Abstract: Over the past decade, psychedelics research has returned to the forefront of psychiatry and neuroscience in the US and the UK. Researchers at Imperial College London speak of a “psychedelic renaissance” which will revolutionise our understanding of the brain, diagnostic categories, and psychiatric practice. They claim to have located the basis of mental illness in the disorders of a brain system called the Default Mode Network (DMN). This paper undertakes a material-semiotic analysis of the DMN, combining an analysis of the foundational papers of the Imperial College Lab with narratives of substance users in the psychedelic underground in New York City and London. It shows that the contemporary rise of psychedelic science depends on the circulation of mystical notions of "ego-dissolution" and conceptions of debt in material, moral and epistemic registers, binding psychiatric survivors, researchers, substance users and venture capital into novel regimes of “plasticity." It concludes with an account of novel “neuroecosocial” innovations in biomedicine which leverage psychedelics to mount an ecological critique of the brain sciences, psychiatry and ‘neoliberal’ selfhood.

Bio: Sujit Thomas is an anthropologist of science, technology and medicine with expertise in Europe, North America and India. His work examines the history and anthropology of the mind, cultures of the self, and the “psy-sciences” (psychiatry, psychoanalysis, psychology, neuroscience). Sujit earned his PhD from the Department of Anthropology at New York University, where he subsequently taught, as well as in the Department of Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement. He is currently Visiting Faculty at Ashoka University, a Visiting Scholar at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA and leads the Thanatology Project at the Psychedelic Humanities Lab at the New School for Social Research. His book project, The Open Brain, is an ethnography of American and European neuroscientists, psychiatrists, substance-users and "brain-hackers" who have turned to psychedelic drugs and cybernetic devices to treat mental disorders over the past decade.