Le Grand Frisson

On technodelics, phenomenology of experience and things we can do to escape our entrenched mental states. An interview with Leonardo Christov-Moore.

Le frisson is a French word that is translated into English as aesthetic chill, although the translation does not do it full justice.

Le frisson is a word that describes an intense experience, that is both mental and - crucially - somatic. That gives you goosebumps. Frisson can be triggered both by a positive and a negative experience. Seeing beauty, hearing a piece of music or an intense relational experience can all give you le frisson.

And if you think about your own experiences of this kind - and you had them for sure - you will probably see how these experiences have a potential to bring insight or alter our decisions making in unexpected ways. Le frisson has certain powers, for sure.

I talk about frisson (or aesthetic chill) here because it is one of the intended targets of technodelics ( I will define later, but something to do with technology and with psychedelics).

As you might know, as of late I have been thinking in terms of metaphor of attractor states and the ‘invisible’ laws of the mental landscape that make us converge, and inexorably so, towards a form of entrenched mental state - whether it is a habit, behaviour, habitual feeling or a cognitive pattern - as though our mind is a snooker ball pulled by gravity to always end up in a familiar groove that leads to that familiar place that we cannot escape, no matter how much that state maladaptive and repetitive that state, at this point of time.

I promised that I will explore with you and for you the ways of how to ‘escape’ those states. And fair enough, therapy as a whole could be seen as an attempt to do just that. But what else? And can we augment therapy in some ways to be more conducive to those events?

Some of you might know - because a friend has told you - that mind altering substances such as psychedelics have this quality, leading, at times, to profound changes such as breaking away from bad habits and addiction, finding the courage to make bold life moves or experiencing feelings that one has not had permission for before. But psychedelics come with their own set of problems: safety, logistics, legality, intensity and the length of the experience, to name a few.

So what if there were things that we could do that do not involve ingesting a molecule but pertain more to our sensory input that could mimic psychedelic experience, providing thus the beneficial effect without the adverse effects and in a milder form? That is what today’s story about technodelics is really about.

I sit down to talk about all this with neuroscientist Leo Christov-Moore who was so kind as to let me pick his brain about this and help me think about how we could repurpose these ideas for psychotherapy use.

However, I get much more than I bargained for.

We talk 101 of psychedelic experience, complex systems, predictive models, brain’s entropy and psychedelics, finding deep meaning in experiences, binaural stimulation and of course aesthetic chills. We also talk music’s capacity to transport us and Leo shares some of the most frisson-prone music out there.

You are in for a treat.

Leo Christov-Moore, PhD is a neuroscientist and interdisciplinary theorist whose research integrates multimodal neuroimaging, neuromodulation, and computational modeling to investigate the neurobiological substrates of empathy, trust, and transformative experience. He serves as a senior scientist at the Institute for Advanced Consciousness Studies, where he is Principal Investigator on the “Emulating Entheogens to Enhance Empathy (E4)” project and Co-PI on a bio-inspired AI alignment initiative. His work—funded by the Templeton World Charity Foundation, Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health—has been published in leading journals including Nature, PNAS, Science Robotics, and Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. He is also a Research Director at Sensoria Research.

The Interview

Ana Leo, what’s a technodelic?

Leo A technodelic a portmanteau for a technological approximation of a psychedelic. So it’s using tools of technology to emulate either the neural states or behavioral outcomes or phenomenological states occasioned by psychedelics. Whether it’s audiovisual, haptic (using vibration, vibrating suits or vibrating chairs) or interoceptive.

And this can include binaural stimulation, stroboscopic stimulation, aesthetic chills like much of our work.

Ana Aesthetic chills?

Leo Aesthetic chills, yeah, is one of the core modalities that we’ve been publishing on and working with… it’s also known as frisson. Or goosebumps. Are you familiar with those? If you’ve heard a beautiful symphony, or a poem, or had some tremendous insight, and you get chills?

Ana So are you guys engineering the situations that create goosebumps?

Leo Yeah. We crowdsourced suggestions of songs that… songs and speeches and speeches with music underneath them that caused people to have chills and goosebumps. This is detailed in a paper called the ChillsDB, the Chills Database in Nature Methods.

We then we ran a study of several thousand participants, about 2,700 where we asked people to rate whether they got chills, and how intense were the chills, and what part of the thing they heard gave them chills, and all this, as well as several other measures, like self-transcendence, and emotional insight, and psychological breakthrough. We were able to create a database of songs that consistently cause chills, right?

Several of our highest scoring stimuli, which we use for experiments later on, consistently, repeatedly cause chills in 70 plus percent of the population.

This is all open source, by the way. One of them is Rufus Wainwright singing Hallelujah with a crowd of a thousand people.

Ana Yeah, I can imagine that’s going to create a frisson.

