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How Psychedelics Affect Models of Reality - An Excerpt from Chapter 9 of "Psychedelics, Chronic Pain, & the Posturedelic Hypothesis"





When we want to target breakthrough reductions in chronic pain, we've got to have a solid understanding of not just the models of reality that can affect the experience of pain, which we discussed last week in the excerpt from Chapter 8, but also how psychedelics affect those models.

Only once we have a conceptual framework for the mechanisms behind how pain might be reduced by the addition of psychedelics, the topic of this chapter, can we begin to design a protocol to leverage those mechanisms, which is the topic of Chapter 10.

In case you're new to my blog, this is where I'm posting about everything surrounding the release of my upcoming book and the progress of Posturedelic Therapy in general.

As with previous entries in this blog, where I have skipped over information in the book, you will find a ". . ." on a line by itself.

From Chapter 9: How Psychedelics Affect Models of Reality

. . .

I chose to name my business and podcast “Chronic Pain Rewired” because the goal is to change the way a person processes the experience of pain by rewiring the structure of the brain using psychedelics. When this dissolution of mental models and ensuing reconstruction is appropriately guided, the evidence I have seen so far leads me to believe there exists a vast opportunity for learning how to trigger breakthrough results for relief from a wide array of chronic pain conditions.

Synesthesia & The Posturedelic Hypothesis

In the traditional medical sense, synesthesia is seen as a disorder in which the mapping of two or more sensory pathways becomes entangled. For example, a person with maps entangled between their visual and auditory cortices of the brain may “see” sound appear as disturbances in their visual field. In contrast to the view of this phenomenon being a disorder, temporary synesthesia can become an agent of healing in the world of psychedelics.

Picture this: You're in the midst of a psychedelic journey, and your visual cortex takes you on a wild ride. With your eyes closed, you witness intricate geometric patterns of light, morphing and flowing through dimensions you never knew existed. These patterns might appear fractal in nature, continuously zooming in and out, creating mesmerizing variations. But they are also reacting to the sound of the music, pulsing and changing with the beat, loudness, and tone of the music! Even with your eyes open, these surreal visuals can merge with the objects around you in harmony with the music, turning the ordinary into the extraordinary.

These hallucinations of being able to see sound aren’t really hallucinations at all.

In fact, I prefer to ditch the term hallucinations when talking about psychedelic experiences, as it doesn't quite capture the essence of what's happening. As we covered last chapter, our brains are constantly processing and constructing our perceptions of reality. What we perceive as "reality" is more like a carefully crafted simulation based primarily upon our existing mental models, with sensory data being used to selectively update those models as we move through time. 

In essence, we're all hallucinating our very own version of reality all the time. It’s just that most of the time, our collective hallucinations tend to agree about the broad strokes of what’s going on around us because our brains use the same general hardware to generate each individual simulation. Because of this, the word hallucination really doesn’t have a helpful meaning.

So, what's really going on during a psychedelic trip? What are those captivating geometric patterns? They're not mere illusions; they're representations of information encoded in our reality frameworks, deep within our brain's visual models. These amazing visual displays we see during a psychedelic trip are manifestations of unusual combinations of physical structures in the brain that don’t usually process information together. In this sense, I think a strong argument can be made that not just psychedelic visuals, but indeed psychedelic experiences as a whole, inherently represent a state of synesthesia.

So the question becomes, how can we leverage this phenomenon to target chronic pain?

Synesthesia Plays a Crucial Role in the Posturedelic Hypothesis

Synesthesia isn't just limited to mixing sights and sounds. The breakdown extends to other sensory cortices. It seems that there are few limits with respect to how this shared processing of information can be distributed. The qualitative nature of both my personal and professional observations suggests that information regarding things like proprioception, body image, body schema, and ego are all being processed with assistance from other \sensory cortices.

When targeting chronic pain in the psychedelic experience, part of my job as a facilitator is to help the seeker trigger a beneficial synesthesia response. It might involve aspects of ego dissolution that allow them to reinterpret past traumas or beliefs. The hope here is that as the body schema models are being updated, some of that sensory information gets processed through the parts of the brain usually responsible for housing the ego. Because a well-designed posture routine targets areas of pain while activating neural networks related to body schema, the ensuing ego dissolution may be more likely to incorporate aspects of the ego affected by chronic pain, body schema, and body image if those areas of the brain are highly active at the same time. You’ll read a whole section devoted to the ego on psychedelics in this chapter.

But synesthesia can and does play an even more direct role in healing during a posturedelic experience, and optimally, we'll get something even more impactful than an ego dissolution. Another potent process is when the visual cortex enters synesthesia with the somatosensory cortex. In my multiple experiences with this, I’ve been provided what I can only describe as various interactive visual/mental interfaces that help me process and tune my musculoskeletal response to the information coming in as a result of performing an exercise, enabling an infinite landscape of possibilities for how healing can occur. I’ve facilitated posturedelic sessions where the participants report a similar kind of experience. 

But this is still not the limit to the importance of synesthesia. Events involving synesthesia stimulate neural circuits that are not normally activated simultaneously. Neuroplasticity happens in everyday life when we challenge our brains to activate underutilized neural networks by learning and practicing new tasks or performing old tasks in new ways. It’s reasonable to hypothesize that synesthesia could help to increase neuroplasticity for the very same reason.

For these reasons, I find that synesthesia plays a crucial role in successful posturedelic experiences. 

A Formal Definition of The Posturedelic Hypothesis

 I've coined the term "posturedelic" to signify "alignment manifesting." So, extending that to the posturedelic hypothesis by incorporating information from the last two chapters, we get the following: Performing extended posture therapy during the course of a moderate psychedelic dosage experience increases the odds of instigating radical changes to body schema models, which might then, in turn, facilitate ego dissolutions via synesthesia, these effects combined can precipitate breakthrough improvements in many forms of chronic pain as a result of the newly manifested alignment of both the mind and body.

Specific protocols for safely facilitating a posturedelic session and the techniques for achieving these goals are discussed in the next chapter. But before we do that, let’s discuss body schema and the ego on psychedelics.

That's all for Chapter 9's Sneak Peek


Next week, we'll take a look at some bonus content on Monday, and on Tuesday not only will the full book be available for sale, but I'll also post an excerpt from Chapter 10 here. See you next trip.

Mush Love,

Posture Monster Jon

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