Endogenous psychedelic speculations

According to psychologist David Yaden, psychopharmacology, brain stimulation technology and virtual reality are set to significantly impact positive technology (the scientific study of well-being) over the next decade or so. Could these technologies affect the brain to induce new types of psychedelic experiences?

Virtual reality

Virtual reality is a promising tool to hack the brain’s predictive processing. For example, virtual reality is used in pain treatment by creating virtual environments that are calming and suggestive of (pain) relief. The brain could be increasing its precision about the virtual environment (to make sense of it) at the expense of decreasing its precision about other sensory information, including pain.

Virtual reality has already been coined as a ‘psychedelic technology’ since it can mimic bodily experiences similar to those experienced on a trip.

Brain stimulation

Non-invasive brain stimulation is already used to modulate people’s creativity and morality, and reward pathways could also be targeted. More invasive deep brain stimulation (where a lead is surgically implanted similar to a pacemaker) is already used to treat movement disorders and can successfully treat Parkinson's Disease where neuroimaging studies have shown specific changes to the Default Mode Network. Could the DMN be stimulated to affect the ego?

The pineal gland- what René Descartes called the ‘the seat of the soul’- converts serotonin into melatonin that activates sleep cycles. Serotonin and melatonin are structural analogues of DMT, and key enzymes for synthesising DMT have been found in the pineal gland (as well as the central nervous system, retina and other organs).

In DMT: the spirit molecule, psychiatrist Rick Strassman claimed that the pineal gland could release enough DMT during extremely stressful events, such as birth and death, to cause extraordinary transpersonal experiences. Studies that experimentally induced cardiac arrest in rats showed significantly elevated levels of DMT that could be related to the phenomenology of near-death experiences in humans; however, it was unclear whether the concentrations of DMT reported in this study can elicit the effects of an exogenous psychedelic dose of DMT. Perhaps brain implants could stimulate the pineal gland to produce a DMT trip to calm any existential fears during long voyages into outer space?