Andres Gomez-Emilsson: Mathematical Models That Predict DMT Trips
episodePreviously titled “The Mathematics That Predicts Your DMT Trip” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 3, 2026
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What is the new paradigm for modeling psychedelic perception that Andres introduces?
You were separated from the universe by these topological defects. I turned into just one point and then that point disappeared. There's no way to distinguish one thing from another, and there is no internal passage of time.
Today, Andreas Gomez Emilson of the Qualia Research Institute discloses his new paradigm for modeling psychedelic perception as well as what he thinks is actually occurring ontologically, not just perceptually, under psychedelics. His views are informed by research conducted over the past decade with hundreds of psychedelic trips in controlled settings ranging from LSD to psilocybin to DMT to 5MEO. We discussed the mathematical Underpinnings of perceptions behind psychedelic states, including, of course, the visual distortions and why we get that feeling of oneness, sometimes even nothingness and fractalness. We even cover those so-called beings encountered in DMT trips, such as the Mantis Being.
This was filmed at the MIT lab and was the last headline event put on by the Augmentation Lab Summit, hosted by MIT researcher Danya Baradari. I'm honored to have been invited. The sonnet featured talks on the future of biological and artificial intelligence, brain interfaces, and included speakers such as Stephen Wolfram, the interview of which is on this channel as well. Enjoy. This is Augmentation Lab Summit Weekend, put on by Augmentation Lab at MIT Media Lab. We're here live recording with an in-studio audience. Thank you all for
coming and waiting.
Okay. Andres? Hello. Hello. Why don't you give a brief introduction to who you are and why you're relevant to people who are psychonauts and psychedelics uh psychedelic research.
Definitely. So I'm Andres. Uh I uh currently run the other qualia research institute, one of the original co-founders. And uh yeah, we studied consciousness and I could really try to uh you know figure it out ideally from first principles, make mathematical models of it. try to like really take phenomenology seriously, uh build tools to visualize phenomenology and uh and also yeah, like figure out like what pleasure and pain uh are fundamentally and try to reduce suffering. It's there's kind of like a uh a constellation of things that we do. And um Yeah, essentially we're gonna it seems like have a conversation about uh exploring the state space of consciousness and visualizing it. I
want this to be valuable to people who have not taken psychedelics, to people who are extremely familiar with psychedelics. So something that gets thrown around is the word qualia. It's not quite clear what the difference between qualia and sensory input is.
So
what is
it? Yeah, I think that's a really important clarification because uh yeah, you could potentially like for hours talk with somebody about consciousness. And if your reference, you know, for for what qualia you know refers to versus what sensory uh you know stimulation refers to, like don't match. You're kind of like, you know, might talking past each other at a very, very deep level. Um Here is one like a like common misconception, uh I would argue, uh that kind of highlights this uh you know contrast in in uh in in how you might like uh define these these terms. Um I would argue that like, you know, the way in which you experience the color blue you can really separate it from like the frequency of light that typically triggers it.
Um, you know, in fact, there's an infinite number of ways in which you can actually experience that particular sensation uh by using like different you know uh combinations of frequencies of light, um having a different like spectral power distribution and still get the same the same way in which it feels like. of sensory input it is. You just know it is from a certain family of sensory inputs. More so, you know, there's like this very weird thing that like when you combine kind of like the colors that are it kind of at the extreme opposites of a rainbow, you get like magenta, you know, a color that is like not within within the spectrum. Right? So All of these are kind of like hints that suggest, well, the actual phenomenology, the way in which the colors feel like, can be perhaps like separated from the idea that they map onto like frequencies of light.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the new paradigm for modeling psychedelic perception that Andres introduces?
0:00–12:57
2
How does Andres explain the difference between qualia and sensory input?
12:57–24:03
3
What does the geometry of color tell us about shared versus private psychedelic experiences?
24:03–33:35
4
How do coupled oscillators and the GPU‑based “Photoshop for psychedelia” generate visual effects?
33:35–44:13
5
Why do DMT and 5‑MeO‑DMT produce opposite patterns of global synchrony and topological defects?
44:13–53:18
6
What is “psychedelic thermodynamics” and how does it relate to valence flips and time perception?
53:18–1:03:43
7
Can meditation, Reiki, or other energy practices be linked to the oscillatory models discussed?
1:03:43–1:15:00
8
How does QRI fund its research and what are the next steps for the visualization tool?
1:15:00–1:25:23
Speakers
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