Latest / R: On Everything / Why Your Brain May Need More Chaos
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- 0:25At the intersection of technology, publishing, leadership, and culture, I'm Ryan R. Campbell, and this is R on Everything. In this episode, we'll explore entropy and why your brain may need more chaos. Entropy has a bad reputation. Ordinarily, we associate entropy with decay: the ramshackle barn collapsing into the earth, the neglected water heater finally giving out, the once-simple workflow accumulating exception after exception until no one remembers how it achieved such discombobulation. From this perspective, it seems that bad reputation is well-deserved: given enough time, everything drifts towards disorder. To be fair, this distillation of entropy is near enough to the scientific concept to be recognizable, but it wouldn't be precise enough to satisfy a physicist. In thermodynamics, for example, entropy concerns the number of possible microscopic arrangements available to a system. Over in information theory, it measures uncertainty or unpredictability. Elsewhere, neuroscientists use the word still in other ways, often to describe the diversity or complexity of brain activity. These meanings aren't interchangeable, but they share an idea useful beyond their original disciplines— namely, that a system can occupy more possible states than the one it occupies now. This is a frightening prospect. We build routines, institutions, identities, and explanations partly to reduce the number of possibilities confronting us. As we accumulate experience, we become increasingly capable of relying on top-down processing. We have enough data to form reasonably reliable hypotheses about the world, allowing prior knowledge to guide how we interpret what we encounter. Often, this comes as a relief. Order makes the world manageable. It helps us coordinate with one another, preserve what works, and avoid reconsidering every decision every day. But even order has its shortcomings and modes of failure. One example of this is the notion that a system can become so committed to maintaining its present arrangement that it loses the ability to imagine another. Eventually, what was once stability transforms more meaningfully into rigidity. Consistency becomes repetition. the system's coherence becomes a prison. Sometimes the problem is not that everything is falling apart, it's that everything is being held together too tightly. This brings me to the order of depression. Mental illness is often approached as though it were a form of chaos. Someone is disordered, their thoughts are disorganized, their emotions out of control. And I can attest to the fact that mental illness can feel chaotic, but depression, at least in my experience of it, can also feel oppressively Orderly. The same thoughts travel the same routes and arrive at the same conclusions. The future is interpreted through a negative outlook on the past. New information is admitted only long enough to be translated into evidence for what the mind already believes. Nothing will change. You will always feel this way. You have tried before. This is simply who you are. Depression reduces an enormous world to a handful of fixed propositions. Its conclusions may be painful, but they're also remarkably stable. The depressed mind does not necessarily lack order; it may suffer instead from too much of a particular kind. This— and prepare for the sharp left turn here— is part of what makes recent research into psilocybin-assisted therapy so intriguing. Psilocybin is the psychedelically active compound found in certain species of mushroom. After it enters the body, it's converted into psilocin, the active metabolite primarily responsible for its psychedelic effects. In clinical settings, generally accompanied by preparation, psychological support, and follow-up care, psilocybin has shown promise as a treatment for depression, including some cases in which conventional treatments have failed. I should say here that the collection of evidence is ongoing, and psilocybin doesn't help everyone. Its risks are real, and tightly controlled trials shouldn't be confused with unsupervised use, but the results are significant enough to demand serious attention. What's most fascinating about the positive results of these therapies isn't whether psilocybin and psilocin can help, but how they help. The research suggests psilocybin temporarily alters the brain's usual patterns of communication. Networks that ordinarily operate within relatively stable boundaries become less segregated, established hierarchies of activity loosen, and some measurements show an increase in the diversity or unpredictability of brain signals— a rise in what researchers call brain entropy. One influential framework known as RBUS, which stands for Relaxed Beliefs Under Psychedelics, proposes that psychedelics reduce the authority of our high-level assumptions. Related research has examined changes to the default mode network, a collection of interconnected brain regions associated with self-referential thought, autobiographical reflection, and our internally narrated sense of self. It'd be too tidy to simply call this Freud's ego, but there's enough conceptual overlap to make the comparison tempting. Another way of looking at this is through the lens of what