Beauty and Immanence in Magic Mushroom Trip Reports

Abstract: Psychedelic experiences have been associated with aesthetic perception since the introduction of psychedelic drugs into Euro-American cultures. This association has also proven enduring, insofar as contemporary psychedelic experience reports often describe encounters with, and references to, phenomena of aesthetic significance. Since limited analyses have focused on the aesthetic objects or the referents of aesthetics reported in psychedelic experiences, this paper aims to explore this association by analyzing contemporary psychedelic mushroom experience reports in which people describe encountering or perceiving beautiful phenomena. By drawing on semi-structured interviews conducted in Miami, Florida, as well as trip reports from the online community forum Shroomery.org, this article demonstrates how beauty is often described as an immanent encounter. As opposed to experiences in which beauty is encountered through a state or experience of transcendence, the reports of beauty in psychedelic experiences discussed here express a beauty that is immanent to the experience, to nature, to another person, or to oneself. Drawing on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, this article develops two lines of argument regarding psychedelic experiences and the perception of beauty. First, that the encounters with beauty in psychedelic experience reports primarily occur on an embodied and affective level, rather than a propositional level through changes in one’s beliefs. Second, that psychedelic experiences may allow a person to temporarily approximate a state of immanence wherein they perceive or feel their relationality in new ways. 

Keywords: Aesthetics, Beauty, Immanence, Mushrooms, Psychedelics 

Since the ingression of psychedelic drugs into the cultures of the Global North, the subject of aesthetics has been discussed across several influential recollections of psychedelic experiences. Given that aesthetics is concerned with the nature of beauty, it is not uncommon to find descriptions of beauty in psychedelic experience reports, often in reference to either an assortment of phenomenological content or to describe the experience as a whole in retrospect. Despite the abundant references to beauty found in many accounts of psychedelic experiences, beauty often arises in a generic sense that lacks specificity. Explicit references to things that are beautiful appear more difficult to discern in psychedelic experience reports, and perhaps it is for this reason that the referents of beauty have not garnered much academic attention. 

This article begins to formulate some potential referents of beauty in analyzing psychedelic experience reports drawn from both semi-structured interviews and the online forum Shroomery.org. I begin by reviewing historically influential examples of aesthetic perception in psychedelic experiences, followed by drawing on anthropological research to introduce four aesthetic categories related to experiences of beauty—namely, beauty in the experience, in nature, in another person, and in the self.  In analyzing these aesthetic categories, I draw on the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze as a way of understanding these experiences of beauty as immanent and affective, signaling instances in which individuals are affected by these encounters with beauty in profoundly meaningful ways. 

Encounters with “the beautiful” appear in some of the early popular literature on psychedelics by English and American writers. While the precise referent of beauty is often fleeting and elusive across experience reports, these early and popularized accounts of psychedelic experiences provide an entryway into some initial aesthetic categories. Beginning with Gordon Wasson’s famed Life magazine article, he describes visions that “emerged from the center of [his] field of vision,” including landscapes and gardens of “ineffable beauty.”¹ Earlier on in his report, he describes a vision of a human figure, “a woman in primitive costume, standing and staring across the water, enigmatic, beautiful, like a sculpture except that she breathed and was wearing woven colored garments.”² In Aldous Huxley’s famous account of his mescaline experience in The Doors of Perception, refrains of beauty are expressed throughout the text, albeit often in generalized ways. The only instance where Huxley elaborates on perceiving something of beauty is in an illuminating passage where he describes becoming enthralled with flowers that appeared to be breathing slowly, which then evolved into a “repeated flow from beauty to heightened beauty, from deeper to ever deeper meaning. Words like “grace” and “transfiguration” came to my mind, and this, of course, was what, among other things, they stood for.”³  In turning to an interview with William S. Burroughs, we find an almost identical characterization of the experience provoked by mescaline: 

Colors and sounds gain an intense meaning and many insights carry over after the drug effects have worn off…the beauty of an object, ordinarily ignored, carr[ies] over so that one exposure to a powerful consciousness-expanding drug often conveys a permanent increase in the range of experience.⁴  

