In August 2026, Nature published a study by Devon Stoliker, Anil Seth, Robin Carhart-Harris, Katrin Preller, and colleagues on the dynamics of brain activity under psilocybin. The researchers compared brain activity during rest, meditation, music listening, and film viewing.
The result was more complex than the familiar claim that psychedelics simply increase brain entropy or neural disorder.
Under psilocybin, the usual segregation of large functional brain networks did indeed decrease. At the same time, however, brain dynamics became more strongly shaped by the immediate context—by what a person was doing and experiencing at that moment. This effect was especially pronounced in participants who reported a stronger dissolution of the boundary between themselves and the environment.
The researchers describe this experience using the term embeddedness: the person no longer experiences themselves as clearly separate from the environment, but as part of a connected whole.
By itself, this finding has nothing to do with psychological typology. Nevertheless, it is interesting to compare it with the way Carl Gustav Jung described extraversion.
Extraversion in Jung
In popular psychology, extraversion is often understood simply as sociability, openness, or greater interest in the external world. Jung’s original concept is much more radical.
In Psychological Types, Jung associates the extraverted attitude with such a predominance of the object that the subject becomes increasingly dependent on it. In one passage he speaks of a “complete absorption in reality”. Elsewhere he describes extreme dependence on the object as complete exteriorization of the conscious process and as an identity of subject and object, in which the very possibility of knowledge disappears.
Thus, in Jung, the extreme form of extraversion is not merely a stronger orientation toward the external world, but fusion with the object, absorption in the object, and ultimately the disappearance of the ego.
This is precisely why the recent psilocybin study is so interesting.
More Disorder—or Greater Dependence on Context?
If the dissolution of the boundary between self and environment is accompanied by weaker segregation among functional brain networks, it is easy to describe this as an increase in disorder.
But the study by Stoliker and colleagues shows something else at the same time: this “disorder” is not random. Brain dynamics become more strongly aligned with the particular external and internal context.
In other words, one form of organization decreases—the system’s usual internal segregation—while another form increases: organization relative to the environment.
This makes it possible to formulate the question differently.
Perhaps higher entropy in certain states of consciousness does not simply mean a loss of order. It may also reflect an increase in the number of contents and relations from the environment that can enter the current psychic process.
Extraversion and the Relevance of Content
In the model of consciousness proposed here, extraversion and introversion differ neither in sociability nor in the direction of some “psychic energy”.
Under the introverted attitude, content from the environment is selected according to whether it is relevant to the subject.
Under the extraverted attitude, the psyche can also admit environmental content that is not directly relevant to the subject.
The psychic content of an extravert may therefore potentially be broader and more strongly dependent on the immediate context. Consciousness includes not only what is related to the subject’s needs and state, but also content that exists in the environment independently of such relevance.
This leads to the following hypothesis:
Increased context sensitivity under conditions of a weakened boundary between self and environment may be accompanied by greater variability of psychic and neural content—not because the system simply becomes more chaotic, but because it becomes more permeable to environmental content.
Such a state does indeed resemble Jung’s description of extraversion, including its extreme form in which the subject is absorbed into the object.
But Psilocybin Does Not “Produce” Extraversion
An important limitation is necessary here.
The study by Stoliker and colleagues investigates a temporary altered state of consciousness induced by psilocybin. Jungian extraversion is a psychological attitude. These are different levels of description.
The study therefore does not show that psilocybin “makes a person extraverted”, nor that neural entropy is a biological measure of extraversion.
What is being proposed is only a structural similarity:
A weakening of the boundary between subject and environment is accompanied by a stronger dependence of internal dynamics on environmental context.
This similarity nevertheless makes it possible to formulate an empirically testable hypothesis for psychological typology:
If the extraverted attitude really means greater openness of the psyche to environmental content, then extraverts should show greater context-dependent variability of psychic content and less filtering of that content according to its relevance to the subject.
The difference between extraversion and introversion could then be investigated not with questions such as “Do you enjoy parties?”, but by examining which contents enter consciousness when the environment changes and which contextual changes reorganize psychic activity.
Modern neuroscience may therefore be leading us, unexpectedly, back toward a far more radical concept of extraversion than the one that has become common in popular psychology.
Source
Stoliker D. et al. Psychedelics align brain activity with context. Nature, 2026.