Neural Annealing: Directing Psychedelic Trips Towards Healing

I’ve gone through two big eras in my use of psychedelics.

In the first, I tried two dozen different psychedelics without much direction. It was like holding a magnet up to an old CRT TV and watching the image glitch and warp. Lots of substances, but not that much substance.

In the second era, I learned to direct my trips toward healing. Psychedelics became tools I wielded intentionally, and they dramatically improved my mental health, helping me with depression and trauma.

The shift happened over a brief period when two things coincided: I’d accumulate a lot of meditative insight and I discovered neural annealing — a model of how the mind updates itself. It’s hard to tease the impact of each apart, but in this post I’ll focus on neural annealing, as I wrote about meditation elsewhere.

Neural annealing

Neural annealing is a model by Mike Johnson from his article “Neural Annealing: Toward a Neural Theory of Everything”. I recommend reading the whole thing. Here I’ll just sketch the core idea.

Physics textbooks often depict metals as neat crystalline lattices — atoms locked into a configuration that represents a local energy minimum. The atoms are held in place by atomic forces — moving them elsewhere would require adding energy.

Real metals, especially ones that have been bent, hammered, or otherwise “cold-worked,” are messier. They accumulate defects and internal stresses. The atoms are still more or less locked in place, but the overall configuration is suboptimal and the crystalline structure is not regular.

To fix this you could let the atoms move more freely: add energy via heating the metal above its recrystallization temperature. The lattice loosens: atoms now shift allowing defects to “melt out”. The structure relaxes toward a less stressed, more regular state. Then you cool the metal down slowly, and the atoms freeze in their new more optimal positions. Not all imperfections get “ironed out”, but the lattice now resembles a more “textbook-like” state.

Another metaphor: packing a jar of nuts. You shake it vigorously at first, then more gently, and finally let it rest. Each round of shaking lets the nuts rearrange and settle into a denser, more tightly packed configuration. You add mechanical energy to let the system explore different configurations.

The mind as a belief lattice

Now imagine the mind as a huge, hierarchical lattice of beliefs. Everything you experience is mediated by this lattice.

Take a simple developmental example: object permanence. Very young babies don’t yet know that objects continue to exist when they can’t see them (which is why playing peekaboo is fun for them). But by the age of 18-24 months they internalise the belief that things keep existing when out of sight.

Object permanence is a high-level belief that constrains many downstream beliefs: if you place a pencil on a table, even when you turn away, some part of you still knows the pencil is there.

Not all beliefs are this straightforward.

Imagine a five-year-old who gets chased and bitten by a dog. Sometimes kids get over it quickly, but let’s look at the ones who don’t. The experience “freezes” into the lattice as trauma and becomes an irregularity. Additionally the kid’s mind acquires a belief “dogs are dangerous”, which is applied to every dog from chihuahua puppies to large pit bulls.

That high-level emotional belief constrains downstream feelings. Meeting any dog now evokes fear. Over time, the kid might carve out exceptions: “my friend’s dog is safe,” “my aunt’s dog is okay,” “my grandma’s dog is fine”. In a healthy, flexible psyche, enough of these exceptions would eventually nudge the top-level belief toward something like “most dogs are safe, but some can bite”.

But if the original traumatic memory is too frozen, that global update never happens. Instead you get a patchwork lattice: “dogs are dangerous” coexisting with a list of special cases that somehow don’t fully count.

Psychedelics as annealing

Fast-forward: that dog-bitten kid turns 18 (or whatever age you think is appropriate for psychedelics). They now want to get over their fear — it’s interfering with their life and they view it as irrational. They hear that psychedelics can help. They take LSD and then just stare at the wall, watching intricate geometric patterns melt and form. It’s a lot of fun, but the fear don’t change for them.

How do they increase their chances of resolving the fear during their next trip? Psychedelic drugs generate a lot of ”energy” — neuronal activity — in their mind, sort of raising the “neural temperature”. If this energy is directed at the part of the lattice containing the trauma, it might melt and the high-level belief “dogs are dangerous” might become more labile. The mind then has a chance to search for a configuration of beliefs that better fits the evidence: three friendly dogs plus one that bit. A more nuanced belief might emerge: “Dogs are usually harmless, but occasionally one might bite”.

