Bridging brain
and biosphere
A systems view of psychedelic experience, from molecule to planet, and what it suggests for healing people and the living world.
Many people come back feeling part of nature.
These words come from an online survey answered by people who chose to take part, so they show what the experience can be like, not how often it happens.
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.
In a survey that followed people over time, connection to nature (“nature-relatedness”) rose after a psychedelic experience and was still higher among those who answered again two years later.
Kettner et al., 2019 -
Seen in clinical research too.
In a small open-label trial, patients given psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression came away feeling more connected to nature.
Lyons & Carhart-Harris, 2018 -
It went with greener habits.
In a cross-sectional survey, lifetime psychedelic use went with greater connection to nature, and that connection went with more self-reported pro-environmental behaviour.
Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2017 -
Natural settings may amplify it.
Natural settings appear to amplify the rise in connection to nature and to prolong it. At festivals, surrounded by people, what rises is connection to other people (Forstmann et al., 2020), which fits the idea that the drug loosens and the setting shapes what comes forward.
Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2025; Kettner et al., 2019
Read it for what it is: most of these studies are correlational and rely on self-report. What they can and cannot show →
How much does setting matter?
Recent brain imaging shows the psychedelic experience following its context. The hypothesis adds a claim about which settings matter most.
Psychedelics loosen the brain’s most entrenched expectations, and the experience then organizes around whatever the person is engaged with.
The deeper the boundary dissolution, the more tightly brain activity follows its context (Stoliker et al., 2026). Those contexts were rest, meditation, music and film, all inside a laboratory.
Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019Whether a living setting shapes the experience differently from a clinic, and whether that difference lasts in how a person relates to the world afterwards.
No study has yet taken that measure into a forest.
Read the research question
Can psychedelic experience be understood as the reorganization of a cognitive system that is fundamentally ecological, rather than as an event confined to an isolated brain? Two further questions follow. How do psychedelics reorganize the coupling between a person and their surroundings, and under what conditions do ecological relations come to the foreground, in perception and in motivation? And under what cultural conditions do the changes that follow feed back into the ecological systems these compounds originate from? Whether such returns help those systems regulate themselves remains open, and is a target for future research.
Belleau, The Psygaia Hypothesis: Psychedelic Experience & Ecological Cognition, §1.1, in brief
The hypothesis adds two predictions. Brain activity should align with the setting most tightly where the setting holds the most life, so more in a forest than in a clinic. And the more tightly it aligned with the setting during the session, the more a person’s relationship to the world should have changed months later.
Three scales.
One coherent account.
Each scale adds something the others cannot, and together they carry two claims: one about what a psychedelic does to a mind, and a weaker one, that what follows can reach back to the plants and fungi the molecules come from.
Earth as a self-organizing system.
The world is an interconnected web, and each of us is a strand woven into it.
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 (Capra & Luisi, 2014; Lovelock & Margulis, 1974): 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.
A mind is made in the back-and-forth between a body and what is around it.
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 a stable, baseline reality.
Psychedelics loosen the ego-centred structures through which a world is enacted, reconfiguring how organism and environment couple. REBUS (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019) sits within this account. On this view, neural activity and lived experience co-emerge, each determining the other rather than forming a linear chain of cause and effect (Meling & Scheidegger, 2023).
Psychedelics as semiotic modulators.
A molecule means something only to a body that can read it as a sign.
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 have been reported to mediate chemical signals. Meaning arises through the receiver’s interpretive response, not through content inherent in the molecule.
Psychedelics can be understood as biosemiotic modulators: they initiate a cascading reorganization of the organism’s semiotic scaffolding. The habitual ego-centred 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.
Psyche was never
separate from Gaia.
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 simple: 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, the setting weighs more heavily on what is made of them, 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 reads psychedelic experience: as the reorganization of a cognitive system that is fundamentally ecological, 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 and rising psychological distress are usually treated as separate emergencies. Ecopsychology linked them decades ago (Roszak et al., 1995), and they are now increasingly read as one entangled pattern, the metacrisis, in which each breakdown amplifies the other (Everth, 2025).
Part of the crisis is a weakened capacity to perceive our relationships with the living world. We can understand our dependence on nature perfectly well and still not feel it, and what we only know about does little to change how we act.
That weakness has roots in industrial societies’ habit of treating nature as inert material and in a steady loss of everyday contact with it. Psychedelics leave the larger forces driving the crisis in place. If they help people feel what they already know, they may show the conditions, in a person and in a culture, under which ecological responsibility takes hold, conditions that policy and technology on their own struggle to create.
- 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 global consensus: Mother Earth is a living, sentient relative with inherent rights, and the rupture with her disrupts the determinants of health. Redvers et al., 2022
Distinct accounts from different fields and knowledge systems. The thesis reads them as pointing the same way, each from its own ground: a breakdown in how humans perceive and take part in the systems that sustain life.
If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behaviour leading to destruction of the world 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.
The hypothesis stands on three kinds of ground. That thinking happens between a body and its surroundings is a premise from enactive cognitive science. That psychedelics loosen what holds a person’s thinking in place is measured, so far only in laboratories and on limited evidence. That the loosening lets the living world come forward is the hypothesis, and it would be weakened if experience and later relations with nature proved indifferent to setting.
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Not settled evidence.
Most studies linking psychedelics to connection with nature are correlational, rest on self-report, and are hard to blind, since participants usually know what they took and what the culture says it does. Many also pool natural and synthetic compounds. That matters for the second claim, since a synthetic copy has no source species for effects to return to, and not for what happens in a mind. And the questionnaires fold what people feel, perceive and come to understand into one score (Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2025).
