Psychedelic Neuroscientist: Your Brain Is Guessing At Reality | Dr. Chloe West - Ep. 314

Send us Fan MailDr. Chloe West is a neuroscientist who studies psychedelics. She explains being stuck like this: your brain guesses at the world and hands you the guess as if it were the world. When that guess gets rigid enough, no new evidence can get in and change it.Your brain runs a prediction of reality and checks it against what comes in through your senses. Most of the time, what you experience is the prediction. Chloe walks through what happens when a prediction about yourself gets so locked down that nothing can touch it. That, in this model, is depression. It is also why you can read every book, do every protocol, and still not move.Chloe grew up evangelical in the South and was taught she had to pick between science and religion. She went and got a PhD in neuroscience. When it came time to choose a dissertation, she chose psychedelics. She is early in her career, and the direction she wants to take her research is belief, particularly what happens to your beliefs about yourself. She also calls herself "a hard materialist most of the time," and says her skepticism comes and goes. That made the middle of this conversation a lot of fun.We get into what the default mode network actually is, why your sense of self comes apart at higher doses, and why the further that dissolution goes the better the outcome tends to be. Then I asked her the thing I could not work out on my own. If the brain is getting MORE disorganized under a psychedelic, why do people come back describing the most vivid and connected experience of their lives? You would predict the opposite. That question is where the whole filter debate lives, and neither of us pretended to have it settled.Then we told each other stories we cannot explain. Mine involved my grandmother, my sister, and a phone call. Hers involved a dream she asked for and did not get.If you have done the healing work and still feel stuck in the same loop, the mechanism in this episode is the one to understand.IN THIS EPISODE:0:00Welcome And Guest Introduction4:00Chloe’s Path From Faith To Science9:10Defining Psychedelics And Classic Compounds10:55Default Mode Network And Ego Death17:30Filtered Perception And The DMT Realm27:35Dreams Synchronicity And Meaning35:30Where Psychedelics Show Real Benefits38:20Predictive Processing And Belief Revision49:20Dosing Set Setting And Microdosing57:15Safety Religious Trauma And What’s NextFIND DR. CHLOE WESTSubstack: Born Again AgainYouTube: @DrChloeWestInstagram: @dr.chloewestFIND METake the free quiz that names the pattern running your life: https://quiz.humanuniversity.comJoin a free Wednesday room at 3:30pm ET: https://nextlevelhuman.com/human-conversationsRead the newsletter: https://substack.nextlevelhuman.com Connect with Next Level HumanWebsite: [email protected] with Dr. Jade TetaWebsite: www.jadeteta.comInstagram: @jadeteta