I was scheduled for three sublingual ketamine dosing sessions at a retreat run by my soon-to-be mentor in the psychedelic world, Jayne Gumpel. After the first two, which had been profoundly meaningful, I felt as though I had gotten what I needed. I was beginning to feel a tug of guilt as I spent days exploring my inner consciousness while my two small children needed their mother. Part of me wondered whether continuing was self-indulgent. When I expressed this, Jayne responded, “You will be doing them a favor if you give yourself this time.”
I stayed—and that third dosing session became one of the most important experiences of my professional life.
Battling guilt, shame, and annoyance with myself, I expected the ketamine to amplify those feelings. My experience with having more than one glass of wine has often been characterized by embarrassment, self-consciousness, and mental fogginess. Given that framework, I assumed I would leave the dosing feeling similarly disconnected and less cognitively sharp. Instead, I experienced something entirely different: Mental clarity.
Finding Connection
The retreat participants gathered for lunch after that third dosing session, and although I was hungry, I was not looking forward to the social interaction. I expected to feel awkward, withdrawn, and self-conscious, but that’s not what happened when another participant sat beside me. Not only did I not feel shame or fogginess, but I found myself able to attend to everything he was saying. I could take in his words, hold onto them, process them, think about them, and respond thoughtfully. Rather than waiting for my turn to speak or becoming consumed by self-awareness, I found myself genuinely engaged with his ideas.
It felt as though I had more time: More time to think and process, more time before distraction pulled me away. Most strikingly, I was less aware of myself. I was less preoccupied with how I sounded, how I appeared, whether I was responding correctly, or how I was being perceived. Instead, my attention was directed outward—toward the conversation itself. Toward concepts. Toward meaning. Toward connection. For perhaps the first time, I could observe the enormous cognitive burden imposed by self-monitoring.
Unburdening the Self From Internal Distraction
As neuropsychologists, we often think of attentional difficulties as failures of focus, working memory, or executive control. But sitting at that lunch table, I began wondering whether another form of distraction was equally important: internal distraction. How much attentional capacity is consumed by self-consciousness? How much working memory is occupied by monitoring ourselves? How much information is lost because cognitive resources are continually diverted inward toward narrative, evaluation, criticism, and self-protection?
The experience made me question whether many attentional difficulties—including those increasingly described as adult ADHD—might be understood, at least in some individuals, as disorders of internal distraction. Not simply distraction by the external world, but distraction by the self.
The after-effects of ketamine seemed to diminish, if not temporarily obliterate, that internal noise. To this day, I do not fully understand why. Was it neuroplasticity? Reduced activity within self-referential networks? Enhanced cognitive flexibility? Or was it simply a temporary liberation from habitual patterns of self-monitoring? I cannot say with certainty. What I do know is that I experienced myself as a different cognitive creature.
The change revealed itself not through formal testing, but through conversation—a highly demanding cognitive task requiring attention, working memory, processing speed, inhibition, social cognition, and executive functioning. For several hours, these processes felt more efficient, more fluid, and less vulnerable to distraction.
How Long Do Ketamine Effects Last?
The experience lasted throughout the day, but its greatest impact was not the temporary cognitive shift itself. It was the realization that this version of myself existed, that there was a way of processing information that was not dominated by self-consciousness.
I had never realized that attention could feel effortless, or that cognition could feel spacious. I hadn’t understood that the problem might not be a lack of capacity, but rather what was consuming that capacity. In many ways, that lunch conversation was the birth of my concept of cognitive ketamine.
The question was no longer whether ketamine reduces depression or anxiety. The question became whether ketamine might create a temporary cognitive state in which individuals can directly experience a different relationship to attention, distraction, self-monitoring, and information processing.
For me, the most profound effect was not what ketamine added; it was what it took away. And in the absence of that constant internal interference, I caught a glimpse of how my mind might function when freed to do what it was designed to do.