• Psychedelics work by violating our models of self and the world | Aeon Essays
    https://aeon.co/essays/psychedelics-work-by-violating-our-models-of-self-and-the-world

    Psychedelic drugs are making a psychiatric comeback. After a lull of half a century, researchers are once again investigating the therapeutic benefits of psilocybin (‘magic mushrooms’) and LSD. It turns out that the hippies were on to something. There’s mounting evidence that psychedelic experiences can be genuinely transformative, especially for people suffering from intractable anxiety, depression and addiction. ‘It is simply unprecedented in psychiatry that a single dose of a medicine produces these kinds of dramatic and enduring results,’ Stephen Ross, the clinical director of the NYU Langone Center of Excellence on Addiction, told Scientific American in 2016.

    Just what do these drugs do? Psychedelics reliably induce an altered state of consciousness known as ‘ego dissolution’. The term was invented, well before the tools of contemporary neuroscience became available, to describe sensations of self-transcendence: a feeling in which the mind is put in touch more directly and intensely with the world, producing a profound sense of connection and boundlessness.

    How does all this help those with long-term psychiatric disorders? The truth is that no one quite knows how psychedelic therapy works.

    Today there are neuroBuddhists, neuroCartesians and neuroHumeans all over the world, filling PowerPoint screens with images of fMRI scans supposedly congenial to their theory. Abnormal cognitive conditions, pathological or otherwise, serve as a crucial source of evidence in these debates, because they offer the chance to look at the self when it is not working ‘properly’. Data floods in but consensus remains elusive. However, the emerging neuroscience of psychedelics may help resolve this impasse. For the first time ever, scientists are in a position to watch the sense of self disintegrate and reintegrate – reliably, repeatedly and safely, in the neuroimaging scanner.

    #Psychédéliques #conception_du_moi