added a comment to the article :
REBUS and the Anarchic Brain : Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelicss
R. L. Carhart-Harris and K. J. Friston, Pharmacological Reviews, 2019, 71, 316–344
https://doi.org/10.1124/pr.118.017160
Prediction : ultimately you will find that the Salience Network has a far greater importance for understanding psychedelic experience than the DMN.
See:
Menon V. (2015) Salience Network. In: Arthur W. Toga, editor. Brain Mapping: An Encyclopedic Reference, vol. 2, p. 597. Academic Press: Elsevier.
In Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley writes,
[I was seeing] a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged… [And] the books, for example, with which my study walls were lined. Like the flowers, they glowed, when I looked at them, with brighter colours, a profounder significance.
Alan Watts writes in “The New Alchemy”:
“I have said that my general impression of the first experiment was that the “mechanism” by which we screen our sense-data and select only some of them as significant had been partially suspended. Consequently, I felt that the particular feeling which we associate with “the meaningful” was projected indiscriminately upon everything, and then rationalized in ways that might strike an independent observer as ridiculousunless, perhaps, the subject were unusually clever at rationalizing. However, the philosopher cannot pass up the point that our selection of some sense-data as significant and others as insignificant is always with relation to particular purposessurvival, the quest for certain pleasures, finding one’s way to some destination, or whatever it may be.”
And see Ido Hartogsohn : “The Meaning-Enhancing Properties of Psychedelics and Their Mediator Role in Psychedelic Therapy, Spirituality, and Creativity” Front. Neurosci., 06 March 2018 :
“In this paper I wish to argue for the importance of another often overlooked mediator of psychedelic action, which is fundamental to understanding the effects of psychedelics in therapy, creativity, and spirituality. I am referring to the remarkable tendency of these agents to enhance the perception of meaning, or, in other words, to cause things to appear dramatically more meaningful than they would otherwise seem to be.“
https://www.grecc.org/publications/ressources-documentaires/substances-psychedeliques-et-therapeutique/the-meaning-enhancing-properties-of-psychedelics-and-their-mediator-role-in-psychedelic-therapy-spirituality-and-creativity-ido-hartogsohn-2018/
My own view is of course that we are not considering a “mediator” of psychedelic action, but the essential effect of psychedelic action. The author goes on to cite the same passage as I have from Huxley’s Doors of Perception, and provides a few references in which authors have mentioned meaning-enhancing properties of psychedelics. Yet, “…it has so far not been the focus of any deliberate and sustained line of inquiry.” Let’s hope that changes.