My academic background is in the neuroscience of motivation and cognitive control: how people decide whether to engage mental effort, what makes cognitive work feel costly, and why we sometimes avoid difficult tasks even when we are capable of doing them.
This perspective shapes how I think about psychedelics.
Much of the current conversation around psychedelics focuses on their effects on mood, depression, trauma, and subjective experience. These are important outcomes. But psychedelics may also change something more basic: how people allocate cognitive effort. In other words, they may not simply make people “think better.” They may change what feels meaningful enough to think hard about.
Cognitive control is not one thing
Cognitive control refers to the set of mental processes that allow us to pursue goals: holding information in mind, inhibiting impulsive responses, shifting between rules, and adapting to changing demands. These abilities are often measured using laboratory tasks like working memory tests, inhibition tasks, or cognitive flexibility tasks.
But there is an important distinction that is often missed.
There is a difference between cognitive control capacity and motivation for cognitive control.
Capacity refers to what a person can do once they are engaged. Motivation refers to whether they are willing to engage that effort in the first place.
This distinction matters clinically. Many people with depression, anxiety, anhedonia, or apathy may retain the ability to perform a task, but experience the task as overwhelmingly effortful, unrewarding, or not worth starting. The problem is not always raw ability. Sometimes the problem is the internal cost-benefit calculation that determines whether effort feels worthwhile.
That distinction has been central to my prior work on motivation for cognitive control, and it offers a useful way to reinterpret how psychedelics affect cognition.
The puzzle: acute impairment, later flexibility
Classic psychedelics such as psilocybin and LSD often impair cognitive performance during the acute drug state. People may show slower reaction times, poorer working memory, or reduced inhibitory control. This makes sense: the acute psychedelic state is intense, perceptually altered, emotionally rich, and often internally absorbing.
At the same time, studies also suggest that psychedelics can be associated with later improvements in cognitive flexibility, creativity, insight, and adaptive behavior. This creates an apparent paradox.
How can a drug acutely disrupt cognitive control but later support more flexible, adaptive thinking?
One possibility is that psychedelics do not simply impair and then enhance cognition in a general way. Instead, they may shift the motivational value of different kinds of cognitive engagement.
During the acute state, externally imposed laboratory tasks may feel arbitrary or unimportant compared to the intensity of the internal experience. In that context, reduced task engagement may reflect not only impaired capacity, but also a reallocation of attention and effort toward what feels more salient, emotional, or meaningful.
After the acute effects subside, the same experience may leave people more willing to engage with difficult but meaningful goals. This would look like improved flexibility or renewed goal pursuit, not because raw cognitive capacity has necessarily increased, but because the perceived cost and value of effort have changed.
A motivational model of psychedelic effects
The model I am developing frames psychedelics as modulators of effort valuation.
I call this framework PRISM: Psychedelic Recalibration of Internal Salience and Motivation.
The core idea is that psychedelics may alter the internal valuation of cognitive effort in two related ways:
First, they may reduce the perceived cost of mental effort. If internally directed processes such as rumination, self-referential thought, or rigid narratives become less dominant, then engaging with a task or goal may feel less effortful.
Second, they may increase the salience of meaningful goals. Psychedelic experiences often involve insight, emotional release, shifts in perspective, and a heightened sense of personal meaning. These experiences may make certain goals feel more valuable, more urgent, or more worth pursuing.
Together, these effects could recalibrate the internal cost-benefit calculation that governs whether people engage cognitive control.
In this view, psychedelics are not simply cognitive enhancers. They may be better understood as cognitive-motivational modulators.
Why this matters for psychiatric treatment
This distinction has important implications for mental health.
Many psychiatric symptoms involve difficulty initiating or sustaining goal-directed behavior. Depression, for example, often involves anhedonia, fatigue, indecision, and avoidance. These symptoms are not always best understood as failures of intelligence or cognitive capacity. They may reflect a shift in the perceived cost of effort and the expected value of action.
A person may know what they need to do, and may even be capable of doing it, but still feel unable to begin.
If psychedelics reduce the perceived cost of effort or increase the value of meaningful goals, they may create a temporary window in which people are more willing to engage with difficult emotional, cognitive, or behavioral work. This could help explain why psychotherapy, preparation, integration, intention, and setting are so important. Psychedelics may open a motivational window, but what a person does with that window depends on context.
This also suggests that not everyone would benefit in the same way. Individuals with intact cognitive capacity but high effort avoidance may be especially responsive to psychedelic-assisted interventions. Future research should test this directly.
How we can study this
Most psychedelic cognition studies rely on performance measures such as accuracy and reaction time. These are useful, but they do not tell us whether participants wanted to engage with the task, how effortful it felt, or whether the task felt meaningful under the drug.
To understand psychedelic effects on cognition more precisely, we need paradigms that separate performance from motivation.
For example, effort-based decision-making tasks can ask whether someone chooses a more demanding cognitive task when there is no requirement to do so. Other paradigms can estimate how much reward is needed for someone to choose a difficult mental task over an easier one. These approaches allow us to measure the willingness to exert cognitive effort separately from the ability to perform once engaged.
This is where my background in motivation and cognitive control becomes especially relevant. Psychedelic science needs tools that can distinguish “I cannot do this” from “this does not feel worth doing right now.”
Those are different psychological and neural states.
The brain systems involved
The brain systems most relevant to this model include the anterior cingulate cortex, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and default mode network.
The anterior cingulate cortex is involved in evaluating the expected value of control: whether a task is worth the effort. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex supports the implementation of control once effort is engaged. The default mode network is involved in internally directed cognition, self-referential thought, and narrative processing.
Psychedelics are known to alter large-scale brain network dynamics, including default mode network integrity and communication among control-related systems. Within the PRISM framework, these neural changes may matter because they shift the balance between internal salience, task engagement, and effort valuation.
The key question is not only whether psychedelics increase or decrease activity in a given brain region. The more interesting question is how they change the valuation system that determines when cognitive effort feels worthwhile.
A different way to think about psychedelic therapy
This framework also changes how we think about therapeutic mechanisms.
Psychedelics may not work only by improving mood or producing insight. They may also change the motivational conditions under which effortful psychological work becomes possible.
A difficult conversation, a therapy session, a behavioral change, or a new life goal may all require cognitive control. They require attention, flexibility, inhibition of old habits, and sustained effort. If psychedelics temporarily reduce the cost of engaging these processes, or increase the value of meaningful goals, they may make change feel more possible.
That does not mean psychedelics automatically direct people toward adaptive outcomes. Motivation can be shaped by context. This is why set, setting, therapeutic support, and integration are not secondary details. They may determine which goals become salient and where newly available motivation is directed.
Conclusion
My view is that psychedelics may produce lasting changes not by simply enhancing cognitive capacity, but by altering the motivation to engage cognitive control.
They may change what feels effortful, what feels meaningful, and what feels worth pursuing.
This perspective helps reconcile an important paradox in the literature: psychedelics can acutely disrupt performance on some cognitive tasks while later supporting flexibility, creativity, and adaptive change. Rather than treating these findings as contradictory, we can understand them as evidence that psychedelics alter the valuation of cognitive effort across time and context.
For psychedelic science, this means we need to move beyond asking whether cognition is impaired or enhanced. We need to ask when, why, and for whom cognitive effort becomes worth it.
That question sits at the intersection of psychedelic neuroscience, cognitive control, motivation, and mental health — and it is one of the central questions my lab aims to address.