In Alan Watts’ ([1962]2013) The Joyous Cosmology, an expressive amalgamation of his experiences with several psychedelic drugs, beauty is only mentioned once in the text to refer to the images he selected for the book which include patterns found in nature, to “give some suggestion of the rhythmic beauty of detail which the drugs reveal in common things.”⁵  Finally, in Albert Hofmann’s LSD: My Problem Child, Hofmann describes a variety of encounters with beauty in reference to nature, where he writes:  

As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light. Was this something I had simply failed to notice before? Was I suddenly discovering the spring forest as it actually looked? It shone with the most beautiful radiance, speaking to the heart, as though it wanted to encompass me in its majesty. I was filled with an indescribable sensation of joy, oneness, and blissful security. I have no idea how long I stood there spellbound.⁶ 

In all of these accounts, at least two categories of aesthetic experience can be discerned: the first is in reference to the phenomenology of the experience itself, while the second refers to objects or phenomena in nature. Recall that Wasson describes seeing a beautiful woman in a primitive costume, perceived as an inner vision during his experience with mushrooms. Huxley encounters beauty when looking at three flowers: namely, “a large magenta and cream-colored carnation,” a “pale purple” iris blossom, and a “shell pink” Portugal rose with flaming hues. Watts refers to beauty in the patterns of nature, ordinarily taken for granted, and finally, Watts, Hofmann, and Burroughs all discuss beauty in nature and in ordinary objects, pointing to an intrinsic beauty inherent in mundane things that are not typically perceived with such profundity and meaning. These two categories, beauty in the experience itself and beauty in nature, provide a starting point that I expand on by incorporating anthropological research on psychedelic experiences with magic mushrooms.  

When I initially conducted my dissertation research between 2021 and 2022, I found that the term “beauty” recurred across many psychedelic mushroom experience reports; however, it was often in a very generalized sense about the experience as a whole.⁷ Returning to the experience reports I gathered,⁸ I discovered at least four aesthetic categories: 1) the experience itself is beautiful (either the phenomenology of the experience or the entire experience in retrospect); 2) beauty in the natural world; 3) beauty in another person; 4) beauty in the self. While these categories are broad and contestable,⁹ they nevertheless offer a helpful way of categorizing the referents of beauty in psychedelic experience reports.

Beauty in the Experience 

The first category of beauty, which also surfaced in the aforementioned literature, refers to instances in which individuals describe their entire psychedelic experience as beautiful. Accounts of this kind are common in the reports I analyzed, with people making statements such as, “It was beautiful, it was revealing, it was worthy of no words!” and, “The more I think about what I was shown and what I felt, the more I understand how beautiful and powerful the experience was.” I also discovered reports where people described an encounter within the experience itself as beautiful. In one rich and detailed account, a woman consumed a 2 g mushroom-infused tea at home and described a moment when she encountered an “inter-dimensional being with black skin that shimmered like glitter.” She wrote:  

[The entity] told me to calm down and I found myself talking back to the ‘being’. Had a moment of eternity and pretty much melted into the bathroom floor for the 10th time that night. The being was very calming and very beautiful and picked me up under my armpits and took me flying through the universe. 

In another report that provides a bit more detail, beauty in the experience was described as follows: 

When I randomly laid my head back to listen to my music and I closed my eyes, I immediately launched into the most wonderful experience of my life. I have the hardest time trying to describe it, but I know for a fact I was seeing sounds. The music made this shimmering fractal, color-changing procession of shapes inside my head. I swear I could see it through my eyelids as if my eyes were still open. I have never ever seen something so beautiful. 

Apart from the last excerpt, the category of beauty in relation to the experience itself tends to be used in a generalized sense in many psychedelic experience reports. Although this may signal an adjectival use of beauty, rather than statements on the nature of beauty itself, beauty is mobilized by individuals as a way of attempting to capture something profoundly meaningful; beauty as a way of approximating something that is ultimately ineffable. 

Beauty in Nature

The second category of beauty refers to instances in which beauty is used in reference to phenomena in the natural world. As with the first category, statements about beauty in relation to nature may also take generalized forms in psychedelic experience reports. One example of this can be seen in a report about a person’s first trip of 1.5 g of dried mushrooms, where they wrote, “I was looking outside, everything is just so beautiful.” In another trip report, an individual describes consuming 4.4 g of dried mushrooms, stating, “My friends left and I sat in my backyard for a few mins, enjoying nature. Everything was so beautiful, the trees, the birds, the insects.” While some specific referents are named here, such as trees, birds, and insects, there is not much detail beyond that.  

