Art as a Neuroplastogen

Psychedelics work by flooding the brain with prediction errors — and this paper argues you can get the same effect from art, music, and live performance.

The core idea is simple. Your brain is constantly predicting what comes next and measuring the gap between prediction and reality. When that gap — the prediction error — is large and structured (not just noise), the brain updates its model of the world. Psychedelics like psilocybin exploit this by chemically loosening the brain's high-level assumptions, letting prediction errors propagate freely and reshaping entrenched patterns of thought. The paper's claim is that the chemistry is incidental. What matters is the computational regime it produces, and that regime can be reached through other doors.

The framework is called Kolmogorov Theory (KT), which treats the brain as a compression engine: it earns its keep by finding short descriptions of its sensory stream. There's a "Goldilocks zone" of prediction-error complexity — not so simple that nothing updates, not so chaotic that nothing compresses. Stimuli that keep the brain in this zone for sustained periods should open a genuine plasticity window, the same kind that makes psychedelic therapy work. The paper's digital therapeutic platform, ENAKD/Tx, operationalizes this for adolescent depression: generative algorithmic visuals are steered in real time by a low-channel EEG reading three biomarkers (valence, arousal, and neural complexity), keeping the user in the Goldilocks band via a feedback controller.

The paper then extends this logic to music and live performance. Tonal music is already a prediction-error machine — it sets up harmonic expectations and then confirms or violates them in controlled ways. Inside ENAKD/Tx, the harmonic tension of Bach's BWV 846 already modulates the visual chaos level. More ambitiously, the paper describes a live performance format (from an unpublished presentation by G. Foffani in Rome) that deliberately walks an audience from high-complexity chaos through the Goldilocks zone to harmonic resolution. The claim is that this arc — structured dissonance collapsing into coherence — produces phenomenology that standard psychedelic questionnaires (the 5D-ASC and MEQ-30) score in territory normally reserved for moderate doses of psilocybin or LSD, with no drug involved.

The paper closes with concrete, inexpensive experiments to test this: within-subject comparisons across all three modalities using the same EEG montage and questionnaires, a closed-loop vs. open-loop ENAKD/Tx test, and a control performance using atonal noise to check whether harmonic structure is the active ingredient or just decoration. The umbrella prediction is falsifiable: if harmonic structure doesn't matter, or if the EEG complexity signatures don't align across modalities, the theory is wrong. The practical upside if it holds is significant — live performance scales to large groups, needs no headset, and has no pharmacology to regulate.