Sixth Sense Abcderium

by Étienne Gagné

Étienne Gagné is a PhD student at Concordia University in Social and Cultural Analysis. His research explores how hegemonic masculinity and digital extremism are shaped, circulated, and embodied through sensory and affective engagements on social media platforms. 

The word “psychedelic” comes from two Greek roots: psyche, meaning “soul” or “mind,” and delos, meaning “manifest” or “to make visible” (Fradkin, 2024). Similarly, the term “hallucination” originates from the Latin word allūcināri, meaning “to wander in the mind,” and was historically understood as “inducing journeys in the mind” (Rodger, 2018).  

The use of hallucinogenic substances is a widespread cultural phenomenon, independently present across numerous societies and historical periods. In Renaissance Europe, trial records reference demonological texts and early botanical pharmacopeias that document potent psychoactive plant-based ointments, often associated with women accused of witchcraft (Piomelli & Pollio, 1994). In the rainforests of West Africa, Ibogaine serves a traditional hallucinogenic role in “magico-religious” rituals (Rodger, 2018). The human use of psychedelics even predates recorded history, with one well-documented example being Ayahuasca, an Amazonian psychoactive brew whose ritual use dates to around 1500-2000 B.C. (Fradkin, 2024; Gearin & Sáez, 2021). 

Within a contemporary Western context, classical hallucinogens are generally defined as psychoactive substances that significantly alter sensory perception and cognitive processes (Laura, 2023). These include compounds like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), amphetamines, psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”), mescaline, and ergine. Although not classified as classical hallucinogens, substances such as ketamine and methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) are often considered psychedelics due to the similarity of their phenomenological effects (Høifødt, 2018).  

Depending on their setting, hallucinations induced by such substances have long captivated interest and sparked debate across psychiatry, psychopathology, and pharmacology, while also being extensively studied within religious, cultural, and anthropological contexts. Although a comprehensive account of the full range of hallucinogenic phenomenology is ineffable and beyond the spatial constraint of this text (Rubenstein 2012; Shanon 2002), such experiences are commonly associated with existential-phenomenological themes and exhibit a wide spectrum of subjective experiences and intensities, influencing perception, emotions, and various cognitive functions. These experiences can range from subtle sensory and non-sensory alterations such as vibrating colors, geometric patterns, deepened experience of the arts, synesthesia, and heightened emotional response, all the way to vivid sensory phenomena, elaborate fantasies, and unimaginably bizarre, seemingly veridical journeys (Howes, 2022; Fradkin, 2024). In extreme instances, participants undergoing induced hallucinogenic experiences have reported a state of ‘ego-death’, where the subjective boundary between the self and the external world is dissolved into a sense of metaphysical continuity with the immediate environment, thereby altering one’s sense of corporeal embodiment and time dilation (Fradkin, 2024; Gearin & Sáez, 2021). 

In contemporary Western societies, the discourse surrounding the embodied sensory and cognitive dimensions of hallucinogenic experiences remains significantly underdeveloped, largely due to two mutually reinforcing factors: First, the rise of recreational psychedelic use and the emergence of psychedelic-influenced themes in counterculture art and music in the 1970s sparked significant socio-political controversy. This is generally noted to have contributed to the reclassification of psychedelics as Schedule I substances in the United States —a designation for drugs deemed to have high abuse potential and no accepted medical use— despite the lack of empirical evidence supporting such claims. As a result, standardized scientific research on psychedelics involving human subjects was effectively banned for several decades (Fradkin, 2024). Second, dominant neurological and psychoanalytic frameworks often presuppose a naïve realist approach to sensory perception. This perspective has been argued to oversimplify and dismiss hallucinogenic experiences by reducing them to mere brain anomalies or pathologies. In doing so, it prioritizes an analysis of “objective” discrete objects rather than engaging with the deeply relational and embodied nature of the experience itself (Howes, 1991; Ingold, 2000). Together, these developments, constrained by their political, theoretical, and normative biases have limited our ability to fully capture the phenomenological diversity and essence of these hallucinogenic experiences (Szabo et al., 2014).

This analysis attempts to elaborate and move beyond the reductionist and normatively biased approaches to hallucinogens commonly found within the confines of Western political and scientific paradigms of neurology, pharmacology, and psychology. It also engages with and offers a critical examination of the counterargument posed by psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in opposition to such institutional frameworks. Finally, drawing on the concept of the “sensorium,” this discussion emphasizes the strengths of both approaches and offers an alternative secular phenomenological interpretation of hallucinogens as a type of “extrasensory engine.” More precisely, hallucinogens are understood as molecules that readjust the standard interaction between body, mind, and environment, thereby allowing for a synesthetic reconfiguration of perception. By altering this dynamic, hallucinogens bring into focus the conflicts and overlaps between the various sensory agencies, allowing us to experience the spaces in-between the multiple layers that shape our senses, rather than simply diminishing or amplifying them.

