Mind reading is no longer science fiction.

In 2006, in the journal Science, neuroscientists unequivocally showed that hospitalized, unresponsive patients can actually communicate with the outside world through their brain activity alone. Ask a “yes” or “no” question, and receive an answer based on what the patient is visualizing or imagining inside: playing tennis for “yes,” or walking through their home for “no,” each inner experience yielding markedly distinct patterns of brain activity.

More recently, with the introduction of machine learning and artificial intelligence, neuroscientists working with healthy participants have been able to decode and reconstruct various presented stimuli, from individual letters to entire scenes, capturing what the mind sees on screen. The same researchers who published the landmark study in 2006 are now asking how these reconstructions may be applied to similar patient populations to unlock a clearer window into their mind, and with it, greater communication with the outside world.

In 1968, Alan Watts lays the foundation for psychedelic science with his article Psychedelics and Religious Experience. There, he characterizes psychedelics as “instruments for studying and describing that experience as one uses a microscope for bacteriology.” However, nearly 60 years later, Watts’ intuition that psychedelics are observational instruments has gained little momentum, at least outside of their emerging application in clinical settings for occasioning personal psychological insights and emotional breakthroughs that predict improvements in mental health and well-being. Where are the data on the general nature of experience, of the mind, of consciousness itself? If a psychedelic can serve as an observational instrument, where is the evidence?

Returning to Watt’s analogy to microscopic phenomena, let’s consider Rosalind Franklin’s discovery of the structure of DNA. Franklin’s major discovery, her evidence, did not rest on her ability to see beyond, to peer through a microscope, but rather to capture what was there, right inside of what we know now as Photo 51. She and her graduate student took this photograph of DNA fibers, ultimately revealing DNA’s structure to the world. This is exactly what is missing in psychedelic neuroscience and why mind reading is coming for the field: to reconstruct the same observations that were once apparent to Watts, only now validated across participants in the world’s first-of-their-kind empirical studies of mind. Whereas Franklin’s discovery unlocked the blueprint of life, giving rise to modern molecular biology and genetic medicine, what might the blueprint of mind lie ahead for our future?