FLAME with Brad Hook
What Psychedelics Actually Do in the Brain, Explained by a Neuroscientist
Dr Chloe West studies how psychedelics change the way the brain processes information and updates its beliefs. Her own story starts at ten, when her family moved from Georgia's Bible Belt to Kawakawa in Northland — and atheism, evolution and ayahuasca arrived in the same disorienting year.
If perception is a controlled hallucination — the brain predicting the world and correcting as it goes — then Chloe's research asks what happens when those predictions loosen their grip. Her answer runs straight through FLAME territory: psychedelics raise neural entropy, softening the brain's certainty in its own models, like fresh snow on a sledding hill where PTSD, depression and addiction have carved deep, rigid grooves.
The conversation keeps returning to why beliefs absorbed in childhood are so hard to shift — Chloe knows first-hand, having crossed from the Bible Belt to Northland as a ten-year-old and met a wholly different story of the world. Her research points to a window of openness in the weeks after a psychedelic experience, when setting and support decide what actually takes hold. The experience, in other words, is only half the work.
Brad and Chloe also take the sober view: the real risks of a challenging trip, mystical states reached without substances — breathwork, meditation, flicker light — and the live question of whether psychedelic experiences helped shape the world's religions. A conversation about how minds change, for anyone curious about the machinery of their own beliefs.
In this episode
- Fresh snow on a sledding hill — how psychedelics let the mind carve paths beyond rigid grooves
- Perception as controlled hallucination: loosening predictions so old beliefs can update
- The window of openness after an experience — setting and support shape what takes hold
- Breathwork, meditation and flicker light can open similar states without substances
- Why beliefs absorbed in childhood hold on so hard
Connect with Dr
New conversations regularly — subscribe wherever you listen.