Colloquium Meetings 2026-2027
Mette Leonard Høeg
20 November 2026
Learning from tripping and learning from reading
Abstract: In recent years, researchers have begun to seriously debate the common intuition that psychedelic experiences have epistemic benefits and explore what the epistemic characteristics might look like. In this paper, I propose that this relatively new scholarly discussion about learning from psychedelic experience can benefit from interaction with an older scholarly discussion about learning from literary experience. There are significant parallels between the two domains, and people who read imaginative fiction and people who have transformative psychedelic experiences both report gaining new knowledge of a deep kind which typically is consistent with naturalism and seems irreducible to new factual or propositional knowledge.
To illustrate this idea, I apply some ideas about the transformative epistemic potential of literature to the epistemic analysis of psychedelic experience with emphasis on an important commonality: both psychedelic experience and imaginative literature can facilitate a shift from 'head' knowledge to 'heart' knowledge. I explore two common and interrelated mechanisms that may underlie this shift, namely altered modes of attention and the deployment of new or under-used representational styles in the engagement with the perceived content.
The paper is both an articulation of a specific set of proposals and a call for pursuit of a general research agenda. Poetics and aesthetics are already significantly influencing our understanding of psychedelics and present, if often unnoticed, in psychedelic research and treatment. The paper is part, then, of a broader argument that poetics are crucial for understanding and mapping the phenomenology and epistemology of psychedelic experiences.
Bio: Mette Leonard Høeg, PhD, is a writer and academic visitor at the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics and associated fellow at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing, University of Oxford. With a background in literature, narrative theory and philosophy, her work focuses on the ethical and existential dimensions of modern consciousness research with a special interest in the potential of psychedelics for human wellbeing. She is the author of Uncertainty and Undecidability in Twentieth Century Literature and Literary Theory (Routledge, 2022). Her paper 'The Value of Literature for Consciousness Research and Ethics' was published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (2024). She is co-editor of the special issue of Neuroethics Interdisciplinary perspectives on consciousness (2025). She has also published extensively on neurophilosophical and -existential issues in various public media and magazines, including Psyche and Aeon. She is currently working on an antitheoretical book with the working title Hallucinationer.