The term “extrasensory engine” in this context does not suggest anything supernatural. Instead, it refers to objects or techniques that facilitate the perception of phenomena beyond the narrow, conventional Western model of the five senses as defined by Aristotle, and their corresponding sensory organs. This includes experiences like the synesthetic modality of perception, or the diverse ways in which we perceive and interact with reality, influenced by factors like culture, bodily condition, genetic variations, physical enhancements, or specialized training. Drawing on David Howes’ anthropological rethinking of the senses, which moves away from a strictly realist perspective toward a focus on dynamic “techniques of the senses [and] ways of sensing,” allows for the exploration of extrasensory engines that, although not directly measurable by scientific instruments, are deeply embedded in and essential to the material and social aspects of human experience (Howes, 2022, p. 7).

The limitations of the traditional Western framework are perhaps most clearly revealed through an examination of the definition offered by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) and the extensive critiques it has generated: 

This clinical definition has sparked widespread debate among social scientists and critical theorists—particularly anthropologists, psychoanalysts, cultural constructivists, and scholars in sensory studies—who broadly challenge it on three main grounds. 

Firstly, by framing hallucinations as involuntary experiences, the DSM-V embeds a conception of hallucinatory perception that is unidirectional, private, internal, ahistorical, and apolitical. Within this framework, valid perception is descriptively defined strictly by its correspondence to external stimuli processed through the sensory organs, casting the mind as a passive tabula rasa. This reliance on biological determinism not only draws a rigid line between sensation and meaning but also imposes a direct realist model onto what is fundamentally a phenomenological domain (Howes, 2022). As a result, it risks oversimplifying the rich, subjective, and embodied nature of hallucinatory experiences, effectively closing off critical relational, ecological, and cultural dimensions that inherently shape how such phenomena are experienced and understood (Howes, 2022; Gearin & Sáez, 2021). From the limited ethnographical studies on the use of hallucinogens, these experiences seem to be deeply shaped by both personal history and sociocultural context, with recurring themes often reflecting one’s cultural affiliation (Rodger, 2018). For example, conceptions of individualism and ownership significantly influence how Ayahuasca is experienced across different cultural groups, such as between Australian neoshamanic users and indigenous Amazonian communities (Gearin & Sáez, 2021). Consequently, the mind is far from a passive receiver of raw environmental stimuli; instead, cognition, knowledge, meaning, and culture actively shape sensory perception, a phenomenon that seems to become even more pronounced in hallucinogenic experiences (Gearin & Sáez, 2021).  

Secondly, this descriptive approach has been criticized for drawing a highly contentious distinction between “normal” and altered states of perception and consciousness, as it gives insufficient attention to the qualitative differences required to meaningfully distinguish the two (Beischel et al., 2011). While the DSM-V introduces certain exceptions to this binary, these remain neither comprehensive nor sufficient.  More importantly, by reinforcing a dichotomy between the “normal” and the “pathological”—with the former implicitly regarded as more real—this framework imposes a normative judgment that reduces hallucinations to mere “perception-like” phenomena. In doing so, the framework privileges conventional sensory modalities and further overlooks the complex ways hallucinatory experiences challenge the boundary between perception and reality (Szabo et al., 2014).

Finally, by artificially separating sensation from meaning, the DSM-V overlooks important non-sensory dimensions of hallucinations that arise from cognitive and affective processes. These include emotional intensifications, paranoid, depressive, and other unexpected psychic episodes as well as shifts in self-awareness that are not merely byproducts but integral aspects of hallucinogenic experiences (Laura, 2023; Szabo et al., 2014). As a result, the DSM-V’s definition is wholly inadequate for capturing phenomena like hallucinogen-induced ego dissolution, frequently described in autobiographical accounts (Fradkin, 2024). 

Although contemporary neuroscience retains certain theoretical limitations, it has nonetheless contributed meaningful insights into the experience of hallucinations. Departing from notions of a fixed cognitive canon, neuroimaging studies have identified conflicting and contradictory neural processes when individuals are exposed to counterintuitive intra-sensory and multi-sensory stimuli (Pieszek et al., 2013). These discrepancies are attributed to the brain’s simultaneous and independent processing of overlapping prior knowledge, intentions, future anticipation, and direct sensory input, rather than generating them into a unified prediction (Darriba et al., 2021). Thus, contemporary neuroscience is now suggesting that sensory perception arises from a dynamic interplay of predictions designed to offer a flexible understanding of our complex world. With these predictions being inherently shaped by “prior knowledge”, or what might funnily enough be coined as “culture.” 

