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A New Theory Tries to Explain Why Psychedelics Make Everything Feel Connected

Estonian researchers proposed a unifying mechanism for how serotonergic psychedelics work at the cellular level: 5-HT2A agonism on the apical dendrites of layer V pyramidal neurons — a specific class of cortical cells — loosens the usual boundaries around a thought or perception, letting it bleed into surrounding context more than it normally would. They're calling it "apical hypercontextualization," and the pitch is that it could explain the felt sense of interconnectedness that shows up across different psychedelics. Worth being clear about what this actually is: a theoretical framework built to organize existing findings, not a new experiment with its own data. It's a hypothesis for the field to test, not a result.

Read at Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews