychedelics; in particular, their influence on selfhood and subject-object boundaries—known as ego dissolution—surmised to underwrite their subjective and therapeutic effects. Agonist of 5HT2A receptors, located at the apex of the cortical hierarchy may have a particularly powerful effect on sentience and consciousness. These effects can endure well after the pharmacological half life, suggesting that psychedelics may have long-term effects on neural plasticity – that may play a role in their therapeutic efficacy. Psychologically, this may be accompanied by a surrender of ego resistance that increases the repertoire of perceptual hypotheses, including those that undergird selfhood. We consider the interaction between serotonergic neuromodulation and sentience through the lens of hierarchical predictive coding, which speaks to the value of psychedelics in understanding how we make sense of the world—and specific predictions about effective connectivity in cortical hierarchies that can be tested using functional neuroimaging.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".