Anil Seth

speaker

1,118 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 28 Jul

Anil Seth’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Know Thyself · E205 - Anil Seth: Your Perception of Reality & Self Is a Hallucination · 28 Jul 2026 podcast

So back to psychedelics.

Yeah, the way I think of it is not that psychedelics sort of widens the filter and gives us deeper access to the nature of reality.

It can do that a little indirectly by, for instance, stripping away some of the assumptions we might have about how experience has to be.

Like if you can have an experience of ego dissolution and that can really make very clear that, ah, consciousness can unfold without...

this very explicit sense of personhood, of subjectivity within it.

But I don't think it sort of allows the objective universe to sort of sweep in and manifest itself directly.

I do prefer the other view, which is, yeah, from a materialist perspective, you mess around with the neurochemistry of the brain,

You can expect strange things to happen and you can study that.

I mean, this is a beautiful resource, a beautiful intervention for understanding consciousness because you can, in a controlled way, maybe not as controlled as you would like, but you inject a very small amount of some specific chemical.

We know what it does at the level of the brain's chemistry.

It might affect the serotonin receptors in these areas and so on.

And people's conscious experience reliably changes.

And so that gives us a tool for figuring out, okay, so how do we connect up the levels?

What's it doing more broadly across the networks of the brain?

And can we explain and understand the nature of the psychedelic experience in terms of these changes in the brain?

I guess that's my approach.

And we don't second guess it, you know.

Your dreams are more interesting than mine.

I'm usually running for a plane or something in my dreams.

Yeah, that's a very good question from Elizabeth.

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