The Mystery

It’s like if we had some two dimensional creatures that were living on this piece of paper right here on the table, and one of those creatures figured out that he can smoke some DMT and that somehow enabled us to peel this two dimensional creature to where it could see in three dimensions and see everything in this room. That’s DMT. You’re getting peeled out of reality into some other realm. And the weird thing is, every scientist that I know that’s studying DMT, not one of them thinks it’s a hallucination. I think the more familiar someone is with DMT, the less certain they are about what the hell’s going on. But everyone, literally everyone who uses DMT pretty much goes to the same exact places and they all meet the same entities, the same seven or eight different types of entities. And it’s been the same for 4,500 years of recorded history with DMT. And DMT is something we make in our own body. It’s an endogenous chemical. It’s so much more real than this reality. It’s so ineffable,...

It’s common knowledge that our brains—and, specifically, our brain cells—store memories. But a team of scientists has discovered that cells from other parts of the body also perform a memory function, opening new pathways for understanding how memory works and creating the potential to enhance learning.  “Learning and memory are generally associated with brains and brain cells alone, but our study shows that other cells in the body can learn and form memories, too,” explains New York University’s Nikolay V. Kukushkin, the lead author of the study , which appears in the journal Nature Communications.  The research sought to better understand if non-brain cells help with memory by borrowing from a long-established neurological property—the massed-spaced effect—which shows that we tend to retain information better when studied in spaced intervals rather than in a single, intensive session—better known as cramming for a test. The scientists replicated learning over time by studyin...

Neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin reveals how consciousness evolved out of the natural world, from the birth of the cell to the majesty of our modern minds. Science says that you are nothing but a chemical reaction—a collection of atoms and molecules, like rocks, paperclips, and everything else in the physical universe. But if that’s so, where is the place in this world for your consciousness? In a word, why does it feel so special to be you? Like the Zen Buddhist riddle pondering the imponderable—the sound of a single hand clapping— 'One Hand Clapping' asks the seemingly unanswerable question of how the human mind came to exist within the material world. In search of an answer, neuroscientist Nikolay Kukushkin takes readers on a billion-year journey through time from the roots of our existence to the advent of Homo sapiens, reimagining the story of our evolution. The result is an exhilarating book that embeds our consciousness within a single, unified story of life on Earth. Il...

Philosopher Bernardo Kastrup's 'Analytic Idealism' is 'a consciousness-only ontology' that has refocused attention, within the philosophical community and more broadly, on metaphysical idealism, that is, an idealism that is grounded in philosophical argument as opposed to promoted by religious tradition or spiritual belief. How to explain, under idealism, the correlation between inner experience and brain states? According to Kastrup, the brain and its patterns of neuronal activity are not the cause of inner experience, but the image, the extrinsic appearance of inner experience. In other words, brain activity is what inner experience looks like when observed from the outside. As such, he says, the correlations ordinarily observed between patterns of brain activity and inner experience are due to the trivial fact that the appearance of a phenomenon correlates with the phenomenon. And when this correlation is broken, as observed in the psychedelic state, the reason i...

Psychedelics and dreams share a profound neurological overlap, with states induced by substances like psilocybin often described as 'waking dreams'. Both states are characterized by unconstrained mental imagery, heightened emotional processing, and decreased activity in the brain's Default Mode Network. The Neurological Connection Shared Brain Activity : Neuroimaging studies show that the brain regions processing memory and emotion are highly active during both REM sleep and psychedelic trips. The Predictive Brain : Recent research on psychedelics indicates that the brain begins to override external reality and 'fills in' sensory information using its own internal memory banks, a process remarkably similar to partial dreaming. Lucid Dreaming Parallel : Psychedelic states most closely mirror lucid dreaming—a mixed state of wakefulness and sleep where you experience vivid, dream-like consciousness but retain a level of self-agency. Therapeutic Implications Fear Extinc...