Reduced Precision Underwrites Ego Dissolution and Therapeutic Outcomes Under Psychedelics

Devon Stoliker; Gary F Egan; Adeel Razi

doi:10.3389/fnins.2022.827400

Reduced Precision Underwrites Ego Dissolution and Therapeutic Outcomes Under Psychedelics

Front Neurosci. 2022 Mar 17:16:827400. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2022.827400. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Devon Stoliker¹, Gary F Egan^{1

2}, Adeel Razi^{1

2

3

4}

Affiliations

¹ Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
² Monash Biomedical Imaging, Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia.
³ Wellcome Centre for Human Neuroimaging, University College London (UCL), London, United Kingdom.
⁴ CIFAR Azrieli Global Scholars Programs, Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), Toronto, ON, Canada.

Abstract

Evidence suggests classic psychedelics reduce the precision of belief updating and enable access to a range of alternate hypotheses that underwrite how we make sense of the world. This process, in the higher cortices, has been postulated to explain the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelics for the treatment of internalizing disorders. We argue reduced precision also underpins change to consciousness, known as "ego dissolution," and that alterations to consciousness and attention under psychedelics have a common mechanism of reduced precision of Bayesian belief updating. Evidence, connecting the role of serotonergic receptors to large-scale connectivity changes in the cortex, suggests the precision of Bayesian belief updating may be a mechanism to modify and investigate consciousness and attention.

Keywords: belief updating; ego dissolution; hierarchical predictive coding; precision; psychedelics.