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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, a person’s mindset and surroundings, shape where an experience goes.
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Not unique to psychedelics.
Contemplative and nature-based practices have likewise been associated with greater connection to nature (Jordan & Hinds, 2016; Richter & Hunecke, 2022). Plenty of things already shape how we think, from caffeine to a familiar street; psychedelics differ in degree and in what they affect, from where the self ends to what stands out as significant.
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Not shown to change what people do.
The second claim’s least-tested step is what people actually do afterwards. So far the only measure is what they say they do, and the gap between environmental attitudes and action is well documented (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002). Whether any of this ever helps a living system regulate itself at a larger scale is a question the thesis leaves open.
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Not the last word on what these experiences are.
The hypothesis reads unity and aliveness in naturalistic terms. That is one reading among others, and many Indigenous traditions hold these relationships in their own terms. Its stance is an ethics of non-closure: it stays answerable to the lineages and territories these molecules come from, and asks whether a systems account of Gaia borrows from Indigenous thought while leaving colonial power in place (Banerjee & Arjaliès, 2021; Redvers et al., 2022).
Questions the thesis leaves open.
In its discussion, the thesis develops four ideas it marks as exploratory; three are here. Each follows from the hypothesis and goes further than its evidence does.
- Cognitive symbiosis
Is the relationship mutual?
These molecules almost certainly evolved for reasons unrelated to people (Wink, 2003). Once people began eating them, a loop became possible: a fungus changes how a species thinks, and that species then grows the fungus and trades it. Over long spans of time, repeated cycles of use, cultivation and cognitive change could benefit both, by analogy with Margulis’s symbiogenesis, with no one coordinating it. They can also cost one party, as the pressure on wild peyote already shows.
Margulis, 2001 - Ecosystem-level cognition
Does cognition reach the whole ecosystem?
The hypothesis puts thinking between a body and its surroundings. Bateson went further and placed mind in the ecosystem itself, “immanent in the large biological system”, as a network of feedback and regulation rather than a conscious agent. On that reading a forest is a cognitive system in its own right, and a psychedelic experience might sharpen a person’s sensitivity to its patterning. That is a stronger claim than the hypothesis makes, and a more speculative one.
Bateson, 1972 - Beyond the nervous system
Does the loosening reach beyond the brain?
The main receptor these molecules act on, the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A, is found in the gut, the immune system and the blood vessels as well as the cortex (Nichols, 2016). Varela treated the immune system as a cognitive network, one that keeps the body itself coherent without central control. Read that way, anti-inflammatory effects reported in cellular and animal models (Flanagan & Nichols, 2018) could be the same loosening at another level. Whether loosening is even the right word for what happens in those tissues is an open question.
Varela & Coutinho, 1991
If the experience is relational, the practice has to be too.
A therapy room with eyeshades and music is a setting too, one someone chose, and the experience organizes around it. Whether what a person felt becomes a way of living depends on the people, stories and places around them afterwards; without those, it is left to chance. And where the mushrooms or cactus came from is a matter of ethics as much as supply.
- Ecological medicine
Health is relational.
Many Indigenous and traditional medicines hold health to be balance within relations. Ecological medicine reaches a related view, and psychedelic researchers have proposed connectedness as a primary mediator of healing (Carhart-Harris et al., 2018).
- 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 days and 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, and they can be practised every day.
- Relational traditions
Learn without taking.
Mazatec, Shipibo-Conibo and Huichol traditions are living knowledge systems with their own authority, inseparable from Indigenous sovereignty (Celidwen et al., 2023). Their ritual, reciprocity with place and shared interpretation can carry an experience into obligation.
- Meaning & narrative repair
New stories, held carefully.
Psychedelics can loosen inherited stories and let new ones form. If the only story on offer is personal healing, insight is absorbed into it; traditions that tell it as responsibility to places and beings can carry it outward. Integration must also sort insight from grandiosity.
- Ecological ethics
Beyond personal change.
A psychedelic industry run on market logic risks reproducing the disconnection it claims to treat. Responsibility means facing settler colonialism (Whyte, 2018) and caring for the fungi and cacti these medicines come from (Ermakova et al., 2021).
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.
Community surveys follow what comes after an experience: people report wellbeing, spirituality and connection to nature before it, after it and again later, which can show whether the connection lasts. Testing whether the setting shapes the experience would take a different study, one that gives the same dose in different settings. Our anonymous survey asks about all three and takes about five minutes.
Who this work draws on.
Cognitive science, biology, ecological philosophy, anthropology, psychedelic neuroscience 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
Vegetalismo
Nicole Redvers
Indigenous Planetary Health
Mother Earth-level determinants
Joanna Macy
Deep Ecology & Systems Thinking
The Work That Reconnects
Glen Albrecht
Environmental Philosophy
The Symbiocene
Arne Næss
Deep Ecology
The ecological self
Theodore Roszak
Ecopsychology
Ecopsychology (1995)
Bill Plotkin
Ecopsychology
Eco-awakening
Yuria Celidwen
Indigenous Ethics
Ethical principles of traditional Indigenous medicine
Kyle Whyte
Indigenous Studies & Environmental Justice
Settler colonialism and environmental injustice
Research that becomes practice.
This hypothesis is the thinking behind our program, guidance and community.
Partners & Collaborators
