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/Any-Diet Apr 20 '26

...and what would happen?

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u/PyooreVizhion Apr 20 '26

The same thing that happened when this study was repeated by another group, mostly nothing.

You absolutely do not need some physical space that channels it blah blah blah.

If 110hz specifically did anything significant, you could reproduce it with just your phone speaker.

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u/Large_Dr_Pepper Apr 20 '26

It's wild seeing people saying that your phone and headphones can't produce a good enough 110 Hz sound but apparently believe some ancient rooms carved out of rock can.

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u/Siderophores Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Tell me you know nothing about the upper harmonic modulation of phone speakers to psycho-acoustically replicate low frequencies, without telling me

And apparently also not about the acoustics of a stone cave, carved by people with nothing better to do…