Ego Dissolution The Three Brain Pathways
If you look across human history, you find these incredible stories of, well, self-transcendence.
Ego Dissolution The Three Brain Pathways
Language: en | Source: Ego_Dissolution_The_Three_Brain_Pathways.m4a
If you look across human history, you find these incredible stories of, well, self-transcendence.
We’re talking about those peak experiences, you know, ego dissolution, that feeling of
absolute unity with everything, mystical states.
Right. And what’s so fascinating is you find them popping up in completely different practices.
Totally unrelated, it seems. You have a high-dose psychedelic journey on one hand,
a decade of silent meditation on the other, or an intense shamanic drumming ritual.
It’s this amazing convergence of human experience. And now,
modern brain imaging is actually starting to confirm it.
That’s our mission for this deep dive, isn’t it? To map that convergence.
Exactly. We’re looking for the common destination, neurologically speaking,
even when the routes to get there seem completely different, sometimes even opposite.
So we’re going to get into the neurological pathways behind psychedelics, meditation,
and shamanic journeying.
And we’re going to target the one brain structure that’s responsible for that
constant, rigid, narrative self that’s running your life.
And this is the core puzzle we really need to unpack for you.
All three of these paths lead to the same subjective feeling of losing the self, but,
and this is the key, two of them do it by shutting the brain’s ego center down.
Right.
While the third, paradoxically, seems to achieve the same thing by turning it up to 11.
That is the ultimate.
Paradox.
OK, so to get there, we first have to establish what we’re talking about, the default mode network.
When we say the neurological seat of I, what is the DMN?
Why is it so powerful?
OK, so think of the default mode network or DMN not as a single spot, but more like a heavily wired superhighway in your brain.
A whole network.
A whole constellation of regions, really, that fire up when you stop focusing on the outside world.
It is, for all intents and purposes, the neural substrate.
For your narrative self.
So this is the system that’s doing all the worrying, the mind-wandering.
Yes, the past reflection, the future planning, all that internal chatter that gives you this feeling of being a continuous, separate person.
And it’s just always running in the background, isn’t it?
It feels like the high background CPU usage of our own operating system.
That’s a perfect analogy.
Yeah.
And within that network, there are a few really critical hubs.
The main one, what some researchers call the crown jewel of the DMN, is the posterior cingulate cortex.
Or PCC.
OK, the PCC.
The PCC is ground zero for self-reflection, for processing your emotions, for pulling up autobiographical memories.
It’s constantly working to stitch together that coherent story of me.
And based on the research you shared, that is an incredibly demanding job for the brain.
It is physically demanding.
At baseline, when you’re just sitting there not doing much, your posterior cingulate cortex consumes 20% more metabolic energy than most other brain structures.
Wow.
Think about that.
There’s a constant measurable.
physiological cost just to keep that rigid self-narrative running day in and day out.
That’s the actual cost of maintaining I.
And what’s the other major player in this network?
That would be the medial prefrontal cortex, the MPFC.
This part specializes in integrating your personal memories across time.
It orders the past, present, and future into one single coherent story.
And this whole DMN structure, it develops as we grow up, right?
It gets more and more rigid.
It gets very rigid, very entrenched.
Right.
And it’s pretty much locked in by adolescence.
And that rigidity seems to come at a cost.
We’ve mentioned that statistic before, that something like 98% of us are considered creative geniuses at birth.
And it drops to just 2% by the time we’re adults.
Is it possible that the increasing rigidity of this DMN structure is what tracks alongside that loss of creative fluidity?
That’s exactly the hypothesis.
Right.
I mean, to form a stable ego, to become a functional adult, the brain has to create these constrained pathways.
But the price of that stability.
It seems to be a decrease in cognitive and emotional flexibility.
So the big question becomes, how do we temporarily disrupt that super efficient but super rigid highway?
Which brings us to the first and maybe the most explosive route.
The pharmacological rewrite.
How does this psychedelic pathway just temporarily dismantle this whole structure?
Right.
This is the acute path to ego dissolution.
So compounds like, say, psilocybin, they work by accessing a very specific molecular gateway.
They achieve incredibly high occupancy.
We’re talking over 50% in therapeutic doses of the serotonin 2A receptors.
And crucially, these 5-HT2A receptors aren’t just everywhere.
No, not at all.
