Can You Train Yourself to Have a Psychedelic Experience Without Psychedelics?

A woman sits inside an fMRI scanner with eyes closed. Within minutes, she reports psychedelic visions. A hexagonal lattice appears, structured and stable, floating in the space around her. The boundaries of her body begin to dissolve. She reports unity, serenity, and an eternal present.

Sounds like the effects of a potent psychedelic substance, right? But it isn’t. It’s self-induced.

A new case study published in NeuroImage mapped the brain activity of a 37-year-old woman (referred to as AVP) who can voluntarily enter a transcendental visionary state on command, without any pharmacological assistance.

And it offers one of the clearest windows into what actually happens in the brain during a profound non-ordinary state of consciousness, without being blurred by the confounding effects of mind altering substances.

What the Study Found

AVP is not a trained meditator and has no formal practice. The ability developed intuitively from early adolescence, and at 24 she experienced a spontaneous visual phenomenon that she later learned to reliably reproduce. The case study reports that she entered the state consistently across 20 separate fMRI sessions, spanning five months.

As fascinating as that is for use laymen, that reproducibility also makes this very use for scientists. Psychedelics induce altered states, but the chemistry is messy. The drug is doing multiple things simultaneously, and isolating which neural changes correspond to the subjective experience versus the pharmacological machinery is extremely difficult. AVP’s brain offers a rare view of the altered state, but without the drug.

To ensure what they were observing wasn’t just vivid imagination, the researchers also scanned a control group of 10 matched women asked to close their eyes and imagine vivid visual scenes. None of those women’s brains were doing what AVP’s was doing. The scans showed that her brain was fundamentally reorganising.

The Mechanics of the Trance

The session had distinct phases. At baseline, ordinary mind-wandering. Then a Transition phase which was effortful, unstable, and marked by the emergence of geometric imagery. Then, once the threshold was crossed, a stable fully-developed trance with its characteristic phenomenology: a hexagonal lattice, a violet pulse, the dissolution of body boundaries, and the subjective sense of being both inside the MRI scanner and somewhere far larger.

The fMRI data tracked these phases precisely. During the Transition, brain connectivity became highly variable, which is consistent with what researchers describe as a temporary destabilisation of normal network organisation. This is the brain’s usual architecture loosening its grip before something new emerges.

In the fully developed state, connectivity between distinct brain networks dropped broadly. AVP’s visual cortex effectively decoupled from auditory, sensorimotor, thalamic, and cerebellar regions. External sensory input was structurally gated out, allowing vivid internal imagery to become dominant. In simple terms, the architecture that normally grounds perception in the external world was temporarily taken offline, and so the brain generated experience from within.

At the same time, her frontoparietal control network and salience network increased their connectivity with the precuneus, the posterior cingulate, and multimodal temporal cortex. These are regions associated with internal attention, interoception, and the integration of self-referential processing. During all this, she remained fully lucid, in control, and was directing her attention inward with high coherence.

The researchers also measured entropy (disorder/chaos) and complexity in her brain signal. During the trance, activity shifted toward lower entropy (less random, more organised signal) and higher statistical complexity (richer, more structured patterns), before returning to baseline levels once the session ended. This mirrors patterns seen in certain meditative states and in the aftermath of psychedelic sessions.

No Drugs Required

This finding maps almost exactly onto what psilocybin research suggests happens during psychedelic experiences, but without the pharmacological trigger.

Psychedelics are thought to work largely by disrupting the precision weighting of predictive signals, loosening the brain’s default assumptions about what reality is, increasing network entropy, and opening a window of heightened plasticity during which new patterns can form. AVP’s brain appears to achieve something structurally similar through a learned voluntary process.

If the transcendental visionary state were purely a product of serotonergic agonism at 5-HT2A receptors, you wouldn’t expect to see it reproduced voluntarily through intention and practice. The fact that AVP can do this suggests these states are latent capacities of the brain’s network architecture, not pharmacological accidents.

Taking psychedelics may simply be one path to inducing a reorganisation that the brain is already capable of.

What This Means for the Science of Consciousness

The study is a case report about one person with an unusually rare cognitive profile (AVP also has grapheme-colour synesthesia, which is characterised by stable associations between letters and colours). So this cannot be generalised yet. What can be said is that the brain-state she enters is reproducible, measurable, and structurally distinct from anything the control group showed.

For those interested in consciousness research, this is fascinating. One of the persistent challenges in studying non-ordinary states is separating the experience from the chemical induction. Here, the experience exists independently of the chemistry. This means a few new questions can be asked. Like what is the minimal neural architecture of a transcendental state? What does it share with psychedelic-induced states, and what is distinct? And crucially, can voluntary access to these states be learned more broadly?

The last question is especially intriguing. Holotropic breathwork has shown for decades that non-ordinary states are reachable without pharmacology. If a transcendental visionary state that looks a lot like what people report from the most transformative meditation retreats and psychedelic sessions – minus the years of training or the pharmacology – can be reliably accessed, that’s not trivial.

AVP seems to have found the key to open her doors of perception without the use of a psychedelic substance. Does that mean we can all find ours too?

Source: Della Bella et al. (2026). The neurophenomenology of a self-induced transcendental visionary state: A case study. NeuroImage.