Moving on to a different trip by an individual who reported having consumed 10 g of fresh mushrooms, the user described an experience when he reached the peak of a mountain and was overlooking the surrounding environment:  

I would see the flower of life build upon itself in the dense patches of trees and watch Fibonacci’s sequence outline itself on objects that followed the pattern. I could not wrap my mind around the beauty of everything I was seeing around me, and could not stop myself from crying.  

The emotional intensity of beauty found in this account resonates with many other trip reports, insofar as encounters with beauty are sometimes followed by reports of awe, joy, or ecstasy. A similar account was also found in a trip report, in which someone reported consuming 1.7 g of dried mushrooms on New Year’s Eve in Big Sur. They wrote:  

While completely enjoying how the sand felt under my feet, my eyes then fixated on how incredibly beautiful the sun and clouds were. I hadn’t seen anything that beautiful before. The colors were all so vibrant and I could clearly see every beam of light that was coming from the sun. I felt that my vision had expanded on either side, and I was able to see my peripherals very vividly which gave my vision a panoramic effect. I was so euphoric I could barely contain myself.  

In reflecting on these reports of beauty in relation to nature, it may be that an encounter with beauty is intimately associated with, and potentially precedes, experiences of awe, which researchers have suggested may be an important precursor of a mystical experience.¹⁰ In fact, some users explicitly describe awe and beauty at the same time, as can be seen in another report I came across: “At that point the sun was setting and I was just in awe with it. Incredibly beautiful. It was [so] much fun just driving around with my bike. I felt happy, free and somehow complete.” 

A third aesthetic category is the perception of beauty in others, particularly in one's partner. The first example is based on a report written by someone who consumed 3.6 g of dried mushrooms while at home one evening. He writes: 

I looked at my wife in bed next to me, and I saw her hair looked like a wave of ocean flowing off of her head and out into space. Now, I believe my wife is the most beautiful and special creature in the entire universe (even sober) but the love and appreciation I felt for her in that moment was indescribable. Her body (she was wearing a blue/green shirt) transformed into a butterfly/caterpillar but her face was there (with hair flowing like waves of ocean). It was truly magnificent.  

In a second example, which again features a couple that consumed approximately 3 g of mushrooms each, one individual describes perceiving beauty in their partner in the following manner: “She had come in to her Self. She was resonating. She looked more beautiful to me than ever before, and though the absurd vividness has receded some, she still looks measurably enhanced from the experience.” In another report titled “Breakthrough Experience,” based on their trip with 5 g of dried mushrooms while at home with their partner, they wrote:  

Then I looked at her personally. She looked so beautiful, elven-like. Her white hair strains were exaggeratingly glowing bright silver. She had beautiful shiny mandalas and fractals around her whole face, shining silver, blue, purple and pink. And then I saw the inside of her. Her pure bright light that is of purest goodness. It was an extreme emotional moment, both of us crying out of sheer happiness and awe. 

Although each of the examples of beauty in another person included here is based on describing a newfound beauty in one’s partner, additional reports may possibly expand this category to people beyond a person’s significant other, and perhaps even to animals and other nonhuman beings.   

Beauty in the Self

The fourth category of aesthetic experiences relates to beauty found in the self. These may include experiences in which one finds something of beauty within oneself, or the experience reveals some beautiful aspect of oneself. The first example is drawn from my interview with a 41-year-old Lithuanian female living in Miami. When I asked her a question about the impact of psychedelics on her life, she told me:  

I think there’s like, big chapters of my life: before psilocybin, after psilocybin, and then life before bufo and life after bufo. So, these two monumental things, in this decade…timeframe, were a huge reset. And huge question mark, new question mark. I believe that number one is, it’s really looking at yourself, right? But, you’re given full permission to look at the ugliest parts of you and the most divine parts of you that in normal states our range is much more narrow, here, the tool is the beauty; [it’s] the beauty of the tool, it expands the range, I think that’s the biggest blessing it gives because in the wider range, now you see how complex, how beautiful, you know, how flawed you are. With that permission. Now you’re like, your self-appreciation and approval, and like, okay, like I’m a decent human being, actually I am lovable, and I am worthy. 

