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Today’s lead story is about the impact of music on healing during the psychedelic experience. There’s new research backing up the notion that music is not a passive component in psychedelic therapy, it’s the mechanism that may be doing the most healing.

If you keep scrolling you’ll find stories about psilomethoxin, where to rave around the world, and what FIFA and the psychedelic space have in common.

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Mary Carreón
Editor-in-Chief

Listening to music under the influence of psychedelics undeniably alters the gravity of the experience. In a sense, music kind of functions like an invisible person or GPS. It guides you through the architecture of your psyche; each room containing different emotions elicited by a song — or even just a section of one — and coaxing you into a swirl of reflection and feelings, both scary and blissful and cleansing. In the context of psychedelic therapy, that guiding force is why some of the field’s most influential voices argue that music is the medicine and psychedelics are what open you up to receiving it. Now, there’s research to back up the notion that music is not a passive component in psychedelic therapy — it’s the mechanism that may be doing the most healing.

In a sweeping review published in the journal Brain and Behavior, a team of researchers looked over six decades of work. The through line they found was that when listening to music on psychedelics, emotions intensify, brain networks tied to meaning and visual imagery light up, and neural entropy increases, meaning brain activity becomes more chaotic and free-flowing, less locked into its rigid frameworks. And in the trials that followed patients afterward, how someone experienced the music tracked with how much better they got.

In an open-label psilocybin trial looking at depression, researchers scored patients on how much they liked the music, resonated with it, and stayed open to it. Those scores correlated with mystical and insightful experiences at 0.53 to 0.70, and with reductions in depression a week later at 0.57 to 0.60. How intense the drug felt showed no relationship to depression scores at all. A separate 2024 analysis found that a patient’s emotional response to music predicted symptom relief even after controlling for how intense the drug felt.

In other words, how much psilocybin was consumed was less relevant to recovery than the music.

The review also looked at brain imaging, and found that LSD raised neural entropy throughout the brain, in both basic sensory areas and the higher-level networks that handle complex thought. Music widened the range of brain states people cycled through and slowed the brain’s return to baseline afterward. When participants heard tracks they had personally rated as meaningless, the drug made those same tracks feel meaningful and lit up regions of the brain tied to self-reflection. And coupling between the parahippocampus and the visual cortex, the wiring behind mental imagery, tracked reports of vivid inner visions scoring at 0.65, a strong correlation on a scale where 1 is a perfect match.

"Music functions as a powerful contextual modulator," the authors write, "shaping both localized regional activity and broader large-scale brain dynamics."

This supports the two leading theories for how psychedelics work in the brain: the entropic brain hypothesis and the REBUS model, both of which hold that psychedelics loosen the brain's usual patterns and let outside input carry more weight. This logic suggests that music stops being decoration when under the influence of psychedelics and instead becomes the signal.

All of this raises an obvious question: What kind of music should we listen to while on psychedelics? Only two studies in the entire review tested for genre, familiarity of music, and delivery, and it didn’t provide too many answers. In a 1970s experiment with patients being treated for alcohol use disorder, researchers compared no music, familiar music, unfamiliar music, and music through headphones, and found no real differences between them. A 2021 psilocybin trial for people trying to quit smoking pitted Western classical against overtone-based music and turned up no meaningful difference, not in the depth of the mystical experience and not in whether people actually quit, even when patients got to hear their preferred genre in the final session.

The specific playlist, in other words, may matter less than a person’s headspace once they start hearing the music. Ambient and neo-classical dominate the field largely by inheritance thanks to music therapist Helen Bonny's work in the early 1970s, and the evidence for those specific choices is thinner than the reverence around them suggests.

The caveats leave a lot of room for study on the impacts of music on a person enduring the psychedelic experience. Only one study used a design that could cleanly separate the drug's effect from the music's. None included a true no-music condition, so causation stays out of reach. Samples ran small and skewed White and highly educated, and most of the music measures were single-item scales built for one study and never used again.

Music can also be ineffective in healing as well. The review cites qualitative work describing it deepening mystical states in some patients and dredging up unpleasant emotions and imagery in others.

In 2019, a woman had a vision during an iboga ceremony. She saw a man's face, the first letter of his name, his age, the city where he lived. A few months later she met him, and it was unmistakably him. They're still together. She's since found others with the same story, including a facilitator who also saw her boyfriend on iboga before the two ever crossed paths. Plant medicine, it turns out, has a real talent for introductions — the ayahuasca match who becomes a 14-year partner, the couple who conceive after the jungle tells them not to give up, the pair who split gracefully because the medicine helped them see they'd only come together to bring a child into the world.

But every practitioner, therapist, and sexologist in this story says the same thing: the vision is the easy part. Whether a relationship thrives, endures, or ends in peace is entirely up to the two people doing the work once the afterglow fades. This week, journalist Suzannah Weiss digs into what actually happens after you meet your soulmate in ceremony.

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