SSE 2026 Conference
Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris Thursday Keynote
Thursday Keynote by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris
How Psychedelics Work: Illuminating the Hidden Mind.
There's no agreed upon definition of "psychedelic" yet its etymology suggests that it is principally an adjective for describing altered states characterized by increased access to the mind's ordinarily hidden content. This talk offers a model for how this occurs, centered on the "entropic brain principle" (EBP)— that the entropy of spontaneous brain activity encodes the depth or richness of experiential content. It explains how the EBP relates to the impact of psychedelics on the mind-and-brain's basic predictive mode of operation, decreasing the influence of encoded assumptions, a phenomenon referred to as "Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics" or "REBUS". Finally, I'll discuss how both EBP and REBUS can shed light on the nature of mental illness as well as how psychedelics can be used to treat it.
Biography
Dr. Carhart-Harris obtained a PhD in Psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol in 2009 before moving to Imperial College London. There, Prof CH and colleagues completed multimodal human functional neuroimaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and DMT, and clinical trials of psilocybin therapy for various disorders, including trials in depression, anorexia and fibromyalgia syndrome. Dr CH founded the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London in April 2019 and set up the Carhart-Harris Lab at University of California San Francisco in 2023, where he moved in 2021, becoming the Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professorship in Neurology and Psychiatry at University of California. He spoke at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos in 2019, was listed among the top 31 medical scientists by The Times newspaper in 2020, TIME magazine’s ‘100 Next’ in 2021 and Vox Magazine’s ‘Future 50’ in 2023. His research program at UCSF focuses on the action of psychedelics and psychedelic-therapy. He has published widely, including in top-tier scientific and medical journals and will soon release his first book, entitled: How Psychedelics Work.