Bryan Johnson describes how psychedelics expanded his internal map of human experience, giving him concrete understanding of emotions like love and heartbreak. He argues humanity needs to shift from fear of the unknown to curiosity for species survival. Both Johnson and Asprey see psychedelics as tools to expand consciousness and foster the curiosity required for human progress.
When I did psychedelics, what it did for me is it populated my map of what I could be excited for. So I know what the feeling is to fall in love. I know what it's like to feel heartbreak. I know what it's like to have children. I know what it's like to, you know, and like all the things we experience in our society. What I didn't have as part of my conscious map was what is my brain? What is my. My brain capable of for conscious existence? And psychedelics changed my understanding of reality. Not that any reality is better than the other reality. It's just like, what is my. What is the raw capacity of my brain to experience consciousness? And so it gave me a data point in the map that I did not expect. It changed my perception entirely of what I'm capable of. And to me, that was the moment where I thought, we can Babe Ruth this moment, we can jfk this moment we can say we are capable of existence that so far outstrips our imagination, we can't even comprehend it. And that the key thing for us as a species is to learn how to step into the unknown and be excited about that which we can't see, point at, or touch. And it's so counterintuitive because we as a species have evolved to do that kind of thing. But I think our survival depends upon it. And to me, psychedelics are a helper in that regard, where they do help us collectively say, what can our shared ambitions be?
Yeah, they can help turn on curiosity instead of fear. And if you're going to face the unknown, since you don't know what it is, you don't know whether you should be afraid yet. Our default settings as life forms is be afraid because it might kill you. But the most functional settings as an entire species is be curious because it might be useful. So you've done some really cool, I'll say, cognitive hacks and some methodological hacks to make sure that you're doing that even with your own health, which is dealing with mortality and death. It's the flip side of health, right?
