How Psilocybin Rewires the Mind Toward Feeling
By Liddya Plenis — Magic Mushrooms Integration Coach & Contributing Writer at Magic Mush
The Part of You That Starts to Sing
Something strange happens about an hour in.
Words stop lining up the way they used to. Sentences unravel mid-thought. Music starts to feel like it’s pouring directly into your chest. You notice colour in the way leaves move. You laugh, then cry, and you can’t explain why — only that it feels truer than anything you’ve said in months.
On my first deep psilocybin journey, I remember trying to explain what I was feeling and hearing myself give up. I couldn’t narrate it. I could only hum. It felt like some buried part of me — soft, childlike, alive — had just sat up inside my body and begun to sing.
At the time, I thought this was “the mystical part.”
Now I know it was also neurological.
Because science is starting to reveal what that feeling actually is:
a temporary hemispheric shift — from the hyper-verbal, analytical left brain to the emotional, sensory, symbolic right.
Left vs Right: A Brief Brain Map
We talk about “left brain vs right brain” like it’s a pop-psych cliché, but the distinction matters — not as rigid categories, but as tendencies.
The left hemisphere loves structure. It handles logic, language, planning, analysis. It builds linear stories, categorises, critiques, compares. It’s where your inner narrator lives — and often, your inner critic. This is the part of the mind that loops on to-do lists at 3AM or replays conversations to search for flaws.
The right hemisphere is a different kind of knowing.
It processes emotion, music, imagery, intuition, relational awareness, and bodily sensation. It sees patterns instead of pieces, meaning instead of metrics. It holds the felt-sense of your life — the hum beneath the words.
Both sides are vital. But modern life over-trains the left. From school to work to social media, we’re rewarded for producing, evaluating, and articulating — not for listening, feeling, or simply being.
The cost is subtle but profound:
when the left dominates, people become anxious, ruminative, and disconnected from their own bodies.
When the right is allowed to speak, they feel more whole — more human.
What Psilocybin Does to the Brain
This is where psilocybin enters like a key.
Brain imaging studies (Carhart-Harris et al., 2012 & 2014) have shown that psilocybin reduces activity in the Default Mode Network (DMN) — the cluster of brain regions responsible for self-referential thought, rumination, and identity maintenance. That’s the left hemisphere’s command centre. When it quiets, something else stirs.
Blood flow and connectivity increase across the brain. The right anterior insula and medial prefrontal cortex — both involved in emotional processing and self-awareness — light up. Brain entropy rises, meaning regions that rarely communicate begin talking freely.
Pull-quote:
“Psilocybin doesn’t erase your thinking mind — it lets your feeling mind finally lead.”
This explains the emotional vividness of journeys.
Right-brain auditory-emotional circuits become hyper-responsive to music, which is why people so often burst into tears from a single chord. Symbolic processing ramps up, which is why insights arrive as images, metaphors, or entire mythologies instead of neat sentences.
Researchers at Ohio State have described this in the HEALS model (Dr. Adam Levin): psilocybin temporarily reduces rigid left-brain control, allowing right-brain functions — compassion, intuition, creativity — to re-emerge.
You don’t become someone else.
You become the parts of yourself that the left brain had been drowning out.
Why This Matters for Healing
Most of our deepest wounds don’t live in language.
They live in sensation.
Trauma imprints are stored in the body and right hemisphere as flashes of feeling, tension, image, or sound — not as verbal stories. That’s why you can understand your trauma logically yet still be hijacked by it somatically.
Psilocybin’s quieting of the left and awakening of the right creates a rare opening:
Repressed emotional material can surface without being immediately analysed or judged. You can feel what you couldn’t say. Grieve what you never got to name.
This isn’t “losing control.”
It’s regaining access to capacities you had to exile to survive.
It’s why so many people describe journeys not as “trippy,” but as profoundly humanising.
The right brain brings emotion back online.
It lets the tears fall and the body soften.
It allows awe, wonder, meaning, and love to return — not as concepts, but as sensations.
When that happens, healing stops being something you figure out.
It becomes something you feel your way through.
Bringing the Right Brain Back Into Daily Life
The most powerful part of this work is what happens after.
Because right-brain states are fleeting unless you nourish them.
Integration means not just processing what you saw — but keeping the channel open.
Here are practices I use myself and offer to clients to help the “feeling mind” stay alive between journeys:
- Intentional music listening — Eyes closed, full attention in your body. Let your nervous system move with the sound.
- Somatic practices — Yoga, slow walks, sensory grounding, gentle swaying. Anything that bypasses words and brings you into sensation.
- Visual journalling — Draw emotions as colours or shapes before trying to describe them.
- Dream tracking — Keep a notebook by your bed; dreams are raw right-brain material.
- Nonverbal check-ins — Pause and ask your body, How do you feel? before asking your mind What do you think?
The left brain is not the enemy. It’s the scaffolding.
Use it to create structure — schedules, rituals, prompts — that lets your right brain breathe.
Pull-quote:
The left gives form. The right gives life. Integration is where they learn to dance again.
When the Feeling Mind Comes Home
Culturally, we’ve been living half a brain.
We’ve built civilisations from logic and spreadsheets and left-brain grit — but quietly starved the part of us that weeps at a song, that feels truth in our bones before we can explain it.
Psilocybin doesn’t give you new feelings.
It gives you back the ones you buried to survive.
This is why journeys feel like coming home.
Not because they make you escape the world,
but because, for a few sacred hours,
they let your whole mind return to you.
And once that happens,
you don’t need to live split in half anymore.
You can let your right brain sing again —
not just in journeys,
but here,
now,
in your everyday life.
—
Liddya Plenis is a Magic Mushrooms Integration Coach and a contributing writer at Magic Mush. She supports people in weaving psychedelic insights back into daily life with compassion, grounding, and curiosity.
