A Papyrus Containing Spells And Scenes From The Book Of The Dead, Created During The Ptolemaic Period

Feeling "one with nature" or feeling the self "dissolve" is triggered when psychedelics shift the patterns of connectivity in the brain. When study participants on LSD reported experiencing their sense of self dissolve (what researchers called "ego dissolution"), a remarkable thing happened to their fMRI scans: The regions of the brain responsible for higher cognition lit up, suddenly becoming heavily "over-connected" with other networks in the brain that do not normally communicate with one another. The degree of connectivity correlated with the degree to which the person on LSD told the researchers they were feeling the borders between themselves and the rest of the world blur or fall away completely. It's important to remember, said Tagliazucchi, that when you've taken LSD and experience your "self" or your ego disappearing, it's an illusion; it's what happens when the brain temporarily reorganizes itself to change our perception. In fact, the brain is doing this all the time—mostly to help make our world comprehensible. For example, the brain filters out the veins that cross in front of the retina of our eyes so we see a clear picture not distorted by the veins. "So when we take psychedelics, we are, it could be said, replacing one illusion [with] another illusion. This might be difficult to grasp, but our study shows that the sense of self or 'ego' could also be part of this illusion," he said.