I was scheduled for three sublinguals ketamine Dosing sessions at the retreat soon to be run by my mentor in the psychedelic world, Jane Gumpel. After the first two, which were deeply meaningful, I felt like I got what I needed. I started to feel the pull guilt I spent days exploring my inner mind because my two little children needed their mother. Part of me wondered if it was self-indulgent to keep going. When I said this, Jane replied, “If you do yourself a favor this time, you’ll be doing them a favor.”
I stayed – and the third dosing session turned out to be one of the most important experiences of my professional life.
Struggling with guilt, shameand, uneasily, I expected ketamine to intensify these feelings. This has often been my experience with more than one glass of wine shameself-awareness and mental fog. Given this scope, I thought the dose would feel similarly disconnected and less cognitively sharp. Instead, I experienced something completely different: Spiritual clarity.
Find a connection
The retreat participants gathered for lunch after the third dosing session, and although I was starving, I wasn’t looking forward to the social interaction. I expected to feel awkward, self-conscious, and self-absorbed, but that wasn’t the case when the other contestant was sitting next to me. Not only did I not feel embarrassed or foggy, but I was able to listen to everything he said. I could take in his words, hold them tight, process them, think about them, and respond thoughtfully. Instead of waiting my turn to speak or being preoccupied with self-consciousness, I engaged with his ideas wholeheartedly.
I felt like I had more time: more time to think and process, more time before distractions took me away. The most surprising thing was that I knew less about myself. I was less concerned with my voice, how I came across, whether I answered correctly, or how I was perceived. Instead, mine attention was directed outward – to the conversation itself. To concepts. Towards meaning. Towards connection. Perhaps for the first time, I could observe the enormous cognitive load imposed by self-control.
Freeing oneself from internal distractions
As neuropsychologists, we often think of attention difficulties as a failure to concentrate, to perform memoryor executive control. But sitting at that lunch table, I began to wonder if another form of distraction was just as important: internal distraction. How much attention does self-awareness consume? How much working memory is occupied by observing ourselves? How much information is lost as cognitive resources are constantly diverted to narrative, evaluation, criticism, and self-defense?
The experience made me question whether there are many attention difficulties, including those described as adults. ADHD– can be understood as an internal distraction disorder, at least in some people. It’s not just a distraction from the outside world, it’s a self-distraction.
After-effects of ketamine appeared to reduce, if not temporarily eliminate, this internal noise. To this day, I don’t fully understand why. Was it neuroplasticity? Is activity on self-reported networks down? Enhanced cognitive flexibility? Or is it a temporary escape from the usual methods of self-control? I can’t say for sure. All I knew was that I felt like a different cognitive being.
The change manifested itself not through a formal test, but through a conversation – a very demanding cognitive task that requires attention, working memory, processing speed, inhibition, social activity. to knowand executive activity. Over the course of several hours, these processes seemed more efficient, more fluid, and less vulnerable to distraction.
How long do the effects of ketamine last?
The experiment lasted all day, but its biggest effect was not a temporary cognitive change. It was the realization that this version of myself existed, that there was a way of processing information that was not dominated by self-awareness.
I had never realized that attention could be relaxed or that perception could feel expansive. The problem is not the lack of opportunities, but what can eat up those opportunities. In many ways, the lunch conversation was the birth of my concept cognitive ketamine.
The question now was whether ketamine would reduce or not depression or worry. The question is whether ketamine can create a temporary cognitive state in which people can directly experience other relationships with attention, distraction, self-control, and information processing.
The most profound effect for me was not what ketamine added; it was what he took away. And without this constant internal interference, I saw how my mind works when I am free to do what I am meant to do.
