Psychedelic Neuroscientist: Your Brain Is Guessing At Reality | Dr. Chloe West - Ep. 314

06/09/2026

Next Level Human

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58:47

Dr. Chloe West is a neuroscientist who studies psychedelics. She explains being stuck like this: your brain guesses at the world and hands you the guess as if it were the world. When that guess gets rigid enough, no new evidence can get in and change it.

Your brain runs a prediction of reality and checks it against what comes in through your senses. Most of the time, what you experience is the prediction. Chloe walks through what happens when a prediction about yourself gets so locked down that nothing can touch it. That, in this model, is depression. It is also why you can read every book, do every protocol, and still not move.

Chloe grew up evangelical in the South and was taught she had to pick between science and religion. She went and got a PhD in neuroscience. When it came time to choose a dissertation, she chose psychedelics. She is early in her career, and the direction she wants to take her research is belief, particularly what happens to your beliefs about yourself. She also calls herself "a hard materialist most of the time," and says her skepticism comes and goes. That made the middle of this conversation a lot of fun.

We get into what the default mode network actually is, why your sense of self comes apart at higher doses, and why the further that dissolution goes the better the outcome tends to be. Then I asked her the thing I could not work out on my own. If the brain is getting MORE disorganized under a psychedelic, why do people come back describing the most vivid and connected experience of their lives? You would predict the opposite. That question is where the whole filter debate lives, and neither of us pretended to have it settled.

Then we told each other stories we cannot explain. Mine involved my grandmother, my sister, and a phone call. Hers involved a dream she asked for and did not get.

If you have done the healing work and still feel stuck in the same loop, the mechanism in this episode is the one to understand.

IN THIS EPISODE:
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Welcome And Guest Introduction