Aldous Huxley described as the mind's reducing valve. Huxley's phrase was philosophical rather than neuroscientific, but the metaphor is useful. The brain filters an overwhelming supply of stimuli, admitting only what it deems necessary for our evaluatory consciousness to, well, evaluate. As a result, we're constantly using prior experience to predict what we're encountering, and this is normally efficient. Without these filters, every moment would overwhelm us with waves of sensory input. However, the same machinery that makes our experiences manageable can also make them inescapable. When our highest-level beliefs become too rigid, I am worthless. The world is hostile. Nothing I do matters. They shape the interpretation of everything beneath them. Contradictory evidence can be filtered out before it has a chance to register. In other words, Huxley's reducing valve has become hyperactive, minimizing any evidence that might challenge the narratives in which we become trapped. Psilocybin, by altering communication among areas of the brain that ordinarily operate within more stable boundaries, may temporarily loosen those beliefs. To borrow Huxley's metaphor, it opens the reducing valve, allowing information that might ordinarily be suppressed to rise into awareness. As a result of this awareness, familiar mental paths lose some of their gravitational pull. The mind becomes capable, at least for a time, of occupying states that its existing organization had made difficult to reach. I should clarify here that the treatment doesn't replace one belief with another; it weakens the certainty that the present arrangement is the only possible one. In other words, it introduces entropy. None of this is to say that disorder is the cure. It'd be tempting to stop there and conclude that disorder, yeah, is healing on its own, but for as much as entropy creates possibilities, it does not choose among them. A psychedelic experience can be beautiful, frightening, clarifying, confusing, or all of these at once. A person may encounter an insight without knowing how to incorporate it into ordinary life. A mind can become more flexible without automatically reorganizing itself into a healthier form. This is why integration matters. The experience may interrupt an old pattern, but interruption is not transformation. The moment of revelation must eventually become a conversation, a boundary, a habit, a changed environment, or a repaired relationship, or a different choice. Otherwise, the old system remains waiting, and once the disturbance passes, it can pull everything back into its familiar arrangement. The same is true of nearly every disruption we experience. A crisis can reveal that our way of living is unsustainable. A loss can expose what we had mistaken for permanence. A period of burnout can make it impossible to continue honoring commitments that have long since stopped honoring us. But breakdown alone is not inherently a breakthrough. It would be cruel to insist that suffering is valuable simply because something can sometimes be learned from it. Many forms of disorder are only destructive. A collapsing bridge doesn't become wiser. A person in crisis doesn't owe the world a redemptive interpretation of what happened to them. Still, when disruption has already occurred, restoring the old order is not always the healthiest possible objective. Sometimes the old order helped produce the crisis. The work, then, isn't to celebrate the collapse. It's to notice what the collapse made visible and to resist rebuilding the very structure that could no longer hold. Turning away from the human mind and to organizations, it's true that they have their own methods of reducing uncertainty. For example, organizations create policies, processes, hierarchies, job descriptions, strategic plans, performance measures, approval chains, and governance structures. The existence of these policies and procedures does not make an organization inherently dysfunctional. On the contrary, much of this work is simply how groups of people coordinate work at a scale that goodwill and improvisation alone cannot support. The trouble begins, however, when maintaining the structure becomes more important than attending to reality. A process that once solved a problem becomes the way things are done. A metric becomes a substitute for the outcome it was meant to represent. A reporting structure preserves the authority of people whose knowledge is increasingly distant from the work. Employees learn which truths the organization can comfortably absorb and which ones must be translated into more acceptable language. Despite this decay, the organization may remain extremely orderly. Meetings happen, reports circulate, dashboards— so many dashboards— stay green. Every required box is checked. But none of this means that the system remains capable of responding to the world outside it. This is why organizations need some amount of entropy. They need places where existing assumptions can weaken and new possibilities can enter. A pilot program introduces entropy. So does a dissenting employee, a cross-functional team, a prototype, a reorg, an unexpected customer behavior, or a technology that makes yesterday's process newly absurd. Each disturbs the established arrangement. Each creates information the existing system may