Year: 2025
Type: preprint
Abstract: Although not well-understood, the notion that psychedelics promote insight problem-solving has been long recognized in cognitive science for decades.Emerging research in cognitive and computational neuroscience highlights that both states share an underlying neural basis for their perceptually rich and cognitively bizarre experiences, leading to moments of insight.Such results have also led to an overarching proposal that dreams might have evolved to assist with the brain's ability to generalize and overcome overfitting.These findings converge with key cognitive science frameworksrelevance realization (RR) and predictive processing (PP)yet discourse on their integration remains limited.This paper examines the extent to which psychedelics may serve as a facilitator of the RR and PP frameworks, using its effects on insight, the overfitted brain hypothesis, and REBUS model as apparatuses for exploring this view.It argues that psychedelics offer a profound and novel avenue for investigating the foundations of cognition.
Author: Darin Lei
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W4409402810