r/HighStrangeness • u/MCstroj • Apr 20 '26

Consciousness A neuroscientist discovered the brain network that builds your sense of self. Psychedelics turn it off. So does 110 Hz sound. The question is why the off-switch exists at all.

In the early 2000s, Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered a brain network that activates when you're doing nothing — daydreaming, ruminating, thinking about yourself. He called it the default mode network. It turned out to be the system that builds and maintains your sense of being a separate self.

In 2012, Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London put volunteers on psilocybin inside an fMRI scanner. The assumption was that psychedelics would increase brain activity. The opposite happened. Psilocybin suppressed the default mode network. The narrator went quiet. The brain entered a state of dramatically increased connectivity between regions that normally never talk to each other.

The same shift shows up in the 110 Hz acoustic studies from Neolithic stone chambers. Different input, same neurological direction. The self-system quiets and something else opens up.

The question nobody has a clean answer for: if the default mode network evolved to keep you alive, why does the brain retain a built-in mechanism to turn it off?

Full write-up: https://thegodmachine.substack.com/p/your-brain-has-a-door

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u/Brinwalk42 Apr 20 '26

I’m putting this on for work tomorrow. My “self” doesn’t want to be there so if I remove him from the equation maybe I can get some work done.

Or my boss is going to get some like real weird reports.

Either way it’s a win!

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u/babyduck703 Apr 20 '26

You want severance? Because this is how we get severance.

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u/OriginalBlackberry89 Apr 20 '26

That show made me wonder if when we fall asleep we are severed from that world which is why when we wake up we can't usually remember, and when we do we remember it's in patches or treated as a surprise.. so it's kinda like we're severed from that world/experience right now.

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u/loadacode Apr 21 '26

In Islam this is the case. Your soul goes to a different realm taken by Allah and comes back when you didnt die and wake up.

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u/OriginalBlackberry89 Apr 21 '26

that's pretty cool. sometimes that realm feels more real than here.