10 votes

The entropic brain: A theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs

7 comments

  1. [2]
    JakeTheDog
    Link
    This is a super-accessible article for anyone with even some scientific literacy. I've been revisiting it since it was first published. It makes an excellent analogy that will help neuro-laymen,...

    This is a super-accessible article for anyone with even some scientific literacy. I've been revisiting it since it was first published. It makes an excellent analogy that will help neuro-laymen, but still scientifically-literate, people understand the mechanisms of mental health (as far as we know it).

    Anyone interested in this topic should read more of Robin CH, he's an excellent academic writer. Also Karl Friston, a co-author of some of their work (careful of the "Free Energy Principle" rabbit hole).

    3 votes
    1. Enoch
      Link Parent
      Good stuff indeed. Thanks for posting.

      Good stuff indeed. Thanks for posting.

  2. [5]
    Gaywallet
    Link
    Still working my way through the article, but I find it a fascinating theory. It makes me wonder, however, if this isn't observable already without the use of psychedelics by finding people who...

    Still working my way through the article, but I find it a fascinating theory.

    It makes me wonder, however, if this isn't observable already without the use of psychedelics by finding people who either have a very diminished sense of ego, or feel like they have no ego. I think the classic relatable example of this is people going through a mid-life crisis who are unable to find a defined sense of self. Others, such as social chameleons, view themselves as having a very flexible sense of self. Would they, perhaps, have different activation/inhibition patterns then people who feel very strongly about their sense of self?

    Ignoring the psychoanalytic application of the data, I do believe that understanding entropy in the brain as it relates to cognition (in particular frontal lobe vs. non-frontal lobe) - I think we can gain a lot of information about how we process thought through the application of psychedelics and targeted questions / study design. It would be interesting, for example, to train people to explain their thought process when presented with certain types of information as well as measure responses (such as emotion) to understand how things are processed when entropy is increased.

    1 vote
    1. [4]
      JakeTheDog
      Link Parent
      I agree that this would be a worthwhile pursuit, but there is an immense divide between "no ego" (during a psychedelic experience) and having a flexible or destabilized sense of self. In the...

      It makes me wonder, however, if this isn't observable already without the use of psychedelics by finding people who either have a very diminished sense of ego, or feel like they have no ego. I think the classic relatable example of this is people going through a mid-life crisis who are unable to find a defined sense of self. Others, such as social chameleons, view themselves as having a very flexible sense of self. Would they, perhaps, have different activation/inhibition patterns then people who feel very strongly about their sense of self?

      I agree that this would be a worthwhile pursuit, but there is an immense divide between "no ego" (during a psychedelic experience) and having a flexible or destabilized sense of self. In the latter case, it's still there and is often the issue at hand.
      That being said, I think this article may be of interest to you - meditation is another state of consciousness useful to study ego i.e. sense of self. Check out Fig 1 at least, in relation to my statement above.

      train people to explain their thought process ... to understand how things are processed when entropy is increased

      What do you mean by this? It's a bit of a problem that we have no idea what our thought processes really are (hence an argument against free will). At any rate, RCH and his colleagues are already on it! Check out their more recent work.

      2 votes
      1. [3]
        Gaywallet
        Link Parent
        Agreed, but it is easier to just recruit people and scan them, then to recruit people, have them take drugs and scan them. Yep, brain scans wrt meditation and sleep and studies on these brain...

        no ego vs. less ego

        Agreed, but it is easier to just recruit people and scan them, then to recruit people, have them take drugs and scan them.

        meditation

        Yep, brain scans wrt meditation and sleep and studies on these brain states are fascinating.

        What do you mean by this? It's a bit of a problem that we have no idea what our thought processes really are (hence an argument against free will). At any rate, RCH and his colleagues are already on it! Check out their more recent work.

        More to get people to free-form explain what they are thinking - this can give insight into mechanistic action. I suspect targeted questions trying to see how various biases affect us under different circumstances or how different emotionally triggering events are perceived is what will actually end up happening in the lab.

        Do you have any direct links to their more recent work? Thanks!

        1. [2]
          JakeTheDog
          Link Parent
          Ah, but easy is not the same as effective. Nothing worth doing is easy. I strongly disagree with this. Explaining how I get from point A to B in my thinking process yields zero insight into the...

          Agreed, but it is easier to just recruit people and scan them, then to recruit people, have them take drugs and scan them.

          Ah, but easy is not the same as effective. Nothing worth doing is easy.

          free-form explain what they are thinking - this can give insight into mechanistic action

          I strongly disagree with this. Explaining how I get from point A to B in my thinking process yields zero insight into the actual mechanisms (either physiologically or topologically) not least because its subjective (e.g. structure of native language). As evident by the current limitations of research on neural correlates. Until we get to single-neuron resolution and can produce entire maps for a representative sample of the population, asking clever questions will only lead to more questions (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

          Here's RCH's Google Scholar, take your pick! You'll see common collaborators on the bottom-right under the citations plot. Let me know if you find anything noteworthy.

          1 vote
          1. Gaywallet
            Link Parent
            Yes but you don't want to conflate the two. It's very possible that the mechanism of action for psychedelics isn't quite as expected in the theory of the author. We'd need to test it's not...

            Ah, but easy is not the same as effective. Nothing worth doing is easy.

            Yes but you don't want to conflate the two. It's very possible that the mechanism of action for psychedelics isn't quite as expected in the theory of the author. We'd need to test it's not something unique to psychedelics altering the mind in a way that we didn't evolve through, rather than the proposed "reversion" to a more "primitive" state.

            Explaining how I get from point A to B in my thinking process yields zero insight into the actual mechanisms (either physiologically or topologically) not least because its subjective (e.g. structure of native language).

            To be clear, I'm not thinking of this as a large scale study, but rather a smaller scale study to help provide insight into what needs to be researched. The second part of my statement where I talk about it likely being specific, targeted questions such as one that reveals a bias we know to be true in humans (such as say, anchoring bias) and testing whether psychedelics influence how we approach thinking is what I expected to be more rigorous (and more likely to be approved). I didn't mean to conflate the two or to imply that we would be conducting smaller scale studies like this for the express purposes of quantitative data capture, but more to explore what exactly does a state of increased entropy do to how we think and approach problems.

            Until we get to single-neuron resolution and can produce entire maps for a representative sample of the population, asking clever questions will only lead to more questions (which is not necessarily a bad thing).

            I'm not convinced there is single-neuron resolution for discrete thoughts and even if there is the simple variety in human genetics and how we approach thinking would make things far too messy for this to be of any use for us outside of very limited scope - very specialized sections of the brain such as how we interpret vision are standardized enough among the population to potentially deduce mechanisms of action on single-neuron scale and draw conclusions that might be useful to other humans, but single-neuron resolution in the frontal cortex, for example, is probably not very useful.

            link

            Thanks!