Reality Switch Technologies

Inside your skull sits a remarkable device, floating in the fluids that circulate around it, whose task is to construct the world you experience. People across the globe have long taken substances such as LSD, magic mushrooms, DMT and Salvia divinorum to stimulate the brain and alter how experience feels. At high enough doses, these compounds can do more than distort the familiar world. They can swap it for an entirely different one, filled with intricate and bizarre landscapes and populated by creatures that seem to think and communicate.

Such experiences are difficult to picture, let alone account for. Yet as researchers learn more about how the brain assembles its sense of reality during ordinary waking life, the route by which these compounds disrupt that process and produce unfamiliar, strange worlds is becoming clearer.

Andrew R. Gallimore, a chemical pharmacologist and neurobiologist who previously wrote Alien Information Psychedelic Drug Technologies and the Cosmic Game, examines in close detail how these molecules connect with the human brain, reshape the structure and dynamics of lived experience, and rapidly shift the brain onto a different reality track. The result is access to a large number of alternate worlds to explore.

Looking ahead, the book proposes that molecular and post-molecular technologies could one day let people move between countless worlds whenever they choose, communicate with the beings who live in them, and shape reality itself.