A Topology of the Psilocybin Experience Reveals Cognitive-Emotional Drivers, Unitive State Divergence, and Psychometric Feature Cancellation
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: Background: Traditional psychometrics collapse rich psychedelic experiences into aggregate composite scores, masking the structural dynamics that drive therapeutic outcomes.Methods: An unsupervised Natural Language Processing framework mapped a substance-specific corpus of psilocybin narrative reports (n = 5,498; ~5.19M tokens) into a continuous seven-dimensional thematic state space, using semantic embeddings and cluster-level differential TF-IDF feature extraction. Spatial topology metrics, multivariable logistic regression, and substructure analyses characterized its organization, dynamics, and functional roles.Results: The resulting topology revealed four functional roles across the continuous state space: modulators (e.g., visual patterns, environment, body-object features), a threshold marker (temporal distortion), a peak state (ego dissolution), and a distributed state (unity). Cognitive-emotional processing emerged as the dominant driver of transitions across this topology, promoting internally-oriented states while suppressing environmental tracking. Within unity, this topology resolves into two mutually inhibitory pathways: internal cognitive-temporal transcendence and external somatosensory-environmental merging. Because legacy composite scales like the MEQ30 sum across these opposing channels, feature cancellation masks divergent phenomenological trajectories behind identical composite scores.Conclusions: Psilocybin phenomenology organizes into a structured, cognitive-emotionally anchored topology rather than unconstrained variation. Resolving unity into opposing pathways exposes a mechanism of feature cancellation in legacy aggregate psychometrics, whereas the global state-space architecture aligns with neuroimaging evidence of network reorganization and provides a quantitative framework for optimizing dose, set-and-setting, and targeted clinical protocols.
Source: PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints)
Authors: Amir Padovitz, Glenn Hartelius
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225348023