She uses “beautiful” not only to refer to the capacity of psychedelic substances like psilocybin for self-exploration and discovery, but also to refer to the beauty that was found residing within herself, in spite of any flaws and self-deprecating thoughts. Experiences like hers can also be found in online trip reports, such as the following case where an individual claimed, “In the 20-or-so psychedelic experiences I have had, on my journey of self-love and happiness, this has been one of the most beautiful and enlightening and I am so, so happy to be who I am.” 

In many ways, there appears to be a variation of themes related to self-growth, self-acceptance, self-discovery, and self-development in experiences of beauty within oneself. In another example where this individual reported dying and becoming one with everything in existence, they wrote: 

Then it hit me......Love....I felt the most intense love I have ever felt in my entire life...words cannot/will not describe. The closest thing I can say is that I became the emotion of love, the entire love of the universe, and it was so beautiful that tears were like rivers coming down my face, and each drop was filled with love.  It felt so good that I thanked the universe. 

Although more examples like these can be found, they suffice as starting points for categorizing the referents of beauty found in psychedelic mushroom experience reports. They provide some insight into how the subject of aesthetics relates to psychedelics on a phenomenological level, possibly helping to identify how certain individuals from Global North contexts encounter beauty in relation to different phenomena.  

In examining the four aesthetic categories outlined above, one feature they share is that people tended to describe perceiving beauty during their psychedelic experience in things usually deemed ordinary. In most reports, the experience of beauty is made in reference to something or someone regularly seen as part of the mundane world, but suddenly seen in a new light.  

However, it is not only that during these experiences the ordinary sometimes becomes extraordinary, but also that it tends to take on a newfound profundity theretofore never encountered or perceived. One way of making sense of what takes place in encounters with beautiful phenomena is that it is people’s beliefs that are being changed through these experiences. For example, a person changes their belief about their partner or about nature, based on experiencing them in a new and beautiful way.  

Indeed, leading neuroscientists discussing psychedelics and consciousness have proposed a Relaxed Beliefs Under the Effects of Psychedelics (REBUS) model, wherein it is suggested that psychedelics tend to render “high-level priors,” or beliefs, more malleable and less rigid, while also allowing for new beliefs to take hold.¹¹ According to the REBUS perspective, phenomenological changes stem from neurological changes provoked by classic psychedelic drugs, which promote neuroplasticity and introduce increased entropy in the brain. Following this line of thought, it may be that individuals can and do form new beliefs about the phenomena they perceive or encounter as beautiful during their psychedelic experiences. From a different vantage point, however, these experiences also work on an affective and embodied level that appears to precede changes in beliefs. It is not just about what a person thinks, but what they feel, which they later attempt to capture in words. Indeed, in many of the reports highlighted here, individuals are not only perceiving or feeling phenomena in new ways, but they are also being affected by them in ways they had never been before.  

The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze may lend some insight here, insofar as his metaphysics, with its commitment to immanence and recognition of the vital role of affect, offers a new way to understand phenomenological experiences. Across the evolving works of Deleuze, there is a neo-Spinozist metaphysical system at its foundation, which posits that reality is fundamentally comprised of one substance; however, this one substance produces pure difference across its infinite modes of expression and variation.¹² Accordingly, everything in reality occurs on a plane of immanence, also referred to as a plane of consistency or plane of Nature.¹³ As a field of dynamic forces, the plane of immanence incessantly generates all things, including what might be referred to as objects, subjects, and concepts, all of which themselves are immersed in a continual process of becoming. Instead of viewing things as objects and subjects, Deleuze sees phenomena as events or relational processes. Accordingly, individuals, bodies, and minds are understood as relational processes or events; a thing is defined by its relations and affective capacities, rather than by its function or form. As Deleuze says, “so an animal, a thing, is never separate from its relations with the world. The interior is only a selected exterior, and the exterior, a projected interior.”¹⁴ It follows then that a body, rather than be defined by its form, is better defined in terms of the “affects of which it is capable” – its “affective capacity.”¹⁵ Affects in turn function as intensities or pre-individual forces that operate on the plane of immanence, producing both material changes and incorporeal transformations as they flow through bodies. Insofar as affects affect a body’s capacity to affect and be affected by other bodies, they continually redefine relationships and processes of becoming that we recognize as things, objects, or people.  

