Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Psychedelic substances are used for clinical applications(e.g., treatment of addictions, anxiety and depression) aswell as an investigative tool in neuroscientific research.Recently it has been proposed that the psychedelicphenomenon stems from the brain reaching an increasedentropic state. In this paper, we use the predictive codingframework to formalize the idea of an entropic brain. Wepropose that the increased entropic state is created whentop-down predictions in affected brain areas break up anddecompose into many more overly detailed predictions dueto hyper activation of 5-HT2A receptors in layer Vpyramidal neurons. We demonstrate that this novel, unifiedtheoretical account can explain the various and sometimescontradictory effects of psychedelics such as hallucination,heightened sensory input, synesthesia, increased trait ofopenness, ‘ego death’ and time dilation by up-regulation ofa variety of mechanisms the brain can use to minimizeprediction under the constraint of decomposed prediction.