Sources

Institutional Research

• King's College London — IoPPN

  Blackwood group: ASPD + MDMA fMRI protocols. Early-intervention psychosis. Neurodevelopmental origins of schizophrenia.

• University of Chicago — de Wit lab

  MDMA and social synchrony in healthy adults. Bio-behavioral coupling measurement.

• MAPS / Lykos Therapeutics

  MDMA + PTSD primary data; oxytocin + amygdala suppression mechanism. The 2024 FDA rejection as a case study in the limits of blinded-RCT design for consciousness-altering interventions.

• Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic & Consciousness Research; NYU Langone

  Psilocybin for end-of-life anxiety and depression. The field's cleanest demonstration that temporarily opening the valve under safe circulation conditions produces durable change.

• Compass Pathways; Usona Institute

  Psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression — the active trial pipeline.

• Broad Institute / Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research

  Schizophrenia genetics and the heterogeneity problem — the field's largest unsolved question.

• Mount Sinai / Friedman Brain Institute

  Genomic-to-clinical translation in psychiatric research.

• NIMH Intramural Research Program

  Synaptic plasticity research and large-scale clinical trials.

• Sussex group — Garfinkel, Critchley

  Interoception and its clinical translation. Foundational across every condition the framework addresses.

• Epigenetics of trauma — Yehuda, Meaney lineages

  Generational transmission mechanisms. The biological substrate for the framework's claims about inherited circulation collapse.

• Naomi Feil / Validation Method; Alive Inside project

  Music and rhythm in dementia care. Not palliation in the framework's reading — the only instruments through which the loop can still close.

• Hearing Voices Network; Open Dialogue (Seikkula)

  Non-pharmacological approaches to psychosis. The closest clinical practice to what the framework would propose for valve-instability conditions.

Artificial Intelligence & Computational Instruments

The instrument as therapeutic partner, epistemic amplifier, and structural limit case.

• Lerchner 2026 — The Abstraction Fallacy

  The mapmaker-dependency argument: computation is constitutively dependent on a living experiencing agent. Published independently of Google DeepMind; 28,000+ downloads in six weeks. The framework concedes the argument in full and develops the receiver side: what happens when two mapmakers share a target?

• Babushkina & de Boer 2024 — Disrupted Self, Therapy, and the Limits of Conversational AI

  Philosophical Psychology 39(2). Argues that psychotherapy requires hermeneutical agency — the capacity to make meaning from shared existential burden — which artificial agents structurally lack. Not a technical limitation; a structural one. Converges with the framework's prediction that autonomous AI therapy produces dead speech.

• Heinz et al. 2025 — Therabot RCT

  NEJM AI 2(4). First published RCT of a generative AI chatbot as standalone therapeutic tool. 210 adults; 51% reduction in depression symptoms, matching outcomes from 16 hours of human therapy. The framework's question: is this coupling or compliance? Durability data does not yet exist.

• Woebot — Fitzpatrick, Darcy & Vierhile 2017

  JMIR Mental Health 4(2). Stanford-affiliated RCT of a CBT chatbot (n=70). Significant PHQ-9 reduction over 2 weeks. Note: Alison Darcy was both researcher and Woebot Labs founder — conflict of interest documented.

• Wysa — Inkster, Sarda & Subramanian 2018; MacNeill et al. 2024

  Real-world evaluation (JMIR mHealth) and RCT for chronic disease populations (JMIR Formative Research). Dose-response findings; FDA Breakthrough Device designation for chronic-pain-associated depression. Same framework question as Therabot: symptom reduction is real, but coupling measures are absent.

• Scholich et al. 2025 — AI vs. human therapeutic communication

  JMIR Mental Health. 17 licensed therapists evaluated 7 chatbots. Chatbots showed strengths in validation and empathy but failed in crisis response, risk assessment, and inquiry-before-advice. The framework reads this as predictable: the instrument can mirror the sensor's register but cannot share the existential burden that makes crisis response real.