Moreover, as Ian Buchanan has noted, although affect takes on different qualities across Deleuze’s works, one of the ways affect can be understood is as a certain “receptivity to the world,” where it “functions to motivate people towards a particular way of acting and feeling.”¹⁶ As such, affects may be experienced phenomenologically as an embodied feeling or a compulsion, which can potentially bring one into an awareness of their own process of becoming and incline one towards specific ways of thinking, believing, or being. 

In tying this metaphysical system back to the psychedelic experiences surveyed here, two insights can be gleaned: first, the psychedelic experience reports describe beauty as immanent to the experience, the self, another person, or nature; second, the concept of affect helps to explain how individuals encounter beauty in an embodied manner that is separate from, or at least prior to, the processes of belief formation.  

To the first point, insofar as individuals describe mundane phenomena as taking on a newfound character of beauty, it may be suggested that this beauty is immanent to the things themselves, as opposed to beauty being imbued from some external or transcendent source. It is not that someone’s psychedelic experience facilitates a conscious or physical state of transcendence through which something that is not beautiful is transformed into something beautiful, nor is it the case that preconceived notions of beauty are superimposed on one’s experience; rather, the experience brings one into an awareness of an immanent beauty that has always resided in the subject and allows them to experience this immanent beauty, perhaps in terms of what Terence McKenna once called “the felt presence of immediate experience.”  

This immanent encounter with beauty is related to my second point about the role of affect, in terms of how such psychedelic mushroom experiences produce changes at an embodied level rather than a propositional one. Recall that affects are always flowing through bodies, incessantly affecting change in the things we tend to perceive as stable or bounded. Since individuals often report becoming awe-struck or emotionally overwhelmed in the face of the immanent beauty they encounter during their experiences, it lends credence to the notion that they are being affected by these phenomena in a novel manner that is experienced as a feeling, or perhaps even a compulsion to act or think in a certain way. In a sense, what these reports demonstrate is that psychedelic mushroom experiences impact a person’s affective capacity, underscoring Peta Malins’ argument about Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) understanding of the drug-user’s body; namely, that “each drug assemblage enables different flows of desire and produces different bodily affects.”¹⁷ 

Whereas immanence for Deleuze refers to a metaphysical feature of reality that involves the generation of difference,¹⁸ immanence in psychedelic experience reports of beauty refers to an inherent beauty within the experience, in nature, in another, or in oneself. Granted that these may appear to be conflicting notions of immanence—one metaphysical and one ontological—they can be reconciled insofar as people tend to experience beauty by entering into, or temporarily approximating, an immanent state of being. Indeed, Deleuze also describes immanence as a life,¹⁹ suggesting that one can “install oneself” on the plane of immanence, which implies “a mode of living, a way of life,”²⁰ where one lives as free as possible from external and transcendent impositions on the nature of reality and experience. This imperative toward a kind of radical empiricism is what Deleuze means when he says, “Spinoza…teaches the philosopher how to become a nonphilosopher.”²¹ Immanence is described by Deleuze as an “indefinite life,” attuned not to significant moments in one’s life, but instead to the in “between-times, between-moments”.²² To live immanently is to live free of transcendent impositions on reality, since one “does not know beforehand what a body or a mind can do in a given encounter, a given arrangement, a given combination.”²³ Therefore, apart from impacting one’s affective capacities, psychedelics may temporarily facilitate transient states of immanence wherein the transcendent imposition of concepts is temporarily suspended. In experiences where people experience immanent beauty in the experience, nature, another person, or oneself, they may be suspending their transcendent conceptual conditioning and temporarily experience a mode of existence wherein they may perceive or feel their relationality in novel ways.  

