Ego dissolution in psychedelic experience

Abstract

Abstract Users of psychedelic drugs often report that their sense of being a self or ‘I’ distinct from the rest of the world has diminished or altogether dissolved in a phenomenon known as ego dissolution (Nour et al., 2016). This is a case of transient disintegration of the self model caused by actions of serotonin 5HT2A agonists. Psychedelic experience provides a window on the nature of self representation and a chance to evaluate different accounts. On one account, the self is modelled in the same way as perceived objects—as an entity to which sensory features are bound. However, self modelling does not use the feature binding solution. This is because of differences between interoception and perception that make feature binding unsuitable as a strategy for interoceptive regulation. Ultimately, dissolution is best thought of not as the unbinding of features, but as loss of a centre of interoceptive gravity.