The DMN and Me
Science enters the cave.
The sun is setting as I weigh out 3.5 grams of mazatapec psilocybin mushrooms. The apartment is quiet and long shadows hang in the living room. Despite meditating, my mind is buzzing with anticipation. Tonight will be hard. I have taken enough high doses to respect the difficulty of the opening process. Christopher Bache discusses the initial pain of crossing the threshold in his book LSD and the Mind of the Universe: the sore teeth, deep body tremors and a sensation of being split apart like a fractal. In some sessions my hands start to spasm uncontrollably and contort in painful fists. Bache interprets this as the soul/inner conciousness shaking off psychic sludge picked up in waking life. The pain sometimes feels like a masseuse grinding their elbow into a knotted spiritual tendon. Silence fills the room. My subconscious will not release willingly tonight. I take a breath and look at the mushrooms resting in my hands. They are small and shrivelled with petite heads and long stalks. Their bases are stained a deep indigo blue where they were cut- a sign of the psilocybin within. The mazatapec strain has been kicking my ass with particularly confronting experiences. I take the mushrooms into my bedroom with my headphones and eye shades. I say a small prayer, light a candle, ingest the mushrooms and lay down with my eye shade and headphones in place. The first song on the Johns Hopkins psilocybin playlist begins and I take a deep breath. Time to go.
Psilocybin is a serotonin analoge that, when converted to psilocin in the body, plays on the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor. Studies have shown it to be massively disruptive to functional connectivity in the frontal and prefrontal cortex of the brain. These areas are effectively desynchronized for the duration of the trip. The Default Mode Network (DMN), a collection of synchronized sites connected to the hippocampus, is particularly affected. The DMN is named for its first observation as a collection of physically isolated parts of the brain that light up in the absence of engaging external stimuli. This strange ‘default mode’, in ways resembling an inner screensaver, is responsible for self-reference, social cognition, episodic memory, remembered experiences, language comprehension, semantic memory and mind wandering. The DMN acts as a coordinator between different siloed parts of the brain, funneling consciousness through its passageways to manifest our particular sense of self, space and time. When I close my eyes and let my thoughts drift, thoughts emerge of self, friendships with others, personal history and daydreams. I am experiencing at this moment my DMN lit up like a fishing boat at midnight. As psilocybin desynchronizes the DMN, the traveler experiences consciousness with a diminished self-descriptive lens. At high doses, the ego will dissolve completely.
The music drifts out before me as I lay on the bed. The darkness bends and blends and morphs into cavernous spaces. Time seems as if to stretch out. There is a familiarity here, one that I can never conjure when sober. Some dark vestige knows me and welcomes me deeper beyond the threshold of my mind. I drift. I was right, tonight is difficult. My mind thrums with discordant tensions. I am pulling out these tensions and cleaning them. The cleaning fucking hurts. Darkness pulls at all sides. There is so much here clinging to me. I whimper as my body flexes on the bed with pain. I am pulled by a current now, subject to forces that are massive and old. Time bleeds away and I am drifting in a disorienting eternity. I pull my mask off and sit up. The room is dark and the single candle burns alone in kaleidoscoping shapes. Colors are bleed into untold spectrums. I breathe deep. Fuck.
Not all sessions are this painful. In 2021 I ventured out alone to a small hill behind Pine Mountain in the high desert of Oregon. The landscape was desolate and empty except for the Pine Mountain Observatory a number of miles away behind an adjoining slope. Highway 20 was visible to the north, just a sliver in the expansive desert. The sun sat low in the sky now and long shadows cast much of the basin in shadow. I laid out my mat and placed the mushrooms before me. My intentions felt loose and incomplete now with the moment imminent. Find myself? Explore my mind? See god? Fuck. Maybe just openness. With that I ate the dry caps and sat back to enjoy the last of the light glancing over Paulina Peak to the south. Later that night I awoke from a reverie to conscious thought. I was exploring my clothing, wondering who had dressed me. The ghost of a memory confirmed that I used to have a name, but I couldn’t remember what it was. My throat was dry and painful and I wondered what horrible person brought me in a dry, desolate desert. The milky way stretched overhead and I gazed with profound newness- a soul without a name or a history or a story. More on that another time.
Back in my bedroom, the music has finally given me a reprieve from a particularly confronting discord. Russill Paul’s Om Namah Shivaaya comes on and a wave of euphoria sweeps over me. Something old and ageless gathers me up. I am suddenly quiet in the darkness, floating in a vast expanse. I am made anew- scrubbed clean and raw. My shirt is soaked. I look out cold eyed- strong. I survived. I drift for an eternity, then I wake up.
Now as I write this I look over academic publications on the psilocybin and the DMN. fMRIs provide detailed maps of unique brain activity. Deep into one of the articles, the researchers correlate fMRI data to a subject’s experiencing of transcendence of time or space while under study. I am struck by how inconsequential this data point reads, having personally experienced it.
Back in the room, a single candle still burns. Multi-colored fractals emanate from the flame and magnify against the wall. My mind is quiet and profoundly calm. I sit there for a long time.
