The Start is in Nature: How Psychedelics Birth New Networks
Steven Kotler: The Psychedelic Detour
Notes by Natalie Ola
6 min read · 20.7.2025
The Start is in Nature
"Entirely on their own and without the influence of captivity or conditioning, wild animals, birds, and even insects… drug themselves. This deliberate seeking of inebriation among all classes of animals is a perfectly natural normative behavior. Indeed, the pursuit of inebriation has been proposed as a kind of fourth drive – akin to hunger, thirst, and sex – so ubiquitous is its manifestation."
–Gorgio Samorini
A really fundamental fact, which is —animals are hardwired to shift their consciousness.
Across the board, psychopharmacologists spent the past few decades cataloging the consciousness altering techniques of animals in the wild.
Fundamental Drive No. 4
Ronald K Siegel writes in Intoxication: “Drug-seeking and drug-taking are biologically normal behaviors. [...] The pursuit of intoxication with drugs is a primary motivational force in organisms.”
He is talking about our fundamental drives; the drive for food, water and sex— the very basic drives in the Maslow’s pyramid of needs. What Siegel is saying, there’s the 4th drive for intoxication which is as fundamental.
Depatterning
Since drugs are dangerous in terms they can easily mess you up, the question is why everything in nature still seeks it. Psychologist Edward de Bono first solved it. The answer is known as depatterning.
In nature, just like in human daily life, the animals can get stuck in rats—they will repeat the same actions over and over with diminishing returns. But interrupting behavior is not easy; these deep instinctive unconscious behaviors are really hard to get rid of, they are really hard to depattern.
It turns out that the use of mind-altering substances is a depatterning incident.
It increases creative decision-making, it increases innovation. The technical term for that would be lateral thinking, or thinking outside the box, divergent thinking—it’s problem-solving through indirect creative approaches.
It usually leads to intuitive leaps between ideas. They are hard to come by in the natural world for animals. So when they need to break the behavior because the old behavior is not working, one of the fastest ways to go from A to B is to deploy the mind-altering substance. It is survival of the trippiest.
Potent Tools for Healing & Performance
For the treatment of anxiety, for the treatment of trauma, and for the treatment of addiction, psychedelics show a tremendous amount of progress.
Interestingly, for the spirituality and high-performance side, we also see that these substances are really potent aids for personal development, for expanding perspective, for heightening creativity, and they show a ton of promise.
A List of Scientific Breakthroughs Emerges
Good Friday experiment, 1962: decreased fear, increased purpose, increased sense of spirituality, intense mystical experience.
1966 study on microdosing, done on 27 engineers—architects, mathematicians from Stanford and Hewlett-Packard—for creativity and cognitive performance in solving a highly technical problem: boost in creativity up to 200%.
1990’s: research done, results showing: psychedelic mushrooms seem to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder; Ibogaine as a heroin treatment drug; MDMA for PTSD.
1999: psilocybin for smoking and drinking addiction, and end-of-life anxiety / panic in dying patients.
2006: Good Friday redone, psilocybin and LSD for treatment of cluster headaches.
2011: study approved on MDMA for PTSD in victims of sexual abuse, childhood trauma, and soldiers.
Follow-up studies follow.
Overriding Neural Circuits
So, MDMA and LSD, and psilocybin, and Ibogaine, and other psychedelics are potent for treatment of depression and anxiety and addiction.
Why?
From study on DMT and LSD on rats and flies we can see an increase in the number of dendrites, their density and the number of synapses. These are all parts of a brain cell.
What it shows is that psychedelics can repair circuit damage in people with mood and anxiety disorders by overriding them.
Disintegrating Default Mode Network
The mass of studies currently going on is insane. My favorite work on this topic is being done at Robin Carhart-Harris’s lab in Imperial College in London—FMRI imaging of what your brain looks like on psychedelics. They did MDMA, psilocybin, LSD and DMT and the results are kind of staggering.
Carhart-Harris was initially studying psychoanalysis and particularly interested in the unconscious. So he turned to psychedelics as a better way to explore the unconscious, with the help of FMRI and psychedelics. He found all the transient hypofrontality aspects, etc., but he also found that psychedelics disintegrate the default mode network.
Neuroanatomy & Networks
Earlier we said that, if we want to really understand how things take place in the brain, two things we need to know are neuroanatomy and networks. We talked about neuroanatomy.
Networks are interconnections between different brain areas, and one of the most famous ones is the default mode network; it is responsible for mind-wandering and daydreaming.
That is why the brain uses a ton of energy, even at rest; the DMN is what’s going on, your brain is constantly mind wandering, constantly daydreaming. That’s the network that is always active when we are awake and not focused on a task. This is the source of a lot of mind chatter and a lot of unhappiness. Mind-wandering as a general rule is negative. Now, mind-wandering for creativity is fundamental and fantastic.
Like any network in the brain it is very very fragile, very very easy to turn off. We are going to see in a little bit that meditation turns it off, flow shuts down the DMN, psychedelics blow it to pieces. All you have to do is knock out a few knots in the network to knock it off-line.
So ego-disintegration is the result of psychedelically-altered states—ego is a network and psychedelics, flow, and meditation modify the connections inside that network.
Carhart-Harris writes, “They literally disintegrate the network.”
Birthing New Networks
The other thing that they figured out is that psychedelics birth new networks.
The scans of people on psychedelics show highly synchronized connections between really far-flung areas of the brain. If you look at a normal brain scan and DMN connections, it is going to look like 50-60-100 lines between different points around the brain.
If you look at your brain on psychedelics, it is a huge huge network map with thousands and thousands and thousands of connections and even kind of separating out different lines and different points one from another is really really difficult.
Literally, psychedelics destroy the networks that produce our sense of self, that produce all that internal negative inner chatter, and instead they build these really far-flung connections between far-flung regions in the brain.
References:
Steven Kotler. Mapping Cloud Nine: Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience. Audiobook. Session 4: The Psychedelic Detour
Ronald Siegel. Intoxication: The Universal Drive for Mind-Altering Substances.
Gorgio Samorini. Animals and Psychedelics: The Natural World and the Instinct to Alter Consciousness. Simon and Schuster.
Trey Brasher. Animals, Psychedelics, and the Innate Drive to Alter Consciousness. Unlimited Sciences.