not know how to accommodate. Building on the idea of a dissenting employee, yes, workplace resistance can perform this same function. When leaders introduce automation or artificial intelligence, they often regard employee discomfort as a communications problem, and they're not always wrong about this. Sometimes their communication is genuinely shoddy, and this is a problem. It's too easy, though, to treat pushback as a communications problem. When it's assumed that restlessness is a result of insufficient comms, the solution is another presentation about the future, another assurance that the work will become more efficient, another reminder that adaptation is inevitable. But resistance is information. It may reveal that employees are defending not merely a collection of tasks, but a craft through which they have built competence, identity, community, and pride. It may expose risks the people closest to the work can see more clearly than the people commissioning its transformation. It may tell us that the organization has mistaken faster production for better work, or reduced human judgment to an inefficiency waiting to be engineered away. That doesn't mean resistance should always prevail, but it does mean that a healthy organization permits resistance to disturb its assumptions. And leaders who are too eager to restore order may eliminate the very feedback that could help the system adapt intelligently. A system with too little order can't coordinate itself. A system with too much order can't change. This tension appears everywhere. A creative practice needs discipline, but discipline without experimentation produces repetition. A relationship needs stability, but stability without honesty becomes performance. And a career needs continuity, but if you have that continuity without reconsideration, that just becomes inertia. You, as a person, need coherence, but if you have coherence with absolutely no flexibility, You've become confined. So the goal isn't chaos. It's a system capable of approaching disorder without being destroyed by it. We need a system that's able to loosen, learn, and organize itself again. Some might see this as a definition of resilience. And we often describe resilience as the ability to return to normal. The resilient person gets back on their feet. The resilient organization resumes operations. The resilient community rebuilds what was damaged. But returning to normal is not always enough. Normal may have been brittle. Normal may have distributed suffering invisibly. Normal may have depended on assumptions the disruption has now disproved. With that in mind, perhaps resilience is better understood as the capacity to establish a new order from what disorder reveals. That requires both openness and discipline. We have to permit just enough uncertainty for new information to reach us, then do the harder work of deciding what to build from it. Entropy without integration leaves us scattered. Order without entropy leaves us stuck. Growth requires both. We spend much of our lives trying to get everything into place. We establish routines, we find explanations, we decide who we are and what the world is like. We build organizations around what's worked before, and every successful adaptation becomes part of the architecture through which we meet the future. This is necessary. We can't live in a state of permanent reconsideration. That said, no arrangement remains adequate forever. The identity that once protected us may eventually constrain us. The process that enabled growth may later prevent it, and the belief that helped us survive one season may keep us from recognizing that the season has changed. Something must occasionally disturb the system. Sometimes we get to choose that disturbance: a new experience, a difficult conversation, an experiment, or a deliberate departure from routine. And sometimes that disturbance arrives without permission: illness, loss, technological change, institutional failure, or the sudden realization that a life we have successfully maintained is not the one we still wish to inhabit. We don't have to romanticize these disruptions to learn from them. We can instead ask what possibilities have become visible now that the old arrangement has loosened. What information can reach us now that certainty has weakened? Which beliefs deserve to be rebuilt and which should be allowed to remain in ruins? The lesson of entropy, then, isn't that everything falls apart. We already knew that. The more hopeful lesson is that falling apart is not the only thing systems do. Given energy, openness, and care, they also reorganize. They discover configurations that were previously unavailable to them. They produce new forms of order not by preserving themselves unchanged, but by responding to what change has taught them. In this way, wisdom may lie not in choosing order over entropy, but in learning when to preserve a structure, when to let it loosen, and how to build again from what disorder reveals. Thanks for listening. You can read essays like this, subscribe to the publication, and find more from R on Everything at roneverything.com. Until next time, I'm Ryan R. Campbell. Onward, upward, and keep curious. Audio assets for R on Everything are made in collaboration with ElevenLabs. 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