🫠 Press S to surrender

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that couldn’t get this email to send. So we took it out and blew in the cartridge. Works every time. 🎮

Robin Arnott used to score indie video games that made people grieve, panic, and occasionally pass out. Mercifully, he shifted his focus to healing. His latest brainchild, a biofeedback device called SoundSelf, drops people into unitive states within minutes.

We asked Robin how a piece of hardware can elicit transcendent states of consciousness, which psychedelics pair well with it, and what his Technodelic Manifesto got wrong.

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Our fingers and toes are crossed, Cyclists.

Psilocybin is barreling toward FDA review, and we’d be stoked if it were approved. But there’s this teeny tiny issue…

Compass, the drugmaker pushing psilocybin through the regulatory process, has hinted that their synthetic product will cost roughly $20,000 a dose. And if it is approved, it’ll be for treatment-resistant depression only at launch.

Again, options are great. We’re all for it. But we believe in access for all.

With Althea, natural psilocybin is already available now for adults 21+. You don’t need a diagnosis. Nor do you need 20 grand.

Why did you pivot from game sound design into building technology in the psychedelics space? Did a personal experience inspire that shift?

In the 2010s, a whole art movement happened in gaming. It was a lot like cinema in the 1970s, when talents like Martin Scorsese found an audience for artistic work and totally reshaped the industry. By unbelievable good luck I landed in the middle of it, working with people who used games for radically different ends, including games that evoke grief or meditative states.

As the sound designer, I created the sonic field that subliminally carried the emotional texture of what they were making. I loved it. My favorite work was Antichamber, a brutally difficult puzzle game. I used the sounds of frogs croaking, rainfall, and soft footsteps to relax the mind into the spaciousness that allows lateral thinking to arise.

In my own game, Deep Sea, I experimented in the opposite direction, toward fear. Fear opens up shortcuts in your neurophysiology that let an artist subvert your sense of reality, and I wanted to see how far I could go. In the game, you wear a gas mask that blinds you and tracks your breath while a monster comes after you. The best way to move through it is to dysregulate your breathing. Someone once fainted playing it at South by Southwest. That experience introduced me to the power of the breath from a game design perspective.

Around then I was meditating about three hours a day. At one point, I took a low dose of LSD in a space filled with music. I began toning along with it, and suddenly the music filled with voices that happened to harmonize with mine. I started to identify with those voices, and once that sense of me-ness expanded a little, I slipped into my first non-dual experience.

I came away feeling like I’d been left instructions for using game systems to evoke a state of oneness. That’s when I began work on SoundSelf.

How does SoundSelf work? Can you explain the biofeedback mechanism?

The SoundSelf Suite is a zero-gravity vibroacoustic recliner, with light therapy glasses and music through headphones. You lie back and put on the headgear, and now you've got sound, sight, and the felt sense of vibration all engaged. You're totally sensorially immersed.

Next, a guided meditation relaxes your body and teaches you the toning mechanic. You breathe in and use your whole exhalation to make a tone, something like om-ing. Those long exhalations and shorter inhalations slow you to about three to six breaths per minute, which stimulates the vagus nerve.

As you do that, the voiceover recedes and the music harmonizes around your voice, so it rewards whatever sound you make. The music and the lights both respond to your voice and your breath, and your voice gets recorded, replayed, and sampled into the music as it goes. The whole musical experience becomes a projection of something intimately your own. We typically get people into unitive states within about 15 minutes, without a drug.

The music isn’t pre-programmed. It gets composed live around you in an obfuscated feedback loop, which means you can’t see the mechanism but you do feel it responding to you. It’s designed that way because if you understood how it worked, your linear mind might take over to try to control the experience. That’s the gaming mentality I spent years learning to get people out of. Here what we want is for people to relax and trust.

If this kind of technology can produce psychedelic-like states of consciousness, does it compete with drugs or complement them?

It’s totally complementary. We’re moving out of a psychedelically naive and averse culture, and these medicines are going to play a huge role in shifting how we operate, solve problems, and relate to each other. That requires educating and exposing a lot of people very quickly, and many of them are scared. SoundSelf helps people orient to non-ordinary states and practice surrendering, because the technology inherently trains the surrender response.

Since you’re wearing a piece of technology and not taking a drug, your linear mind can check whether you’re safe. It remembers you’re fully in control, so you relax again. An anxious person might do that ten times a minute, and every time is a rep at feeling safe and letting go. Developing that sense of safety helps people navigate psychedelic states more confidently down the line.

It also pairs well with lower doses, which is how clinics use it alongside Spravato and ketamine. Combined with SoundSelf, ketamine becomes a much higher-order psychedelic that’s more emotional and more of a journey, and it still feels really safe.

SoundSelf has mostly been used around ketamine therapy so far. Do you anticipate needing to update the product to support other medicines as they become more accessible?

It already works extremely well with psilocybin, and it seems to work well with MDMA, which we’re doing more research on. It’s a great preparation for DMT and mescaline-based experiences, though I wouldn’t use it concurrently with them. In all of these cases, it relaxes the mind and roots you in your body, which gives you a foundation for something very deep and very personal.

Psychedelics are always experienced in a sensory context, and there’s a real art to crafting that context. Plenty of concerts and music are designed for MDMA or psilocybin. You can dismiss that fact, or you can take it seriously. I take it seriously. There’s something about these medicines that wants to happen in conjunction with an intentional sensory experience.

Anyone who’s been to a ceremony knows how central the lighting and music are. The rules and ritual matter just as much. For example, if everyone walks around the fire in one direction so their hearts face it, that creates a swirl of energy and reverence.

That’s where my game design background comes in. We’re surrendering to a higher power, but there is a directorial element to how we set the space. When we approach this work with intentionality, expertise, and knowledge, we can do so much more with it.

You called your shot years ago with your Technodelic Manifesto. What have you learned since then that changes how you think about tech-induced altered states?

When I wrote that manifesto, I hadn’t yet taken SoundSelf out of the gaming context and into a therapeutic one. At that point, I was trying to point other game designers toward evoking the numinous and relating to the profound. The shot I called was that virtual reality would broaden consumer gaming technology to include these sorts of things. I was wrong. VR didn’t take off the way I thought it would. But I also never expected the enormous proliferation of psychedelic spaces that would follow.

To me, this moment is the perfect opportunity for technological innovation, because the people going to clinical spaces really need help. Now we have tens of thousands of spaces with people taking psychedelics, and there’s still a gap in knowledge about how to master these medicines. Each of those spaces is a chance to create something better and more powerful. Clinical spaces are also already tracking biological signals for medical reasons, so they’re equipped for immersive biofeedback technology like ours.

A lot of what I wrote still stands, especially the centrality of music and the centrality of the body. The more we engage the parts of our bodies that the linear mind doesn’t control, like breath and heart rate, the more intimacy we’ll find. When we tap into those parts of ourselves, we open ourselves to entirely different horizons of experience and healing.

Want more from Robin?

Reserve the SoundSelf Suite, or read his Technodelic Manifesto.

! UNTIL NEXT TIME !

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

! ONE CYCLIST’S REVIEW !

So, how was your tricycle ride?

Let us know what you thought of this week’s newsletter.

• 🍄🍄🍄🍄🍄 Feeling euphoric
• 🍄🍄🍄 It was okay I guess
• 🍄 What a waste of time

DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.

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