They are highly, highly concentrated in precisely those DMN regions we just talked about.
The posterior cingulate cortex and the medial prefrontal cortex.
So it’s less like a general brain flood and more like a surgical strike right into the ego’s control room.
It’s unlocking a very specific door.
It is highly targeted.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And the immediate effect is a dramatic, profound decrease in the functional connectivity of the DMN.
Specifically, that link between the PCC and the MPFC gets quieted.
It just silences the normal self-talk.
Instantly.
And researchers call the result an entropic brain state where all the normal network boundaries dissolve
and you get this unprecedented communication across the whole brain.
And that neurological chaos translates directly to that subjective feeling of oceanic boundlessness, right?
The sense that the eye has just dissolved and merged.
The sense that the eye has just dissolved and merged.
The sense that the eye has just dissolved and merged.
Exactly.
Okay.
So that’s the acute state.
But what about the lasting change?
The neuroplasticity that allows for the therapeutic benefits to actually stick around.
Right.
That’s where it gets even more interesting.
We have to look beyond the immediate receptor action and look at the physical rewiring of the brain.
A really groundbreaking discovery in 2023 showed that these compounds bind directly to something called the TRKB receptor.
TRKB.
That’s the main receptor for BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor.
Theorical growth of the brain, as it’s often called.
Yep.
And what’s just stunning is that they found psychedelics bind to this TRKB receptor with an affinity up to a thousand times higher than traditional antidepressants.
A thousand times.
I mean, think about it like this.
If a traditional antidepressant is a key that kind of jiggles the lock to promote a little plasticity, these compounds are the master key.
They fit perfectly and just throw the door wide open.
This promotes massive neuroplasticity,
driving the formation of new dengue,
dendritic spines,
new connections.
And it starts within 24 hours.
So it’s not just a beautiful experience.
It’s physically restructuring the brain to be more flexible.
Which brings us to the predictive coding bottle, the cognitive framework that helps explain why this structural change is so healing, especially for things like depression.
It’s the how of the rewrite.
So in conditions like severe depression, the brain has these very specific, very negative self-beliefs.
I am a failure.
The world is unsafe.
And the DMN holds.
The brain holds those beliefs with incredibly high precision or confidence.
Exactly.
They become these deeply rutted roads in the mind.
You can’t steer out of them.
The ruts are just too deep.
Psychedelics then act to temporarily reduce the precision of those deeply held top down beliefs.
They turn that rutted road into a wide open field.
Creating a window of plasticity.
Yes.
A brief opportunity for what scientists call Bayesian belief updating, where the brain can actually consider and adopt new, healthier self models.
Because the old.
Rigid ones have been temporarily taken offline.
OK, so that’s the pharmacological route, an acute molecular flood to force the DMN offline, chemically reset the system and achieve ego dissolution.
But how do we get to the same place through just sheer disciplined effort?
That brings us to pathway to deep meditation.
This is the voluntary down regulation path.
So same goal DMN decrease, but achieved through a totally different mechanism, totally different.
It’s done through intentional.
Top down regulatory control, not chemistry.
How does that internal control look different from the acute rewrite in the brain scans?
It’s much slower, more deliberate.
So long term meditators, after years of practice, they show a trait level DMN down regulation.
But unlike the acute decoupling you see with psychedelics, meditators often show increased coupling between their default mode network and cognitive control regions like the anterior cingulate cortex.
Ah, so they aren’t smashing the ego.
They’re building a wise manager to supervise the ego.
That’s a great way to put it.
Yeah.
They’re training the network to be less chatty, less self-obsessed, and more of an observant witness.
Witness consciousness.
Yes.
They haven’t destroyed the seat of the self.
They’ve fundamentally changed its function.
It’s a controlled gradual quieting.
But this is where the convergence paradox just hits its absolute peak.
If the shared neurological goal for these profound states is DMN decrease, how does pathway three shamanic journeying get to the exact same mystical state?
Let’s get to the paradox.
Shamanic journeying, often induced by rhythmic drumming, right?
It results in these identical reports of ego dissolution and unity.
But the neuroimaging is baffling.
It shows a surprising increase in DMN activity.
Why?
This is truly where the neuroscience and the ancient wisdom traditions just merge.
That DMN, as we said, is the internal narrative creator.
When you’re exposed to that constant rhythmic auditory input, especially in a dark intentional setting,
you are perceived as a person who is not a person.
