Relaxed Priors and the Anarchic Brain
From the public record
Proposed by: Robin Carhart-Harris and Karl Friston
Psychedelics relax the brain's high-level beliefs, letting lower-level generative structure surface. Recurring glyphs may be shared building blocks of the visual grammar.
The REBUS model from Carhart-Harris and Friston treats the brain as a prediction machine whose top-down priors normally smooth experience into the ordinary. Relax those priors and deeper layers of the generative model show through. Because human visual systems share architecture, this reading expects cross-observer similarity without any external channel, and it suggests the interesting measurement is where reported detail exceeds architectural expectation.
Source: REBUS and the Anarchic Brain (2019) (academic)
Tags: predictive-processing, neuroscience