Richard’s Blog - October 31, 2026 10:07

Reading: Psychedelics tune the brain to the environment, Nature (news and views), 19 August 2026.The story so far: reality is a controlled hallucination.A theoretic framework of brain function known as predictive processing posits that the brain does not just register sensory information passively, but builds predictive models based on past experiences.Your brain is predicting what's expected, and updating the predictions by diff-ing against what is actually sensed. Your actions are trying to bring your senses in line with your expectations.From this perspective, psilocybin [the psychedelic compound found in some mushrooms] might allow a transient relaxation of high-level priors — the pre-existing assumptions that enable the brain to make inferences from incoming signals.This fits with the idea that psychedelics plus therapy could make a difference for stubborn mental health issues:At the same time, it might sharpen the influence of incoming sensory evidence and affective signals,…