Psychedelics in an Age of Attention Fragmentation: Recalibration or Shattering of our Grip on the World?

Psychedelics, literally “mind-manifesting” substances, are a class of hallucinogens that typically bind to the serotonin 2A receptor in the brain, inducing altered states often characterised as an “expansion of consciousness.”. In Doors of Perception, the famous English philosopher Aldous Huxley (inspired by his self-experimentation with mescalin, a psychedelic found in cacti) described the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience like this: “Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system [in normal, sober consciousness] is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful (Huxley, 1954).” Psychedelics, in his view, “open the gates of consciousness” and flood it with all of this suppressed information.

Given this depiction, what is the effect of such substances in an era arguably not suffering from too little input, but rather from the opposite: informational overload? Hop on the metro, and you will likely witness dozens of people glued to their phones, bombarding their dopamine-hungry brains with a never-ending cycle of novel and shiny information. According to some estimates, roughly one in four people worldwide exhibit patterns of problematic smartphone use (Meng et al., 2022), characterised in part by compulsive, fragmented, and shallow attentional engagement with rapidly shifting, overabundant streams of information. What happens when you throw psychedelics into this mix? On the face of it, their influence should exacerbate the problem of maladaptive hypersalience. After all, just like smartphones, they seem to flood our system with enticing information that is, for the most part, “useless”, i.e., not relevant to our sustained goal pursuits. However, intuitively, there is a difference. What could that be?

Let’s unpack the picture that Huxley draws for us. The basic idea is that ordinary consciousness functions like a “reducing valve”. We don’t just perceive what’s out there (i.e., naive realism). Instead, our perceptual apparatus continually construes a single, canonical interpretation of reality from an inexhaustible influx of sensory and interoceptive information. To achieve such a coherent percept, some ways of construing reality must take precedence over others. Which ones? According to predictive coding, it is those with the smaller prediction errors given our prior beliefs. In effect, almost all information is filtered out, and only a tiny fraction is salient to us. Psychedelic states interfere with this mechanism by altering the dials in our internal salience hierarchy, dramatically distorting our perception. Everything and anything can become salient, as our priors become ever more loose. An ordinary leaf may turn into the most complex, intricate, and mesmerizing object in the world, and you can lose yourself in it for hours on end without getting bored. Now that sounds very different from doomscrolling, doesn’t it? It’s not compulsive novelty-seeking leading to numbness, but rather resensitisation to the inherent vastness of ordinary experience. 

Modern neuroscientific theories about our brain on psychedelics echo the picture drawn by Huxley: The REBUS model (RElaxed Beliefs Under pSychedelics), introduced by neuroscientists Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston, states that psychedelics loosen the brain’s “top-down” grip on reality, allowing for a more flexible and “bottom-up” flow of information (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019). Specifically, they propose that psychedelics act by disinhibiting specific units in the brain (deep-layer pyramidal neurons) that encode higher-level expectations, such that they become more sensitive to ascending prediction errors. This can account for the perceptual richness (diversity and vividness of experiences) and aberrant salience (trivial things feel meaningful) experienced under the influence. Think again of my tripping-on-a-leaf example. 

So then, what does science tell us about how psychedelics fare in an age of attention fragmentation? The scarce empirical literature suggests that the answer depends on two key differences that get lost if we treat psychedelics and digital overstimulation as the same kind of “too much.” First, they differ in where the excess comes from. Doomscrolling floods the mind with externally engineered novelty, whereas psychedelics primarily amplify internally generated activity (e.g., Herzog et al., 2023; Viol et al., 2016). Importantly, this amplification is context-dependent: brain dynamics seem to become more disordered in low-stimulation settings, but are constrained when attention is pulled outward by rich sensory input. In other words, the same pharmacological state can either facilitate inward reorganization or be dominated by external signals, depending on the informational environment. Second, they differ in cognitive flexibility. While constant media exposure appears to entrench rigid habits of shallow attentional engagement, psychedelics increase sensitivity to context, reopening a window in which beliefs and perceptual priors can be revised (Agnorelli et al., 2024). Where the attention economy narrows behavior into compulsive, reward-driven loops, psychedelics, contrariwise, relax high-level constraints on perception and cognition, increasing flexible engagement with incoming information. When paired with the right kind of clinical guidance and post-experience integration, the temporary loosening of priors can potentially even allow us to overcome rigid, maladaptive patterns like a compulsive habit to doomscroll.

Based on these differences, what is our final verdict on the question of whether psychedelics shatter or recalibrate our reality?

They do neither or both, depending on how we use them. If Huxley is right that the brain ordinarily functions as a “reducing valve,” filtering out the overwhelming surplus of reality we don’t need to pursue our goal, then psychedelics do not just open that valve; they remove the safeguards defining which information is allowed to get to us and which is kept out. 

In a sparse, intentional setting, this can feel like revelation: perception slows down, attention deepens, and what was previously filtered out can be meaningfully integrated. You come to appreciate the marvelous feat of evolution bringing about the complex and beautiful structure of a leaf, for example. 

But in an environment already saturated with incoherent signals competing for salience, the same mechanism risks becoming indiscriminate, turning openness into overload. If the attention economy trains us to skim, switch, and fragment, then a psychedelic experience embedded in that same ecology may simply intensify those tendencies. To use Huxley’s language, opening the floodgates of consciousness in a world already overflowing with information may just accelerate the drift towards disorientation. So if we want these substances to heal rather than destabilize, they must be embedded in practices of deep focus and deliberate meaning-making. Otherwise, the opened valve does not reveal a clearer reality cleansed of 21st-century media baggage. It simply leaves us, as we already are, hopelessly flooded with junk. This is where the etymology of “psychedelic” comes in handy: Psychedelics manifest what’s already in our minds.

Final words: If you do decide to go on a trip, maybe leave your phone at home and trust your inner compass for once. And, of course, don’t take drugs, kids… unless you are part of an EMA-approved trial, that is.