The Geometry of Recovery: Accessibility Expansion, Insight, and Adaptive Change

Summary

Psychedelic compounds like psilocybin are linked to increased neural entropy and psychological flexibility, but their relationship with adaptive recovery is unclear. This paper suggests that accessibility is a crucial factor, arguing that psychedelics expand the set of reachable future possibilities. Insight is seen as recognizing these new trajectories, while recovery involves regaining access to previously constrained pathways. The study redefines psychedelic change as a process of expanding accessibility followed by exploration and stabilization.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Psychedelic research has repeatedly linked compounds such as psilocybin to increased neural entropy, reduced network modularity, enhanced psychological flexibility, insight, and sustained improvements in well-being. Yet the relationship among these phenomena remains poorly specified. Entropy, plasticity, relaxed priors, and network reorganization describe important features of psychedelic states, but they do not fully explain why perturbation sometimes produces adaptive recovery rather than disorganization. This paper proposes that the missing explanatory variable is accessibility. Building on Persistence Geometry, this paper argues that adaptive systems are governed not only by what futures are possible, but by which futures remain reachable, viable, and recoverable from a given position within a landscape of possibilities. From this perspective, entropy is not the therapeutic outcome. It is a perturbative mechanism capable of temporarily reorganizing accessibility structure. Psychedelic perturbation may expand the set of reachable trajectories, allowing systems to explore futures that were previously inaccessible under ordinary constraints. Within this framework, insight is interpreted not as the acquisition of new information, but as the recognition of newly reachable trajectories. Psychological flexibility reflects expanded access to multiple viable futures. Recovery occurs when systems regain access to viable pathways that had become constrained, collapsed, or unreachable. This interpretation reframes psychedelic change as a process of accessibility expansion followed by exploration, selection, and stabilization. The framework also clarifies why increased entropy alone is insufficient. Adaptive change requires perturbation to remain bounded by viability and recoverability constraints; otherwise, exploration becomes destabilization rather than recovery. By linking entropy, flexibility, insight, and recovery through the geometry of reachable futures, this paper offers a unified account of psychedelic-assisted adaptive change and proposes a broader theory of recovery as restored reachability within persistence landscapes.

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