You are perceptually decoupling from the outside world.
Your brain stops focusing on external input and it turns completely inward.
It’s a forced internal reflection.
Precisely.
The DMN activity goes way up because the brain is generating a massive amount of internal imagery, memories, self-referential content.
But, and here’s the current thinking, the increase is so intense, so rapid, and so fragmented by that rhythmic drive that the coherent narrative of the self just collapses.
It’s overwhelmed.
It’s overwhelmed.
The network is running at such criticality that the system, overwhelmed by its own internal noise, dissolves the boundaries between self and not-self.
And you get the same profound feeling of unity, but you achieve it through overload rather than shut down.
So the brain has multiple, sometimes completely contradictory routes to get to the same place.
The therapeutic suspension of the rigid self.
You can chemically overpower the network.
You can patiently regulate it into quietude.
Or you can paradoxically overload it until its coherence just breaks down.
What’s so fascinating is this.
This confirms what the wisdom traditions have been saying for millennia.
They all describe the same destination.
The dissolution of boundaries, the sense of unity, even if their technologies were completely different.
So given that this experience is the common denominator, what’s the actual clinical relevance for healing?
I mean, if all these paths lead to suspending the ego, what’s the hard evidence that this loss of self is actually good for your mental health?
Oh, the evidence is remarkably compelling.
Yeah.
And it all points to the depth of the ego.
And it all points to the depth of the ego.
And it all points to the depth of the ego.
And it all points to the depth of the ego.
And it all points to the depth of the ego.
And it all points to the depth of the ego.
And it all points to the depth of the ego.
Right.
Take the Johns Hopkins major depression study from 2020.
They used psilocybin.
The patients saw this massive drop in their depression scores.
And not just a small drop.
Their mean scores on the GR-DIAMD scale, which measures depression severity, went from the severe range all the way down to the non-depressed range in just one week.
The effect size, which is a statistical measure known as Cohen’s d, was 2.5 to 2.6.
To put that in perspective, the researchers described.
That as being about four times larger than what clinical trials have shown for traditional antidepressants.
Four times larger.
But here’s the critical insight.
The more profound the mystical experience, the deeper the ego dissolution, the better the long-term therapeutic outcome.
The experience is the medicine.
Okay.
But we have to address the critical safety distinction here.
This is so important.
If losing the self is so therapeutic, why do we associate the word dissociation with trauma?
We have to be really clear about the context needed for this kind of surrender.
This is where we need to bring in something like polyvagal theory to understand the body’s physiological state.
Because not all self dissolution is healing.
Right.
Therapeutic ego dissolution requires the nervous system to be in what’s called a ventral vagal state.
This is your state of safety of connection of social engagement.
When you feel held and safe, your defensive system, the rigid ego, is able to relax and let go.
The environment basically acts as a safety net.
Allowing.
Allowing you to make that jump.
Exactly.
The opposite of that is pathological dissociation that is linked to the dorsal vagal state.
This is our oldest, most primitive defense.
The playing dead or freeze response.
A total shutdown.
A total shutdown.
And if a powerful state of self dissolution happens without that crucial container of physiological safety, the nervous system interprets it as a life threat.
It could lead to fragmentation, isolation, even re-traumatization.
Which is why set and setting isn’t.
Just a nice to have.
It is biologically essential for creating that necessary vagal safety context.
So this journey through the three doors, the pharmacological, the attentional and the rhythmic, it all confirms that the brain’s ability to heal itself is fundamentally tied to its capacity to just temporarily shed that rigid, defensive narrative structure we call the self.
The DMN is the ego’s architecture and its temporary dissolution seems to be the key to profound insight.
And if we can just bring it back to that initial really staggering fact.
Mm hmm.
You’re asking us to consider the immense constant demand of just maintaining that structure, that the posterior cingulate cortex, the command center of the rigid self, is burning 20 percent more metabolic energy than baseline just to keep the story of past, present and future going.
A fifth of your resources all day, every day are dedicated just to maintaining I.
So we’ll leave you with this provocative thought.
If your brain could temporarily suspend that 20 percent metabolic tax, if you weren’t constantly spending massive amounts of energy.
Reinforcing your story and your defenses, what revolutionary learning, what profound insight or what deep seated healing could your brain achieve when it’s finally released from the tireless duty of maintaining I?