During a DMT trip in 2020, I felt the presence of a man I was dating in the ceremony room, distinctly saying: “Let’s eat coconut butter with a spoon.” A few weeks later in his kitchen, unprompted, he opened a jar of coconut butter and said, “I love this stuff.” I’ve had several such experiences on psychedelics, where I heard things from people while in a psychedelic state that they later confirmed — and others apparently have, too. 

“I have lots of examples of my clients having these moments during psychedelic sessions where they connect to people who aren't present because they're in a state beyond the boundaries of their limited, confined self,” says psychedelic psychotherapist Dr. Michael Ryoshin Sapiro. “One of my veterans was having a heart opening and feeling remorse for the way he treated his wife,  feeling an overwhelming sense of gratitude, and connecting deeply with her. We were at a retreat center when the phones turned back on, and we received a message from his wife that she felt grateful for the work he was doing. He received a text from her at the same time he was having that experience. The text said, ‘I love you. Thank you so much for doing this work, and I feel your presence.’”

In a 2020 study out of the University of Bergen in Norway,, 16 of 40 psychedelic users said they’d experienced telepathy — most commonly in the form of exchanging information with others, feeling others’ feelings, and experiencing union with another person. It’s not just psychedelics that can do this: In one 1993 study, 69% of cannabis users reported telepathic experiences while under the influence. Additionally, a series of telepathy studies have been conducted over the past few decades without substances using the ganzfeld method, in which one person watches a video clip and mentally transmits it to someone in a separate room, who then guesses which clip the sender watched from four options. In these experiments, people have consistently performed above chance, meaning better than 25% accuracy, since the receiver is choosing from four options. For instance, in a 2001 meta-analysis of 2,878 ganzfeld sessions, the receiver guessed correctly 32% of the time, a result estimated to have a one-in-a-trillion likelihood of happening by coincidence according to a paper by parapsychologist Dean Radin.

Many of these experiences may sound like magic, but some can be explained by a basic feature of the human brain: empathy. “There’s a lot of things that happen between people who are close or have an emotional connection,” explains psychedelic psychotherapist Dr. Cat Meyer. “Your nervous systems and cardiovascular systems are interconnected. You can feel a partner’s distress or emotional experience even if they’re in other parts of the world. I’ve personally had experiences where I guessed what my partner was thinking or what he was about to surprise me with. I ruined so many surprises.” 

The syncing of cardiovascular systems that occurs when two people spend lots of time together leads to shared feelings, which psychedelics amplify, Meyer explains. “Psychedelics can help quiet the noise that’s around us. They activate the nervous system in a way that can make it much more receptive to sensation and stimuli in a calm, contained, controlled unit.” Specifically, psychedelics like psilocybin reduce activity in the brain’s right parietal lobe and default mode network, eroding the boundary between “self” and “other,” according to psychologist Dr. Jeff Tarrant’s Becoming Psychic. High-entropy brains — those with high variability and complexity of neural activity, which psychedelics promote — are more prone to such phenomena.

Many describe feeling others’ emotions, if not hearing their thoughts, on psychedelics. Nicole Ambrosia, a 39-year-old embodiment coach in Southern California, recounts an ayahuasca ceremony: “I ended up sensing what everyone was going through, and it ended up opening my heart a lot and gave me more compassion for everybody. Some people were purging, releasing demons and things. Everyone was going through some kind of process. I might not have known the full story, but I had so much love and compassion for what people were going through and letting go of.” Sapiro has also seen people trip together and have the same visions.

“Sometimes that understanding comes in a state of complete egolessness,” says Tricia Eastman, medicine woman and author of Seeding Consciousness. “You're sending the beam through your heart, and the field of manifestation is instantaneous. So it's like you’re thinking ‘I could use a drink of water’ and the facilitator receives that message and all of a sudden there's coconut water there waiting for you.”

When we know someone else well, we develop an intricate understanding of their mind to the point that we may guess what they’re thinking, explains Dr. James Giordano, Professor Emeritus at Georgetown Medical Center. Psychedelics help us subliminally process past experiences and subtle cues, improving this ability. “You have to think of the brain as a time-space machine,” Giordano says. “If you think of what you do with your brain at a given moment in time, your brain is functioning according to something known as Bayesian heuristics. It’s matching everything in your immediate present to something in your past to guide how you should think and feel.” While tripping, the brain can synthesize this information more easily and quickly, “so what you're getting there is cognitive congruence whereby things in your past become far more congruent to what would be your expectations,” Giordano explains. In other words, maybe my brain calculated that it was likely my partner wanted to eat coconut butter because I’d already noticed he liked coconut oil and coconut cream.

