Drug-Free Microdosing And The Fight To Free The Brain From Its Own Myth

At Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam, Garnet Dupuis Argued That The Most Powerful Psychedelic Tool May Not Be A Substance At All

In a conference culture often drawn to molecules, stacks and performance hacks, Garnet Dupuis arrived at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam with a provocation that cut against the grain. Microdosing, he suggested, was never fundamentally about drugs. It was about the brain, its plasticity, its habits, and its capacity to loosen the grip of inherited stories.

Speaking on Saturday, 14 October 2023, in Amsterdam, Dupuis presented Drug-Free Microdosing: Neuroplasticity & The Naturally Psychedelic Brain, a talk that moved between neuroscience, philosophy and lived experience. His thesis was strikingly simple and quietly radical: if the purpose of microdosing is to refresh perception, interrupt rigidity and increase adaptive functioning, then substances are only one route among many. Breathwork, attention, light, sound and carefully structured sensory engagement may also open the door.

“Whatever the state of your brain today, it can be better tomorrow,” Dupuis told the audience.

It was the kind of sentence that could easily sound like summit optimism. But in Dupuis’s hands, it became something more searching: a challenge to the way people understand memory, identity and consciousness itself.

The Personal Myth We Mistake For Reality

At the emotional core of Dupuis’s presentation was a deeply unsettling idea: that much of what people take to be their past is not a stable archive but a continual reconstruction. Memory, he argued, is not a neutral record. It is editorial. It is selective. It is forever being rewritten so that the self can keep telling a coherent story about who it is.

“We all create our own personal myth,” Dupuis said. “We are our own mythic creatures. We try to make our life into a story.”

This was not offered as a poetic flourish. It was central to his theory of why drug-free microdosing matters. If the brain is constantly filtering the present through a version of the past that is both inaccurate and culturally imprinted, then much of daily experience is already compromised before it reaches awareness. The danger is not merely nostalgia or self-deception. It is stagnation. One keeps becoming the sequel to a former self.

Dupuis described this as a kind of slow internal drift, a “glacial slide” back into narratives shaped not only by personal memory but by family, culture and social conditioning. The result, he warned, is that people can mistake repetition for truth and conditioning for identity.

His formulation of trauma made the point especially stark. “In PTSD, the past that has not been processed is constantly pretending to be the present,” he said.

That line landed because it captured something larger than a clinical observation. It named a general human tendency. The unprocessed past does not always remain behind us. Often, it speaks in the voice of now.

Why Dupuis Believed You Cannot Think Your Way Out

Dupuis’s argument rested on a distinction familiar in neuroscience but potent in his telling: the difference between top-down and bottom-up processing.

Top-down cognition, as he described it, is the brain’s predictive machinery. It uses past experience to anticipate what will happen next. This is efficient and often life-preserving. It helps a person avoid danger, navigate the world and make rapid decisions. But it also means the brain is perpetually jumping ahead, using old models to shape current reality.

Bottom-up processing is different. It begins with raw sensory input. It is the stream of present-moment experience arriving before it is fully captured by interpretation. And for Dupuis, this was where genuine change could begin.

He argued that neurological health depends on allowing these bottom-up signals to challenge the authority of top-down assumptions. When sensory experience disrupts established predictions, the brain is forced into what researchers call prediction error. In that moment, rigid beliefs can soften. New learning becomes possible.

That, in essence, was his version of microdosing: not a tiny amount of a chemical, but a strategic nudge to the nervous system that makes old patterns less tyrannical.

“You cannot think your way out of the problem, but you can feel your way into the solution,” he said.

It was a line that neatly reversed the modern instinct to solve consciousness with cognition alone. Dupuis was arguing for the authority of sensation, for the intelligence of the body, and for a model of change that begins not in analysis but in perception.

The Naturally Psychedelic Brain

Dupuis pushed the idea further by reframing psychedelia itself. The psychedelic state, he suggested, should not be treated as alien to the brain. It is not necessarily an intrusion from outside. It may be a latent capacity of the nervous system.

“The brain is naturally psychedelic,” he said, “meaning it is able to manifest a very broad range of fluid qualities of consciousness. Just because a state is uncommon does not make it abnormal.”

This was among the boldest claims in the talk, and perhaps the most revealing. Dupuis was not merely advocating a wellness protocol. He was trying to widen the frame of what counts as normal consciousness. Dreams, altered states, meditative absorption, perceptual shifts induced by sound or flickering light: these were not curiosities at the fringe of the mind, but expressions of capacities the brain already possessed.

In that sense, his project was both demystifying and expansive. Psychedelic possibility did not belong only to the pharmacological domain. It belonged to attention, to sensory design, to the patterned stimulation of the brain and to the after-effects that followed.

