Why psychedelics
turn us toward
the living world
A systems view of psychedelic experience, and what it suggests for healing people and the planet.
Many people come back feeling part of nature.
In clinical trials and large surveys, people describe the same kinds of experience again and again. Over the past decade, researchers have started to measure how these experiences affect people’s connection to nature.
There is actually no real separation between humanity and the natural world.
I could communicate with trees.
Harming nature would be like hurting myself.
Survey participants, Irvine et al., 2023
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The change can last.
Connection to nature (“nature-relatedness”) rose after psychedelic experiences and was still elevated two years later.
Kettner et al., 2019 -
Seen in clinical research too.
In a small study, patients given psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression came away feeling more connected to nature.
Lyons & Carhart-Harris, 2018 -
Self-transcendence is the link.
The link between psychedelic use and connection to nature ran through experiences of self-transcendence, not use alone.
Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2017 -
Natural settings may amplify it.
Natural settings appear to amplify the effect and prolong it.
Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2025
Read it for what it is: most of these studies are correlational and rely on self-report. What they can and cannot show →
Why nature?
Neuroscience can now describe much of what psychedelics do in the brain. It says far less about why so many people come away feeling closer to the living world.
How psychedelics loosen the brain’s most entrenched expectations, so experience turns fluid and the sense of a separate self softens.
Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019Why that loosening so often brings a sense that the world is alive, kinship with other beings, and a felt interdependence.
Read the research question
How might psychedelic experiences modulate organism-environment coupling in ways that contribute to ecological attunement, and which theoretical frameworks best account for this pattern without reducing it to purely neural description or invoking non-naturalistic explanations?
Belleau, The Psygaia Hypothesis: A Systems View of Psychedelics, §1.1
Those models still hold. They describe the experience at the level of the brain. The Psygaia Hypothesis adds the level of the whole organism in its environment, and stays with processes that research can study.
Three scales.
One coherent account.
Each scale reinforces the others, and together they make one claim: psychedelic experience is not localized in the brain, but distributed across the organism and the living systems it belongs to.
Earth as a self-organizing system.
At the macro scale, systems theory and Gaia theory frame Earth as a complex, self-regulating network maintained through distributed feedback processes across biological and geochemical domains. Human cognition is positioned not as an observer standing outside this system, but as one process embedded within it — shaped by, and shaping, the same regulatory dynamics that sustain life at planetary scale.
The hypothesis employs Gaia theory in its weak, cybernetic formulation (Lovelock & Margulis, 1974; Capra & Luisi, 2014): as an Earth-system model describing regulatory dynamics without invoking planetary consciousness or purpose. The disconnection crisis, within this framing, is a breakdown in a node's integration with the network processes that sustain it.
Mind as coupling of organism and environment.
The meso level is anchored in the enactive theory of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. Against representationalist models that locate cognition inside the brain, enactivism holds that cognition is the active bringing-forth of a meaningful world through embodied, sensorimotor interaction — not the passive reception of pre-given data. Psychedelic experience, from this vantage point, is therefore not a departure from reality at all.
Psychedelics loosen the ego-centered structures through which a world is enacted, reconfiguring how organism and environment couple. REBUS (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019) sits within this account. New imaging agrees: under psilocybin, brain activity aligned with its context, most strongly in those who felt continuous with their surroundings (Stoliker et al., 2026).
Psychedelics as semiotic modulators.
Biosemiotics holds that semiosis, the production and interpretation of meaningful signs, is not a uniquely human achievement but a foundational property of living systems. Cells respond to molecular cues; plants detect airborne compounds from stressed neighbours; mycorrhizal networks mediate chemical signals. Meaning arises through the receiver's interpretive response, not through content inherent in the molecule.
Psychedelic compounds function as biosemiotic modulators: they initiate a cascading reorganization of the organism's semiotic scaffolding. The habitual ego-centered self-world boundary loosens and the range of environmental features registering as meaningful signs expands. Here, the molecule is a key, not a message. The information that emerges belongs to the coupling itself.
A systems account
of psychedelic action.