These researchers indicate that minor hallucinatory effects, such as vibrating colors and geometric patterns, could stem from disruptions in the integration, consolidation, and fine-tuning of intra- and inter-sensory processes, predictions, and cognition, caused by specific chemical compounds and altered mental states (Näätänen et al., 2014). Yet despite these contributions, the neurobiological approach still falls short of accounting for the symbolic, emotional, and culturally embedded dimensions of hallucinations; hallucinations rooted not in sensory anomalies alone, but in the cognitive and affective structures that shape human meaning-making. 

Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan attempted to move beyond the ontological naive realism of neurobiology by rejecting the traditional focus on the ‘unreality’ of hallucinatory perceptions. He critiques dominant psychiatric models that portray sensory faculties as passively and unidirectionally extracting data from external material objects, with the ‘percipiens’ assembling this data into an objective ‘perceptum’ which descriptively and normatively undermines hallucinations, thereby ignoring the cognitive, affective, and culturally relevant origin of hallucinogenic illusions (Lacan, 2006a, p. 446). To that extent, Lacan offers phenomenologically based definitions and descriptions of hallucinations as “real” to the extent that they are produced through the same means that allow for ordinary perception (Lacan, 1993). 

According to Lacan, it is explicitly through the use of meaning, symbols, and cultures that people are able to develop, delineate, and produce coherent experiences and to create a sense of reality (Lacan, 2006a). As such, drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (2012), he develops an alternative sensory framework in which sensing should be understood not in terms of the sensory registers involved, but in terms of meaning-generating processes (Vanheule, 2011). In this vein, he introduces a diachronic distinction between “the symbolic” and “the real,” with the former standing for the inherently structured way in which we experience the world.  

Developing an alternative theoretical framework, Lacan indicates that hallucinations are characterized by the incapacity to signify one’s own existence as a subject in relation to the Other; an inability to differentiate between “the symbolic” and “the real” (Vanheule, 2011). Lacan (2006b), therefore, qualifies hallucinations as an “irruption in the real” (p. 449). More specifically, he suggests that hallucinatory experiences should be understood in terms of an interruption within the hermeneutic chain in which language is used to link the subject to its surrounding signifiers. As such, hallucinated sensory perception is to Lacan an “unchained signifier”; an inability to distinguish between our production and projection of “the symbolic” and “the real”, thereby collapsing the distinction between self and Other. 

Lacan’s framework allows for a nuanced examination of the socio-cultural and interpersonal symbolic influences on both sensory and non-sensory hallucinogenic experiences, aligning closely with some ethnographic findings (Näätänen et al., 2014). It proves particularly effective in analyzing why such experiences among Western individuals are often shaped by “myth fragments drawn from wide-ranging cultural frameworks as diverse as quantum physics, neuroscience, dynamic psychologies, animistic and Indian religions, [and] Marxism” (Rodger, 2018, p. 89), and are frequently characterized by strong tendencies toward individualism and visualism (Gearin & Sáez, 2021). 

Whist Lacan did not explicitly develop the concept of ‘ego-death’, his framework provides a plausible explanatory approach to such phenomena. From his perspective, the chemically induced disruption in the hermeneutic signifying chain between one’s existence as a subject in relation to the Other might lead to a complete isolation from one to the other. By deactivating the boundary between the self (symbolic) and the external world (real), hallucinogens would lead to the self’s symbolic representation of the world being reflected back upon itself in a quasi-endless loop, moving the experiences of dialoguing with the world into a monologue. This would explain what Matte Bianco (as cited in Rodger 2018) has described as “experiences of infinite affect”. Within this isolated echo chamber, the brain’s psychic forces recursively interact without the moderating presence of the Other, effectively dissolving the ego, which loses its ability to distinguish itself from the synthetic environment it continuously creates. 

Lacan’s approach is not without its limitations. While his framework moves away from the traditional reductive naive realism of neuropsychology, his reliance on Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “prereflective unity of the senses,” which views the senses as a unified, immediate experience of the world, has been heavily criticized for overlooking non-affective/cognitive sensory illusions created by hallucinogens (Rodger, 2018). In a similar vein, this approach offered by Merleau-Ponty has further been criticized by Howes (2022), who argues that while the senses overlap and collaborate, they may also conflict. To that extent, this model offers no explanation for the neurological findings related to conflicting symbolic and direct sensory processing when presented with intra- or multi-sensory contradictions. As a result, it falls short in explaining phenomena such as the perception of vibrating colors and geometric patterns. 

