Relaxed beliefs under Psychedelics and the Anarchic Brain

>"Speaking of Carhart-Harris’ overenthusiasm for psychedelics running a little ahead of the evidence, the paper ends with a weird section comparing the hierarchial structure of the brain to the hierarchical structure of society, and speculating that just as psychedelics cause an “anarchic brain” where the highest-level brain structures fail to “govern” lower-level activity, so they may cause society to dissolve or something:

Two figureheads in psychedelic research and therapy, Stanislav Grof and Roland Griffiths, have highlighted how psychedelics have historically “loosed the Dionysian element” (Pollan, 2018) to the discomfort of the ruling elite, i.e., not just in 1960s America but also centuries earlier when conquistadors suppressed the use of psychedelic plants by indigenous people of the same continent. Former Harvard psychology professor, turned psychedelic evangelist, Timothy Leary, cajoled that LSD could stand for “Let the State Dissolve” (Pollan, 2018). Whatever the interaction between psychedelic use and political perspective, we hope that psychedelic science will be given the best possible opportunity to positively impact on psychology, psychiatry, and society in the coming decades—so that it may achieve its promise of significantly advancing self-understanding and health care."

I wonder how many people are aware that Timothy Leary was a fan of Socrates! He mentions him in an interview as being "his model" (idol?), and "the cause of all the trouble". There's another video made late in his life where he mentions providing material related to Socrates to a group of college students (with not-so-much emphasis on psychedelic drugs to the best of my memory, though Socrates wasn't the main subject matter either).

Socrates, as presented by Xenophon and Plato, considered the state, defined as a group of individuals that cooperate for their mutual benefit, to be a noble thing that he would have no interest in dissolving, merely improving. I think this is likely the intent of the authors as well (notice they say, "... the best possible opportunity to positivity impact..."), and I would wager the late Leary himself if pressed (note that despite everything, in the end American society tolerated him).

From the paper[1] referenced by TFA:

> In brief, our proposal is that psychedelics disrupt functioning at a level of the system (sensitivity of deep-layer pyramidal neurons, power of low-frequency rhythms, and integrity of large-scale networks) that encodes the precision of priors, beliefs, or assumptions.

As SSC point out, this idea isn't really new with this paper. SSC cite "Mad Science Blog" and the Qualia Research Institute as precursors, but perhaps a better example would be renegade computational neurobiologist Andrew Gallimore.

Gallimore has a 45 part course[2] up on Youtube which, after providing an overview of the neurobiology of the predictive coding[3] model of the brain for context, delves into the detail of psychedelics' action on pyramidal neurons giving a picture so consonant with the Relaxed beliefs paper's (less biologically detailed) proposal that it's somewhat surprising his name doesn't get a mention.

The main takeaway from the predictive coding model for this purpose is that most of the information flow in the cortex is top-down, from a world-model (analogous to an ANN model) implemented in the neural structure of the cortex, downwards towards lower-level neurons in "deeper" cortical layers. The world we experience flows from the model rather than directly bottom-up from sensory input, as we might naively expect.

Data flowing downwards from the higher-level model to deeper layers appears as a set of predictions to be compared to sensory data arriving at the same layers from the bottom upwards.

Divergences between sensory data and the model's predictions then serve as a corrective signal, fed upwards back to the model, in a constantly running training cycle.

When additional divergences are introduced by the neurobiological impact of psychedelics, Gallimore theorizes, the model reorganizes in an effort to restore predictive efficacy, experienced as the characteristic perceptual and cognitive distortions of the psychedelic experience. The longer term effects of the disruption seem analogous, perhaps, to pushing the an ANN model out of its local minima.

For an in-at-the-deep-end look at Gallimore's neurobiological overview of how psychedelic action on pyramidal cells disrupts the training cycle see[4] though it relies heavily on context established by the previous 35 episodes.

1: https://pharmrev.aspetjournals.org/content/71/3/316

2: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbqdD4EM-aEfmLvbWu8GQ...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictive_coding

4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L45A6XlPRM0&list=PLbqdD4EM-a...