If encounters with beautiful phenomena during psychedelic experiences are understood through the metaphysical frame of affective relational processes unfolding on a plane of immanence, it supports the notion that the intensity in feeling and meaning that tends to accompany these experiences of beauty is the result of changes in affects rather than beliefs. This is because the experience itself is primarily an experience of being affected by something that one is not typically affected by: the rays of sunlight, the depths found in oneself, the multidimensionality of a partner. Although new beliefs may certainly materialize from these experiences, their affective nature signals potentially new modes of being wherein one’s relations are redefined corporeally as opposed to propositionally. The implications of this line of thought cannot be understated, for the focus on affect has broad applicability not only in terms of how it might play a role in resolving conflict, but also in terms of transforming environmental subjectivity from an affective rather than a discursive standpoint. If someone can feel their connection to someone or something, rather than understand it rationally—as participants have told me about their experiences with nature after their psychedelic mushroom experiences—then I would argue that they are much more inclined to act in a manner that is in accordance with their feelings. What this inquiry into the aesthetic dimension of psychedelic mushroom experiences yields is not only a starting point on the aesthetic categories of psychedelic experiences, but also a window into how psychedelics operate as vectors of becoming through impacting one’s affective capacities and potentially bringing one into an immanent mode of being. 

¹ R. Gordon Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” Life, May 13, 1957, 102, 110.  [Return to Section]

² Wasson, “Seeking the Magic Mushroom,” 109. [Return to Section]

³ Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception (Harper Perennial Classics, 2004 [1954]), 18. [Return to Section]

⁴ Daniel Odier, The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs (Penguin Books, 1989 [1974]), 130. [Return to Section]

⁵ Alan Watts, The Joyous Cosmology: Adventures in the Chemistry of Consciousness (New World Library, 2013 [1962]), xxv. [Return to Section]

⁶ Albert Hofmann, LSD: My Problem Child (McGraw Hill, 1980), 10.  [Return to Section]

⁷ Joshua Falcon, “The Politics of the Self: Psychedelic Assemblages, Psilocybin, and Subjectivity in the Anthropocene” (PhD diss., Florida International University, 2022).  [Return to Section]

⁸ 100 of the experience reports were drawn from the community forum Shroomery.org, and another 30 interviews were conducted with individuals from South Florida. [Return to Section]

⁹ Such contestations could include what constitutes “the natural world,” the challenges of categorizing such a subjective experience as beauty, or the slipperiness of the boundaries between self and other during a psychedelic experience. [Return to Section]

¹⁰ Peter S. Hendricks, “Awe: a putative mechanism underlying the effects of classic psychedelic-assisted therapy,” International Review of Psychiatry 30, no. 4 (2018): 331-342. [Return to Section]

¹¹ Robin Carhart-Harris and K. J. Friston, “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics,” Pharmacological Reviews 71, no. 3 (2019): 316-344.  [Return to Section]

¹² Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy trans. Robert Hurley (City Lights, 1988), 122. [Return to Section]

¹³ Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 124. [Return to Section]

¹⁴ Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125.  [Return to Section]

¹⁵ Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 124. [Return to Section]

¹⁶ Ian Buchanan, “What is Affect,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies Camp and Conference keynote lecture, University of Belgrade, Serbia, July 10, 2023, 8:47-9:09; Donald Cross, Deleuze and the Problem of Affect (Edinburgh University Press, 2021). [Return to Section]

¹⁷ Peta Malins, “Machinic assemblages: Deleuze, Guattari, and an ethico-aesthetics of drug use,” Janus head 7, no. 1 (2004): 89. [Return to Section]

¹⁸ Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition trans. Paul Patton (Columbia University Press, 1994). [Return to Section]

¹⁹ Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life trans. Anne Boyman (Zone Books, 2001). [Return to Section]

²⁰ Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 122. [Return to Section]

²¹ Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 130. [Return to Section]

²² Deleuze, Pure Immanence, 29. [Return to Section]

²³ Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, 125. [Return to Section]

Buchanan, Ian. 2023. “What is Affect.” Lecture video. Filmed at #DGS2023. Posted by FMK  Beograd, January 11, 2024. YouTube video, [53:59].  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCzycV8Nfl8 

Carhart-Harris, Robin L. and K. J. Friston. 2019. “REBUS and the Anarchic Brain: Toward a  Unified Model of the Brain Action of Psychedelics.” Pharmacological Reviews 71 (3):  316–344. 

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