Another significant limitation of Lacan’s framework lies in its reproduction of the European Enlightenment conception of the self—anchored in ideas of privatized subjects and property ownership—which may restrict its relevance across different cultural contexts where such notions of the self are not foundational. Within this model, the self is cast as an inherently active agent that constructs “the symbolic” whilst “the real” is relegated to a passive role within the qualia. Consequently, hallucinogenic visions are not encountered as relational phenomena but are instead internalized, appropriated, and reconfigured into symbolic representations of personal trauma, memory, or one’s own truths (Ingold, 2000). However, this interpretive lens contrasts sharply with ethnographic accounts of ayahuasca drinkers in the Amazon and iboga consumers in West Africa, where such experiences are situated within collective, relational, and ecological frameworks that resist the privatization of experiential knowledge (Rodger, 2018; Fradkin, 2024). In these ontologies, identity is conceived as porous, socially distributed, and composed of various human and non-human agencies in which hallucinogenic experiences are not owned by the individual –or mere projections of the self– but are seen as a dialogue with autonomous, substantial actors (Gearin & Sáez, 2021). 

To deepen our understanding of the meaning, sensation, and experience of hallucinogens—and the hallucinatory phenomena they evoke—this analysis employs a sensorium-based approach that moves beyond the constraints of both neurobiology and Lacanian psychoanalysis. While sharing with Lacan a phenomenological perspective that regards hallucinogenic experiences, whether sensory or non-sensory, as holding the same normative significance as ordinary perception from the viewpoint of the embodied subject (Laura, 2023), the sensorium framework diverges by rejecting the assumption of sensory unity or coherence as a given. Importantly, it further challenges Lacan’s Eurocentric model of a bounded, self-contained subject, instead adopting a conception of the self as porous, relational, and embedded within a broader socio-ecological context. 

The term sensorium, as defined by Walter J. Ong (1991), refers to “the entire sensory apparatus as an operational complex” (p. 28). It describes the dynamic and ongoing perceptual system of the self, emerging from the social and material dialectical interplay between body, mind, and environment. Each of these elements shape and are shaped by the others, generating a continuous dialogue marked by contrasting symmetry, congruence, and contradiction. This interaction gives rise to a holistic phenomenological experience greater than the sum of its parts (Howes, 2010/2021/2022). Within this framework, the sensorium positions the ‘self’ as a composite of multiple agencies—some operating within conscious awareness, others beyond it—situated both inside and outside the physical body (Rodger, 2018). In this view, the “self” is not an autonomous producer of meaning but an emergent phenomenon shaped through ongoing interactions between body, environment, culture, and consciousness. 

Thus, a sensory studies approach, centring on the notion of the sensorium, opens a space for understanding hallucinogens in a way that goes beyond the Aristotelian framework of five discrete senses, reductive neurobiological mapping, and symbolic determinism of psychoanalytic theory –without resorting to pseudoscientific mysticism– by situating brain processes and meaning-making practices within a broader network of perception. It allows for a coherent integration of both the exploratory insights of neurobiology and the interpretive depth of Lacanian psychoanalysis, leading to a more accurate and nuanced reflection of ethnographic accounts of hallucinogen users across diverse cultural and historical contexts (Gearin & Sáez, 2021; Rodger, 2018).

This represents a radical departure from the naive realism often associated with neurobiology and the hermeneutic scope of psychoanalysis, integrating them instead as components of a larger ecology that shapes our biological and spiritual connection to the world. Here, culture and language modulate biology, enabling greater flexibility and reflexivity; as Oliver Sacks eloquently put it, “culture tunes our neurons” (cited in Howes, 2021). This creates a dialectic interplay “between assumed psychological and bodily givens and their culturally constructed representations and contingent personal experience” (Rodger, 2018, p. 80). 

Therefore, hallucinogens are compounds that, once ingested, do more than alter the body’s neural characteristics; they transform the entire Sensorium: the very interplay of body, mind, and environment through which the self is constituted. As such, they disrupt the habitual interactions within these systems that typically generate a coherent and stable qualia and sense of self. Expanding on Oliver Sacks’ insight, hallucinogens “retune” the dialectical relationship between culture and cognitive processes that gives rise to subjectivity, exposing the latent gaps and tensions within this interplay and destabilizing the assumed unity of our sensorium and the subsequent phenomenological experiences of the self.

