It’s Not the Molecule nor the Brain State

I heard something recently that stopped me, because it was almost exactly in my own words. A neuroscientist, talking about how people actually change, said: “It’s not the molecule.”

Next, he finished his statement, and it went somewhere I hear a lot: “It’s accessing the right states of neural activity.”

So, the same opening but a completely different final argument. What I found interesting is that he works in what people are starting to call technodelics: immersive digital experiences designed to produce altered states without a substance.

For example, mirrored chambers lined with LED lights, flashing light paired with music that are tuned to entrain your brainwaves, and devices that give you the chills on purpose. The research is real, some of it looks promising, and the people doing it are serious scientists, and the crux of it is: if we can identify the brain state a psychedelic produces, we can produce that state directly, and skip the plant.

Altered states are older than psychedelics

The reason I take that seriously is because half of it is something I already believe. For instance, you do not need a psychedelic to enter a non-ordinary state. This is one of the oldest facts about human beings, and the evidence for it is not thin: steady drumming, sustained chanting, breathwork, fasting, long silences. In fact, emotions such as grief that arrives without being invited can take you there.

When researchers scan experienced practitioners entering trance to a drum, they find the same large-scale brain networks reorganizing that psychedelics reorganize, reached by an entirely different road. Rhythmic sound is probably the oldest and most widespread method our species has ever found for getting out of ordinary consciousness, and it works. And I know it from the inside out too. I have been carried as far by a drum and a song as I have ever been carried by a plant. Some of the most powerful ceremonies I have ever sat in had no psychedelic in them at all.

So when the technodelic people say you do not need the substance, I agree with them even though I study psychedelics. That is my own argument, and I am glad to see it taken seriously. My problem is with the next step they explain.

The assumption: healing resides in the molecule

A long-standing assumption in this field is that the healing resides in the molecule: find the compound, isolate it, get the dose right, deliver it under controlled conditions, and you have the medicine. That story though comes apart when observing from a different perspective, and it should.

Here is the part that invites a lot of questions: Two people can enter the same measurable state and come out in completely different places. For instance, one person’s ego dissolution is the most liberating hour of their life while another person’s ego dissolution is a terror they are still carrying two years later. At the level of the neural state, these can look much the same. And instruments cannot isolate and measure them, because whatever makes the difference is not isolated in the neural networks.

The same state can lead to different destinations

Now, we have some evidence about what does make the difference. In a survey of people whose difficult psychedelic experiences left them with lasting symptoms, what predicted the damage was not how intense the state had been. It was whether they had been able to meet what came with some acceptance, or whether they had spent the whole time fighting it. And the growth that some of them reported afterward was not predicted by how hard the experience was either.

It was predicted by that same capacity to accept what was happening while it happened. So, the same substance and the same kind of state yield different destinations, all decided by something the state does not contain. Ironically, this can mean that if you get very good at producing a state, what you have got very good at is producing that state. That is all. It does not follow that you have produced healing, any more than it followed when we thought the molecule was doing it.

What actually shapes the experience

So, the difference may come down to several factors: whether someone in the room can stay steady while you come apart, and/or whether you feel safe enough to stop fighting. Stopping the fight isn’t a decision you can make alone; it becomes possible when the container is worth trusting. Also, what the experience may mean afterwards, and whether anyone helps you make sense of it. And whether you go home to people who can receive what happened to you, or to a house where there is no one you can tell.

None of that is in the state, yet all of these factors influence what the state does to you.

And yes, it’s true that a device can loosen the ordinary self and it can quiet the machinery that keeps a person locked inside their usual story. But it cannot be a person sitting with you at two in the morning three weeks later, when what you saw comes back up and you do not know what to do with it. It cannot notice that you are lying when you say you are fine. It cannot be a community that knew you before and will still know you after. The opening is not the healing. The opening is the opening.

Where technodelics might genuinely be useful

I do not want this to land as dismissal, because I think these tools may do real things.

What is great about this is that we are curious to be more accessible than a ceremony or a clinical trial. This does carry lower risk. Also, these types of things can matter enormously to people who are frightened of getting on a ride they cannot get off. Someone who would never take a psychedelic might use one of these to find out what a non-ordinary state even feels like, and that can be beneficial. If they turn out to reliably ease anxiety or lift depression, that may be worth it. I hope the research explores all of this not as a shortcut to transformation, but as one more way to open a door, with all the same questions still waiting.

The danger of experience on demand

There is a version of this that worries me, though: whenever the appeal of a device is that it promises the experience without the inconvenience. This means there is no tradition to be accountable to, no community to belong to, no facilitator who might tell you no, and no long weeks afterward when nothing seems to be happening. In other words, it is just a state, on demand, and on your schedule. If that sounds like an improvement, it is worth asking what all the “inconveniences” outside of this were doing for healing. In my experience, they were doing most of the work.

We keep asking the same kind of questions: what is the active ingredient, which compounds, which doses, which frequencies, which protocols. They are good questions, and have produced real knowledge. But these questions do crowd out other questions: ones the traditions that have done this work for centuries never stopped asking. For example, who is with you while you are in it, what is on the other side, and whether anyone is there waiting for you.

The relationship may be the medicine

We can build a machine that produces these states; however, I do not think we can build one that produces the relationship. And as far as I can tell, that is where most of the healing has been the whole time.