The hypothesis names the synthesis of three scales — systems and Gaia theory at the macro level, enactive cognition at the meso, biosemiotics at the micro. Together they describe Earth as a self-organizing system, cognition as organism-environment coupling, and meaning as something organisms actively interpret rather than passively receive.
Their shared claim is a simple one: psychedelics reorganize how we make sense of the world — not by altering brain activity alone, but by shifting the relational processes through which meaning is co-constituted between organism and environment. As ego-centred perception loosens, a wider field of signals becomes salient, and identity moves from ego-centric to eco-centric — what Næss called the ecological self.
Boundary dissolution, a heightened sense of aliveness, insights into interdependence — these common phenomenological motifs become intelligible as moments when the relational systems that constitute the human organism grow vivid. What the language of “connection” or “unity” reaches for is not a metaphysical claim but a perceptual one — the relational processes that constitute the self, briefly brought into view. It is through these recurring structures that the account explains ecological attunement: a mode of embodied cognition in which the interdependence of living systems becomes perceptually and motivationally salient.
Most of us know we are part of nature. Few of us feel it.
Ecological breakdown, rising psychological distress, political polarisation and a loss of shared meaning are usually treated as separate emergencies. Increasingly they are read as one entangled pattern, the metacrisis, in which each breakdown amplifies the others (Everth, 2025).
Much has been written on how these crises connect. The thesis looks at a more basic problem: a weakened capacity to perceive our relationships with the living world. It calls this ecological disattunement. We can understand our dependence on nature perfectly well and still not feel it.
Its roots include a modern habit of treating nature as inert material, and a steady loss of everyday contact with it. This is why the hypothesis matters beyond individual healing. If psychedelic experiences can, under the right conditions, help people feel what they already know, they address something that facts and policy alone struggle to change.
- The metacrisis
- The entanglement and mutual amplification of ecological, social, economic, political and existential breakdowns. Everth, 2025
- Crisis of perception
- A mismatch between mechanistic worldviews and the relational patterns that sustain life. Capra, 1996
- Meaning crisis
- A widespread erosion of the shared frameworks through which industrial societies make sense of life. Vervaeke, 2019
- Extinction of experience
- Connection to nature declining across generations. Richardson, 2025
- Mother Earth-level determinants of health
- An Indigenous-led consensus that treats the rupture with Mother Earth as a cause of ill health. Redvers et al., 2022
Distinct accounts from different fields and knowledge systems. The thesis reads them as converging, not as a single cause.
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Ecology
Biodiversity loss at a rate consistent with a sixth mass extinction.
Ceballos et al., 2015; IPBES, 2019 -
Mind
Rising psychological distress worldwide.
Moitra et al., 2023 -
Politics
Deepening affective polarisation across countries.
Boxell et al., 2020 -
Economy
Widening inequality, with ecological costs kept off the books.
Piketty et al., 2022; Steffen et al., 2015
If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behaviour leading to its destruction will be experienced as self-destruction.
What the hypothesis does not claim.
The thesis is clear about what it can’t claim. These are its main limits, and they apply to everything on this page.
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Not a finished proof.
This is a conceptual synthesis. It organizes existing findings and generates hypotheses to test. It is not an empirical study, and it offers no definitive causal explanation.
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Not settled evidence.
Most studies linking psychedelics to connection with nature are correlational and rely on self-report. Participants usually know they received a psychedelic, and cultural stories about psychedelics and nature can shape what they report.
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Not automatic.
Psychedelics are directionally, but not deterministically, relational. Not every experience fosters connection, and some reinforce the worldview around them, including right-wing and transhumanist ones (Pace & Devenot, 2021). Set and setting shape where it goes.
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Not unique to psychedelics.
Contemplative and nature-based practices cultivate this kind of attunement too (Jordan & Hinds, 2016; Richter & Hunecke, 2022). Psychedelics are one path among several.
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Not the last word on what these experiences are.
The hypothesis reads unity and aliveness in naturalistic terms. That is an interpretive choice, not a denial of other accounts, and it must never be used to claim a scientific monopoly on truth. Indigenous traditions have mapped these relationships in their own terms for far longer, and this work does not replace them.
Questions the thesis leaves open.
The thesis marks these ideas as exploratory. They follow from the hypothesis, but none of them is established yet.