Light, Sound And The Battle Against Rigid Belief

Drawing on models such as REBUS, shorthand for relaxing existing beliefs under psychedelics, Dupuis offered his own adaptation of the concept. The key mechanism, he argued, was not the drug itself but the interruption of fixed internal patterns. Any psychoactive agent that reliably softened entrenched beliefs could serve that function. And the most universal of these agents, he suggested, was attention.

“Attention is the most powerful, most reliable psychoactive agent,” he said.

From there, he turned to the practical architecture of his work: bottom-up stimulation using light and sound. Through devices such as the NeuroVizr instruments associated with his work at Lucid Studios and Brain Prime Technology, Dupuis described a method designed to engage the nervous system directly rather than merely instruct the mind from above.

He distinguished this from older forms of brain entrainment, though he acknowledged a lineage that stretched back to Brion Gysin’s “Dream Machine”, an early device that used flickering light to provoke unusual states of consciousness. The larger principle, however, remained the same: sensory stimulation could alter neural dynamics, disrupt habitual patterning and create a condition in which new forms of integration become possible.

For Dupuis, the point was not spectacle. It was honesty. The present moment had to be given enough force to override the brain’s preference for familiar fictions.

The Real Effect Began After The Experience Ended

Perhaps the most arresting part of the talk came when Dupuis insisted that the main benefit of neurological stimulation did not occur during the session itself.

“The real neurological effect and benefit begins when the light and sound end,” he said.

He compared the process to digestion. Eating is only the beginning. Assimilation, integration and use come later. In the same way, a brain-priming session may trigger a window of heightened plasticity, but what matters most is what follows.

Dupuis described a one-to-two-hour period of “hyperplasticity” after stimulation, during which the brain becomes unusually sensitive to information, feeling and internal experience. This was the moment, he urged, not to rush back into ordinary activity, not to check a phone or force the experience into language, but to remain still and attentive.

In that post-stimulation state, he said, people could access a depth of feeling and meditative presence that is often elusive in effort-based practice. The nervous system, primed by sensory engagement, had done some of the work already. The task then was to stay with what emerged.

It was a subtle but important inversion of contemporary biohacking logic. The breakthrough was not in doing more. It was in not interrupting what the brain had already begun.

A Three-Day Rhythm Of Change

Dupuis also tied this integration process to circadian timing, outlining a three-day rhythm that he believed mirrored the logic of conventional microdosing schedules. According to his account, sensitivity rises in waves after the initial stimulus: first in the one-to-two-hour period, then again roughly eight hours later, then again at 24 and 48 hours, each return softer than the last but still significant.

He connected this pattern to the well-known Fadiman protocol, suggesting that what looks like a practical dosing schedule may reflect an underlying neurological cadence. Whether or not every detail of that alignment withstands scientific scrutiny, the conceptual move was revealing. Dupuis wanted microdosing to be understood as a temporal ecology of the brain, not just a consumption habit.

The implication was that integration is not an optional afterthought. It is the process itself.

A More Honest Brain, Not A More Decorated Self

There was something refreshingly unslick about Dupuis’s presentation at Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam. Beneath the language of neuroplasticity and stimulation technology was a moral concern, even a spiritual one. He was less interested in enhancement for its own sake than in freeing perception from distortion. His target was not just poor focus or low mood, but the deeper human tendency to live inside rehearsed narratives.

Drug-free microdosing, in his telling, offered resistance to that pull. It could help keep the self contemporised, adaptive and less beholden to a past that was already partly imagined. It could make room for what he called “objective neural honesty”, a phrase that sounded almost austere in a wellness economy often saturated with promises of transcendence.

Yet that austerity was the strength of the talk. Dupuis did not promise a miracle. He proposed a discipline of perception. Use attention. Trust sensation. Interrupt the sequel. Give the present moment enough power to contest the myth.

For a summit built on the future of human optimisation, it was an unexpectedly humane message. The brain, Dupuis seemed to say, did not need to become someone else. It needed the chance to stop mistaking yesterday’s story for today’s truth.

Frequently asked questions

Why does Garnet Dupuis say microdosing is not about drugs?

Because in his framing the target was never the substance but the brain: its plasticity, its habits and its capacity to loosen the grip of inherited stories. That reframing lets the same work proceed without a molecule at the centre of it.

What is the personal myth?

Dupuis argued that much of what people take to be their past is not a stable archive but a continual reconstruction. Memory is editorial and selective, forever rewritten so the self can keep telling a coherent story about who it is. We all create our own personal myth, he said.

Why can you not think your way out of it?

Because of the difference between top-down and bottom-up processing. Top-down cognition is the brain's predictive machinery, using past experience to anticipate what comes next, which is efficient and often life-preserving but also the thing doing the rewriting.

About the event

This recap is part of the Biohacker Summit 2023 Amsterdam series, recorded in Amsterdam on 14 and 15 October 2023. Read the summary of the whole event or join the next edition, HOLOLIFE Summit 2026 Amsterdam, on 14 and 15 November 2026.