Psychedelics may also fortify other human abilities within the realm of parapsychology, the study of seemingly paranormal phenomena. Take remote viewing — the capacity to tune into events happening at a distance. This phenomenon has been studied for decades, including by the U.S. government from 1977 to 1995 in a military operation called the Stargate Project, which produced some statistically significant results suggesting anomalous performance, meaning people appeared to guess or describe distant targets more accurately than would be expected by chance, for example, visualizing or drawing events happening thousands of miles away. The findings were ultimately inconsistent and remain controversial in the scientific community. 

“The Stargate Program demonstrated positive and reproducible results for those subjects who were shown to exhibit remote viewing capabilities,” says Giordano. “This was a relatively small number of subjects, and they exhibited recurrent capabilities to remotely view in repeated and varied trials. However, the results were inconclusive as regards to the trainability of naive subjects (those who were not identified or self-identified to possess such abilities).” In other words, data suggests this phenomenon exists, but only in certain people — perhaps those whose brains are most sensitive to subtle spatial cues in their environment.

“Psychedelic use can be instrumental in facilitating what appear to be exceptional capabilities,” as they alter the frequencies of electrical impulses running through the brain known as brain waves, says Giordano. DMT and ayahuasca, for instance, stimulate the brain’s theta waves — eliciting a dream-like state where information in the subconscious becomes consciously available — and reduce alpha wave activity, leading to ego dissolution. “By potentially dropping alpha activity and slowing down electrical brain activity to drop below 30 to 40 hertz, you see a rise in both theta and delta activity,” Giordano says. “You get a coupling of neural patterns in which the drop in alpha rhythms becomes entrained to the rise in theta and delta activity. This seems to promote better integration of neural node and network activity patterns that allow a more nuanced interpretation of what's happening in the present.”

Psychedelics activate the serotonin system, which decreases top-down processing (thoughts under conscious control) and increases bottom-up processing (thoughts based on feelings and subtle physical sensations), says Giordano. He adds that serotonin-sensitive cells in the brain, called cyclical helical tryptophan proteins, are hypothesized to have quantum properties, allowing their activity to transcend the usual limits of the brain’s space and time properties. Parapsychologist Dean Radin has argued that telepathy may be explained by quantum nonlocality, where two particles far apart can influence each other. Specifically, neural structures with quantum properties like microtubules or cyclical helical proteins may enable brain-to-brain communication.

Some people interpret the experience of telepathy as tapping into a kind of universal consciousness that belongs to everyone, not just the person they’re communicating with. “There's this idea of thoughts as thought forms, and some of them aren’t even ours,” says Eastman. “It's almost like a radio station that is playing that some people are able to tune into. On iboga, some people say they can download and receive information. I've [worked with] many musicians who are profoundly creative and have said they download their music from the spheres.”

Parapsychologist Howard Eisenberg, MD, author of Dream It to Do It, thinks such people may be accessing Source, the underlying source of everything. “In telepathy, you have two people who apparently are physically separated yet are able to transfer information between them if they’re connected in reality, and the separation is an illusion,” he says. “What we consider to be physical is an illusion – a very convincing illusion. Psychedelics can break that illusion. Many times when we have dreams, we don't realize while we’re in the dream that we're dreaming. The dream populates sometimes with other people or creatures or physical environments. Sometimes these dreams seem totally real until we reawaken. We are all in this divine dream.”

The mental openness and disinhibition psychedelics provide may simply help us tap into this universal force. “What psychedelics do is disrupt the normal organization of the brain,” says Eisenberg. “It scrambles the brain in terms of how it’s functioning, and then that scrambling bypasses the filter effect so that consciousness can come through from that greater level of consciousness and awareness—that oneness with source. Our understanding of reality is convergent with the notion that we are one with the elements. In contrast to the idea that there are various particles and energies and forces outside us, everything is ultimately one. The analogy I use to illustrate this is the ocean. When you look at the ocean, you see waves. Sometimes the waves are very large. But it’s in motion. Waves slide and new ones emerge. It’s the same ocean.”

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