Psychedelia and the vulnerability hangover
A few months ago I learned a very useful concept from a new friend: the vulnerability hangover. A vulnerability hangover is something you have after an interaction in which you reveal something about yourself to someone else (eagle-eyed readers will note that this in principle includes any interaction). In the hangover, you mentally revisit the episode of self-revelation and feel bad about it -- you beat yourself up over it; perhaps you imagine that the person you revealed yourself to inwardly reacted with scorn. (Note that you can have a vulnerability hangover even if the person does not react at all negatively. I think this is the central case.) That's a sketch of the phenomenology.
I would like to roughly outline a computational model of the vulnerability hangover. We're going to go over to Bayesian brain / hierarchical predictive coding land. The vulnerability hangover is the product of a highly precision-weighted (low temperature parameter) top-down prior or belief that you will be (in a broad sense) interpersonally punished for sharing your feelings -- that the person you shared with will think badly of you, or use what they've learned against you, etc. When you share, the top-down prior generates a prediction of this punishment. Interpersonal punishment is a very important but very noisy signal -- you can be interpersonally punished by someone thinking bad thoughts about you, which you might never observe directly. Because of this, the predicted punishment is both very aversive and very resilient to disconfirmation. It is this prediction that is felt as the hangover.
If this is on the right track, there is reason to suspect psychedelic therapy could be beneficial. Here are some suggestive passages from Carhart-Harris and Friston:
[V]ia their entropic effect on spontaneous cortical activity-psychedelics work to relax the precision of high-level priors or beliefs, thereby liberating bottom-up information flow, particularly via intrinsic sources such as the limbic system. ... With regard to their potential therapeutic use, we propose that psychedelics work to relax the precision weighting of pathologically overweighted priors underpinning various expressions of mental illness. We propose that this process entails an increased sensitization of high-level priors to bottom-up signaling (stemming from intrinsic sources), and that this heightened sensitivity enables the potential revision and deweighting of overweighted priors.
The vulnerability hangover sufferer is in a kind of Bayesian trap where they can't integrate new evidence. But aha if they're lucky then in comes some event that injects a little chaos into the top of the hierarchical belief system. Carhart-Harris and Friston again:
A corollary of relaxing high-level priors or beliefs under psychedelics is that ascending prediction errors from lower levels of the system (that are ordinarily unable to update beliefs due to the top-down suppressive influence of heavily-weighted priors) can find freer register in conscious experience, by reaching and impressing on higher levels of the hierarchy. ... Subsequently, as the drug is metabolized and the system cools, its dynamics begin to stabilize—and attractor basins begin to steepen again (Carhart-Harris et al., 2017). This process may result in the emergence of a new energy landscape with revised properties.
Okay probably you see where I'm going with this as much as I do. Ta.