Leo As well as several, not surprisingly, classical religious pieces, like Miserere. Several group choral arias seem to cause this a lot. And there’s still ongoing work as to why it is that that’s the case.

So, the way we cause chills is primarily through music and speech. It’s a very easy deployable technology. You just play someone a song.

Ana Because we are talking about technodelics, can you tell us how that would replicate psychedelic experience?

Leo Well, something that we showed in a series of studies with over 4,000 people.

Because we had the original study with 2,700 people, then we ran another study where I was curious about why some people were getting chills, and why people who were more conservative or liberal got more chills, and why, you know, the relationship to religiosity. So I re-ran the study with 400 more participants in California and Texas.

Then, we did another study in 600 people, where we tested chills augmented loving-kindness meditation. So, at this point, we’ve looked at four thousands of participants, and.

The reason, to get to your question, the reason why we call this a technodelic is because it seems to robustly replicate many of the classical features associated with psychedelics, such as, aspects of mystical experience. So, the chills are robustly associated with self-transcendence. In other words, ego dissolution.

Some features of ego dissolution are: a sense of connectedness to the world, to one’s true self, to others. A sense of moral elevation, change in one’s disposition and an inspiration to act in a noble and virtuous and compassionate way towards other people in the world.

It shows high levels of emotional breakthrough, psychological insights about themselves.

And also, importantly, which we showed in last year’s OHBM conference, on-site in an actual laboratory experiment, is that chills cause downstream changes in pro-social behavior, so they make people behave more generously with others afterwards, even though there’s nothing explicitly about generosity in the stimulus itself, it’s just music.

We also showed, that chills cause the same increases in neural complexity, neural entropy, as are known to be caused by psychedelics.

And importantly, this is the really crucial thing, is that we were able to show that those changes in neural entropy, the psychedelic-like increases in the complexity of the brain signals, predicted the extent to which people’s beliefs and behavior changed after.

So it really looks like they’re actually changing the prior landscape in a way that allows people to shift into more pro-social attractors.

Ana (I am having a big surprise moment as I am catching on here that Leo uses the same terminology of attractor states that you guys also will recognise from my Strange Attractors piece - life is full of surprises) So did you say attractors?! You mean the states that we habitually converge to, is that what you mean?

Leo Yes, well, I call it attractors in the sense of new stable configurations of one’s preferences and beliefs. This is because the term attractor is very pertinent for the study of psychedelics, right?

Ana And why would that be?

Leo Because something very interesting about them is that unlike many conventional forms of treatment, oftentimes a single dose of a psychedelic and a single strong psychedelic experience can cause someone to change their life priorities for the rest of their life. It can cause people to stop being addicted to compounds. It can cause them to change their whole relationship to their job, to their family.

It’s transformative. Now, psychedelics are not alone in this. Something that I think is very emphasized in our approach is that psychedelics, these psychedelic compounds, are only one way, one very powerful and replicable way, to achieve that.

Others include when people have near-death experiences, or simply transformative insights on their own, such as philosophical discoveries, or when they’re in advanced states of meditation or breathwork. So, there are many ways to get to these states, but they all share similar properties.

Metaphorically, we are sort of relaxing and shaking up the system allowing them to then settle and reconfigure into new, stable configurations, which is otherwise very difficult, right?

And for a good reason, whatever stable state we ended up in is generally quite resistant to perturbation. And so, for it to change, there has to be a good reason, and that’s why near-death experiences are a very illustrative example. Because it might make you see clearly that your current model is not allowing you to potentially escape death or dissolution in some way, that model is forced to change very deeply.

Ana I was asking that, because just a few weeks ago, I wrote a piece that I called Strange Attractors. I had no idea of other people using it in this context and I borrowed it from Chaos Theory. I really underline the fact that it’s metaphorical and I am not formally applying the Chaos Theory to psychotherapy.

Leo I don’t think that your usage is purely metaphorical. I mean, it’s very good that you’re being intellectually honest and saying, I’m using it metaphorically but I would argue that the use of the term attractor to describe patterns of behavior and brain thing is not metaphorical.

Ana When I used it in that way I could see it was resonating with people, as a number of them reached out to share similar trains of thought. However, I don’t use it in any kind of formal way that would involve the equations and the complex system formalism. And so we are not calculating specific attractors - Lorenz, point attractor or whatever else it could be. It was more conveying the idea of the black hole kind of pull that is kind of drawing everything, whatever you do, it ends up in the same place, you know?

Leo Again, that’s not metaphorical, you’re using the concept correctly. Let’s say there’s many configurations of mood and action and other states that you can be in, right? If someone is exhibiting a very fixed, maladaptive pattern, maybe depressive, ruminative, and you saw them in their state space, right? What types of thoughts they have, what types of actions, what types of relationships, all that stuff, and you were to model that as a multi-dimensional space, you would see they’re just occupying this one shape, and they don’t escape from it.

