Overview

⏱️Schedule:  Doors 18:30 → Talk 19:00→ Q&A → Mingle
🌐Language: English

Your brain doesn't show you reality. It shows you its best guess — a prediction, built moment to moment, that you mistake for the world itself. Psychedelics interrupt that guess. What's left once the model drops away?

This is the third and final chapter of Eric Lonergan's psychedelics series at Brewing Minds — a deep dive into the philosophical territory the first two talks only gestured at. No need to have caught the earlier ones to follow this: it's a self-contained journey through perception, knowledge, and what we owe each other once the old picture of reality stops holding.

What we'll cover

• Your brain doesn't show you reality — it shows you its best guess. A look at how psychedelics dissolve that guess, revealing just how much of what we call "reality" is actually constructed, not given.
• What happens when the line between "you" and everything else stops feeling so solid? How the psychedelic experience challenges the idea that we're separate from each other and the world around us.
• Psychedelics have a way of shaking your certainty about what you know — and there are surprising parallels in how quantum physics treats reality as fundamentally uncertain, too. What does it mean to hold your own knowledge a little more loosely?
• What if "being" isn't something you are, but something you're constantly doing — consciousness and reality shaping each other in real time, rather than one simply reflecting the other?
• If these experiences really do change how you see reality, what responsibility comes with that? A look at the ethics of carrying these insights back into how we treat each other — and the planet.

Speaker

Eric Lonergan

Neuroscientist

Eric Lonergan is a neuroscience researcher at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin (Humboldt University). His work explores the issue of consciousness and social connection.