Assuming this happens: when the trip ends their mind “cools down”, their new world-model stays flexible and keeps updating. The psychedelic did two things: it helped the grown-up kid see reality more accurately, and it left that new view flexible enough to keep refining itself.

Tips and skills to cultivate

A caveat

Psychedelics are both more healing and more dangerous than they’re usually portrayed. In a sense you’re getting “root access” to your own mind and gaining the ability to rewrite deep beliefs. This power doesn’t come from a substance alone — it relies on the general mechanism for updating beliefs. However, this mechanism sometimes goes wrong even without psychedelics, for example in psychosis.

Good epistemic habits help here. But as the already linked “Neural Annealing” article puts it: “In general it seems strongly preferable to err on the side of caution. You can always take that LSD tomorrow, or next week, or next year.”

How to

In this model a key aspect of psychedelic action is unlearning. You are deconstructing beliefs, de-weighting experiences and letting your mind search for a better configuration.

Psychedelics ramp up global uncertainty in the mind, subverting habitual patterns of looking at reality, so cultivate tolerance for uncertainty. The skill is to stay with it, without freaking out and without latching to the first new story that might explain what’s going on.

Uncertainty is your friend. Look at your inflexible beliefs and stored experiences — welcome them in your attention. Release often involves fully instantiating a stored experience or a chunk of beliefs in awareness so its tension can dissipate. The process is one of simplification, which can often feel like untying a knot — or peeling off leaves from a tree branch. Somatically, the body may shake — that’s normal.

Get familiar with a felt sense of what it’s like to hold a belief in attention — how it shows up in your body, emotions, and imagery. In particular, notice what it feels like when a belief becomes labile, and the different degrees of “disbelief.” Learn how to hold multiple contradictory or discordant beliefs in your awareness — let the learning machinery of your mind work out what’s going on with them.

Also, recognise when a belief drops out of the lattice completely. Don’t freak out: sometimes, in “hot” states, a belief becomes so labile it temporarily disappears. It can be disorienting, but it’s part of the search process.

Surrender to the search process. You are letting your inner parts renegotiate equilibrium: old coalitions of beliefs, fears, and desires dissolve and re-form in healthier alignments. This can feel like throwing stuff into the melting pot of uncertainty and steering it, but you don’t micromanage every update from the “top level” of your “self”. In fact, psychedelics can sometimes trigger a state known as “ego dissolution” — your entire self-concept melting off. It can be quite uncomfortable; there is a reason people call it “ego death”.

Very important — have fun. Annealing unpleasant experiences is an acquired taste, a bit like eating spicy food. Ultimately, annealing is about dissipating stored stress — and finding strategies for dissipating stress in the future. So, welcome stress. Think of this as “doing practice rounds” for the future. The “Yes, and I like it” mental motion is great here.

By default, annealing emotion-laden beliefs is best done with closed eyes, so that most of the energy is focused on those beliefs instead of on generating psychedelic visuals over your environment. However, if the experience gets too intense, reverse this tip: open your eyes to “lower the emotional annealing temperature”, watch visuals for a bit, and recenter yourself.

Is there such a thing as “overupdating”? I’ve only observed a single mind from the inside — my own. In my experience, some overupdating is inevitable. Over the next few days and weeks, the mind rolls back some updates and tweaks its emotional models.

If you are concerned with overupdating, it’s good to practice the same skills sober — with meditation and therapy techniques like Gendlin’s Focusing and Coherence Therapy. It’s also good to space your trips out in time and start with smaller doses: larger doses allow for bigger and wider updates, but smaller doses let you practise the skills in a more controlled fashion.

In conclusion

Annealing is a general mechanism of belief updating in the brain that you can leverage with psychedelics.

Done repeatedly, annealing makes the mind robust to stress, anti-fragile, and more “pleasant to inhabit”. You can’t change your past — but you can radically alter the way you look at it. If you decide to embark on the journey of rewriting your beliefs, build a good conceptual understanding of how belief updating works. I provide some links below.

May all beings anneal toward inner peace and greater coherence.

LESSWRONG
LW