- Cognitive symbiosis
Is the relationship mutual?
Psychedelic compounds almost certainly evolved for reasons unrelated to people. But humans have long cultivated, protected and spread psychedelic plants and fungi, and those organisms in turn shift human cognition. The thesis asks whether this is a two-way relationship, one that needs no design or intent.
Margulis, 2001 - Ecological cognition
Is cognition partly ecological?
Bateson held that mind is found in whole ecosystems, not only in individual organisms, as networks of feedback rather than conscious agents. The thesis asks whether psychedelics make people more sensitive to that wider web, which everyday self-focused perception pushes into the background.
Bateson, 1972 - Setting
Does a natural setting change the outcome?
The thesis predicts that psychedelic experiences in nature strengthen ecological attunement more than clinical settings do. A fair test would compare them with time in nature alone, such as forest bathing, to separate the effect of the setting from the effect of the drug.
Li, 2022
If the experience is relational, the practice has to be too.
Most psychedelic care is built around the individual: a diagnosis, a protocol, fewer symptoms. Yet these experiences often involve other people and the living world, and practice needs to account for that.
- Ecological medicine
Health is relational.
Connectedness is among the most reliable predictors of healing in psychedelic research (Carhart-Harris et al., 2017). Ecological medicine takes that seriously: integration means repairing relationships across self, community, ecosystem and planet.
- Ethics of attention
What you attend to shapes what settles.
Psychedelics loosen entrenched patterns of perception for a while. What people keep paying attention to in the weeks after helps decide which new patterns take hold, so integration needs care about where attention goes.
- Convergent practices
Meditation, breathwork and place.
Meditation, breathwork and time in a particular place all change how we relate to our surroundings, from the inside. They partly overlap with psychedelic states without sharing a single mechanism.
- Relational traditions
Learn without taking.
Mazatec, Shipibo, Huichol and Amazonian mestizo traditions hold these medicines within reciprocity, place and community, where plants are approached as teachers (Estrada, 1981; Luna, 1986). They are living knowledge systems with their own authority, inseparable from Indigenous sovereignty, and not templates to copy.
- Meaning & narrative repair
New stories, held carefully.
Inherited stories no longer make sense of how interdependent we are. Psychedelics can loosen them and help new ones emerge. They can also produce grandiose beliefs, so integration has to tell real insight from elaboration.
- Ecological ethics
Beyond personal change.
A psychedelic industry run on market logic risks reproducing the disconnection it claims to treat. And feeling connected does not automatically become ethics: responsibility also means facing structural drivers of harm, from extractive economies and settler-colonial land relations to environmental injustice.
Integration then asks a wider question: what does this experience ask of me, as part of the larger community of life? Psychedelics can prompt that question. Answering it takes practice, culture and ethical commitment.
The thesis calls for community-based research into how psychedelic experiences relate to wellbeing, spirituality and connection to nature. Our anonymous survey asks about all three and takes about five minutes.
Who this work draws on.
Cognitive science, evolutionary biology, ecological philosophy, psychedelic research and Indigenous-led scholarship all shape the hypothesis.
Varela, Thompson & Rosch
Enactive Cognition
The Embodied Mind
Fritjof Capra
Systems Theory
The Web of Life
Lynn Margulis
Evolutionary Biology
Symbiogenesis
Gregory Bateson
Ecology of Mind
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Biosemiotics
Semiotic scaffolding
Robin Carhart-Harris
Psychedelic Neuroscience
REBUS model
John Vervaeke
Cognitive Science
The meaning crisis
David Abram
Ecological Philosophy
The Spell of the Sensuous
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Indigenous Science & Botany
Braiding Sweetgrass
Luis Eduardo Luna
Anthropology
Plant teachers
Nicole Redvers
Indigenous Planetary Health
Mother Earth-level determinants
Arne Næss
Deep Ecology
The ecological self
Theodore Roszak
Ecopsychology
The ecological unconscious
Bill Plotkin
Ecopsychology
Eco-awakening
Joanna Macy
Deep Ecology & Systems Thinking
The Work That Reconnects
Glen Albrecht
Environmental Philosophy
The Symbiocene
Theory that becomes practice.
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