How Psychedelics Modify Your Consciousness & Deeper Beliefs | Dr. Chloe West

Psychedelics can expand your consciousness in a way most people can’t imagine.

My guest is Dr. Chloe West, a PhD neuroscientist who's been researching psychedelics for nearly a decade and is now writing a book on psychedelics and religious trauma.

Dr. Chloe explains what happens in the brain during a trip, from increased entropy to disorganized activity in the default mode network. Her framing of the brain as clay, where plasticity softens it, and the trip itself guides how it gets reshaped, is one of the clearest explanations I've heard.

We get into the REBUS model and one finding that stopped me: the research doesn't actually show that psychedelics reliably turn atheists into believers, even though people will swear otherwise. Beliefs about the self, however, are another story.

Her personal story is where this conversation deepens. Chloe grew up in evangelical Christianity in the South, walked away from it in graduate school, and is now researching how psychedelics might offer something the deconstruction space has been missing: a tool for reconstruction.

She describes someone close to her who spent years praying out of fear, and after psychedelics only wanted to pray out of gratitude. That single shift, from fear to gratitude, is what many therapeutic outcomes seem to rest on.

You’ll learn:

[0:00] Introduction

[3:41] Psychedelics as the fastest method for rewiring rigid beliefs

[7:57] Defining consciousness, and whether psychedelics can really expand it

[17:30] Predictive processing turns your brain into a protection machine working against you

[23:08] Why integration matters and how set and setting predict a bad trip