Qualifies· weakORCH-E033
Carhart-Harris 2012: vivid reported experience alongside decreased blood flow and BOLD signal
- what the source states
- Arterial spin labelling and BOLD fMRI before and after intravenous psilocybin found only decreases in cerebral blood flow and BOLD signal, maximal in hub regions such as the thalamus, while subjects reported intense subjective experience.
- what we infer
- Proponents cite this dissociation as evidence that rich conscious content need not track metabolic expenditure — relevant to the claim that consciousness is the metabolically cheap part rather than the expensive membrane machinery. The inference is weaker than the citation suggests: reduced hemodynamic signal in hub regions is a change in network dynamics, not a measurement of the energetic cost of experience, and the authors themselves draw an entropy/network interpretation with no quantum content. Recorded because the observation is real and load-bearing for one side's argument, and because its limits should be on the record next to it.
- limitations
- A psychedelic state, not anesthesia — its bearing on anesthetic mechanism is indirect at best.
- The authors' own interpretation is network/entropy-based and makes no claim about quantum processes or metabolic accounting for consciousness.