Ego dissolution in psychedelic experience
Anatomy of an Avatar September 19, 2024 Philip Gerrans
Psychedelic drugs can cause ego dissolution, a temporary loss of the sense of a distinct self. This phenomenon offers insight into how the brain models the self. One theory holds that the self is modeled like any perceived object, with sensory features bound together. However, the authors argue that self-modeling does not use feature binding because interoception (sensing the body's internal state) differs from perception in ways that make feature binding unsuitable for regulating internal states. Instead, ego dissolution is better understood as the loss of a center of interoceptive gravity, not the unbinding of features.