We are actually working with people at Imperial College London to actually formalize this within a paper around neurophenomenological state space. So you are talking about something that is a very similar thing to what we’re working on.

Ana You see when I discussed this idea with a cognitive neuroscientist he pointed out that attractor states in neuroscience mean quite a low level brain architecture stuff, and it would be a fundamentally different level of description that what we are discussing here.

Leo Right, well, but that’s because that person is probably a neurobiologist, and they’re talking about it in terms of attractor dynamics within neuronal ensembles, and they’re right, but the same notion can be equally applied to multidimensional dynamic spaces of neurophenomenology.

Ana And now to the important question: how do we disrupt the attractor states?

Leo Right, how do you disrupt?

Ana OK, so let’s try to slowly unpack that. Let’s take the aesthetic chills as an example we talked about - can it help disrupt the attractor state? And maybe before that, you said that it is a technodelic because it mimics in some ways the effects of a psychedelic. In which way?

Leo Word mimic implies that there’s one true thing, and then these are all sort of imitations, and I would say, no, they’re different instances of the same type of process.

Ana A thing that comes to my mind is that psychedelic experiences are going to be much stronger, much more imprinting than hearing a song, no matter how powerful the effect of the song is. Whatever effect there might be, it is much more transient and fleeting.

Leo Part of what you’re describing is one of the factors that makes something be a deeper experience or not, which is partly duration, right? So, I would say that largely because of factors like duration, and because of their multi-sensory quality. Your average psychedelic is gonna have a more profound effect, or be perceived as more profound, than just having an experience of aesthetic chills. So you might call an average experience of aesthetic chill a micro-mystical experience.

However, one thing to remember is that chills are kind of a marker. It’s not that chills are the experience, chills are the marker of a type of transformative experience.

In the same way that when people have insights in psychedelic states, insights intellectually, they have a somatic response. So we are referring to chills as a kind of a shorthand. But what we’re really referring to is chills-causing music. The chills-causing music is the technodelic, the chills itself are the marker.

Ana Okay, so what you’re saying is that the chills will be a kind of a somatic manifestation.

Leo Yes, it’s a manifestation of the process.

Ana Manifestation of what’s experienced through the brain.

Leo The brain and body, right? The central and interoceptive nervous system working together, right?

I would just provide a short counterexample to the distinction you were making with hearing an aria as a more transient experience than having a mushroom trip.

If I take a small dose of mushrooms, or just take one hit of DMT, and I haven’t particularly set up any particular container, I have no intention, I’m just sitting on a hillside, and I just want to look at the clouds. That experience might be wonderful, and I might feel relaxed, and I’m just reminded how everything’s connected, how beautiful everything is. But, the rest of my day has not changed much, except that I might feel a little more relaxed. Now, that would be a light psychedelic experience.

Now, on the other hand you might have, as I’ve experienced, a moment where you came to, let’s say, a concert. You came to a beautiful concert, you had been going through a really difficult impasse in your relationship with, either your parents, or your girlfriend or your job, and you have this problem, and you’re coming in the concert with this intention, you’re sitting there, around other people, and you’re all connecting to this music, and it’s your favorite artist, and you have this one song that hits this one note, and boom. Chills arrive and are marking an experience where suddenly you break down into tears, and you realize, oh my god, I’ve been cut off from my childhood self, and I’ve realized that what I’ve really been pursuing is a wrong thing, I’ve seen it all wrong. And there you have it: a transformative experience.

There are instances of the thing that we’re doing in this very micro way that are very powerful, despite not being a traditional psychedelic, and there are instances of traditional psychedelic experience that might not be that powerful at all, because they didn’t have a container, there wasn’t much of an intention, there wasn’t a problem being dealt with.

So, generally speaking, I’d say you’re right, but one must consider the full spectrum, and again, try to take this bird’s eye view of what is this general process of cathartic insight and belief updating.

Ana I was being a Devil’s advocate because I really want to stress test your thinking about this, but I find it hugely interesting. And obviously, doing what I do, my thoughts go directly to: how can we use this in therapy? The huge upside I see is that these experiences caused by what you call technodelics are actually something that we can be much more in control of than a psychedelic. Safety is not necessarily a problem and requires much less organisation and logistics. So they are huge upsides if we were to use technodelics in therapy, provided we had an idea about how to use it effectively. For starters, you avoid the whole issue of legality/illegality of it.

I mean ultimately, you can go to a concert or listen to a tune but stop if something feels off. If you have a bad trip, you’re in for at least a couple of hours.

Leo Exactly that’s one of the benefits of technodelics.

Ana Really huge potential for psychotherapy.

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