Notably, a sensory studies approach, foregrounding the notion of the sensorium, affirms and extends the claims made by the aforementioned neurological studies, recognizing that hallucinogenic experiences—such as vibrating colors, geometric patterns, and synesthetic perceptions—can indeed stem from disruptions between factors that typically integrate and regulate intra- and inter-sensory processes and predictive mechanisms (Näätänen et al., 2014). These factors include prior knowledge, intentionality, and culturally shaped cognitive schemas, which normally work together to synthesize sensory input into a generally coherent and actionable perceptual experience (Darriba et al., 2021). Although the brain is naturally susceptible to conflicting interpretations when exposed to counterintuitive intra- and multi-sensory stimuli (Pieszek et al., 2013), hallucinogens’ alterations seem to further destabilize this interpretive system. The result is an increased overlap and interference among perceptual and cognitive maps, producing a sensory overflow marked by subtle perceptual distortions and an intensified affective or aesthetic response. Importantly, these effects are not merely the result of isolated neural misfiring but reflect a broader disruption in the ecological coordination of the sensorium. 

Concurrently, the intensified sensations, surreal narratives, and vivid symbolic imagery frequently reported during hallucinogenic experiences can be understood as arising from a destabilization of the multiplicity, divergence, and underlying contradictions of meanings and ways of sensing that circulate within the ecology of the sensorium. Rather than inducing sensory solipsism, hallucinogens chemically modulate the interplay between cognitive, environmental, and cultural forces that—under ordinary conditions—maintain a dynamic yet generally coherent negotiation of meaning through the continual mediation among various agencies and the harmonization of their idiosyncrasies. With these hallucinogenic alterations, latent tensions and contradictions among these agencies are no longer sublimated but surface into awareness. The resulting hallucinated symbols and affects are therefore not internal fabrications but expressions of a more immediate and less mediated dialogue between embodied memory and the material-social world.

This interpretive reframing clarifies why hallucinatory perception is often experienced as deeply meaningful or revelatory: it is not simply personal or fantastical, but arises from an expanded symbolic interface, where the altered dialectic between sensory agencies allows for previously marginalized constellations of significance to crystallize rather than be silenced in the sensorium (Szabo et al., 2014). In this view, hallucinations are not distortions of perception, but symbolic expressions of a sensory system operating in a different mode, one that foregrounds the multiplicity of agencies and the many contradictory layers of meaning-making in our sensorium (Gearin & Sáez, 2021).

Ultimately, the phenomenon of ‘ego death’ can be understood as a critical point at which the dynamic interplay and shifting balance among the multiple agencies comprising the sensorium overwhelm the usual agential processes that generate and sustain the causal frameworks underpinning the relational distinction between self and world. At this juncture, the co-creation of the “self” amidst the various agencies that compose the sensorium ceases to organize experience around a stable subject-object duality; instead, identity becomes temporarily decentered and diffused across the entire relational field of cognitive, affective, cultural, and environmental forces. Far from signaling the disappearance of selfhood, ego dissolution marks its radical redistribution within this network of interdependent agencies, resulting in an expansive, unbounded, and more spontaneous mode of experience.

It is through the dispensation of the self that hallucinogens can produce the phenomenon described by some researchers as “inducing processes of autognosis” (Høifødt, 2018, p. 5). By decentering the usual relations among agencies that create the agential divide between self and others, hallucinogens allow the self to renegotiate its formulation, opening a distinctive space for deep examination of the complex internal and external agencies that make it up (Preller & Vollenweider, 2016). Such insight, seldom accessible during ordinary consciousness, has been linked to transformative outcomes, including aiding recovery from addiction (Rodger, 2018). However, this dissolution is not inherently cathartic or integrative; it also carries risks of destabilization—manifesting as paranoid, depressive, or other challenging psychic episodes—that reflect struggles in renegotiating the chains underpinning selfhood (Szabo et al., 2014). Therefore, ego dissolution is best understood not as a mere transitional state, but as a reconfiguration of the sensorium’s dialectical interplay, through which the self temporarily gains a more direct, extrasensory mode of engaging with its constitutive forces.

The sensory studies approach, which turns on the notion of the sensorium, fundamentally reorients our understanding of hallucinogenic phenomena by rejecting both neurological reductionism and purely constructivist interpretations. Rather than treating these experiences as malfunctions or projections, this framework reveals how psychedelics temporarily reconfigure the entire perceptual apparatus: the dynamic, culturally-mediated system through which we negotiate self and reality. By disrupting the habitual equilibrium between sensory modalities, cognitive frameworks, and environmental inputs, these substances expose the sensorium’s normally invisible operations, laying bare the contingent processes of world-making.

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