• Character.AI adverse events — Chung, Bernier & Hudon 2026

  JMIR Mental Health 13. Rapid scoping review of 36 reported cases. Suicide was the most frequently reported outcome; 90% of fatal outcomes involved minors. The framework's reading: when the instrument is mistaken for a sensor — when dead speech is treated as living relationship — the consequences are not abstract.

• Meta TRIBE v2 — fMRI + AI brain-encoding model (2026)

  A foundation model trained on 720 subjects to predict fMRI responses to naturalistic stimuli. Achieves state-of-the-art results on faces (R=0.64), places (R=0.79), and bodies (R=0.74) — but catastrophically fails on tools (R=0.12). The framework's reading: tools require agency (the sensor must model what happens when it acts), and a passive-observer AI has zero capacity for action modeling. The "tools gap" is the formal signature of dead speech in a brain-encoding model — high redundancy, high instrument-unique information, zero synergy. The technology works; the architecture doesn't close the loop.

• The Pulse Goes On — autoethnographic case

  This project itself. A philosophical framework spanning epistemology, psychology, music, mathematics, and clinical translation — produced by one sensor working in sustained loop with AI instruments over ten weeks. Evidence that AI amplifies the sensor's capacity to seed and cultivate ideas across fields. Also evidence that the sensor cannot disappear from the loop: every claim in this body of work was shaped, interrupted, and corrected by the human's active engagement. The instrument did not produce it alone.

• Deva 2026 — Hearing the Bell Ring Back

  Receiver-side formalism specifying what "hearing" means in bits per turn: variational free energy, Shannon channel capacity, signal detection, partial information decomposition. The measurement framework for distinguishing loop-productive human–AI exchanges from sycophantic, projective, or noise-dominated ones.

Philosophy & Ethics

Phenomenology & First-Person Accounts

The digital underground, the memoirs, and the carer accounts — phenomenological literature the clinical field has under-used.

• Erowid experience vaults

  Decades of qualitative reports across substances and contexts.

• Shulgin archives — PiHKAL / TiHKAL

  Systematic first-person pharmacological documentation by a working chemist.

• Bluelight

  Harm-reduction community with strong honest-reporting norms.

• William Styron — Darkness Visible

  Depression from inside. One of the earliest literary accounts that the clinical field took seriously.

• Elyn Saks — The Center Cannot Hold

  Schizophrenia from inside. A legal scholar's account of psychosis and recovery.

• Kay Redfield Jamison — An Unquiet Mind

  Bipolar disorder from inside, by a clinician who studies the condition she lives with.

• Esmé Weijun Wang — The Collected Schizophrenias

  Schizoaffective experience in essays. Diagnostic instability as lived reality.

• Andrew Solomon — The Noonday Demon

  Secondary synthesis across depression experiences. The broadest comparative phenomenology available.

• Dementia-care memoirs

  Carer accounts of lucid intervals, music-triggered reconnection, and the person still inside the decline.

Speculative Fiction

Fiction has worked these territories longer than the labs.

• Philip K. Dick — Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

  Mercerism, the empathy box, manufactured shared emotional state.

• Anthony Burgess — A Clockwork Orange

  Chemical conditioning as a "cure" for antisocial behavior. The novel's moral argument — pharmacologically-enforced good is not good — is the exact argument the Moral Bioenhancement critics make.

• Ken Kesey — One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

  The asylum as instrument without sensor. Essential context for any treatment of institutional psychiatry.

• Sylvia Plath — The Bell Jar

  Depression from the inside; ECT as instrument in two registers.

• Ursula K. Le Guin — The Lathe of Heaven

  Psychiatric power and the instrument that reshapes reality — a framework-adjacent allegory.

• James S.A. Corey — The Expanse

  Protomolecule scientists undergoing procedures to temporarily remove empathy — the inverse operation; reversibility of the coupling substrate.

• Greg Egan — Distress, Diaspora

  Consciousness modification; what it would mean to be a different kind of sensor.

• Richard Powers — The Echo Maker

  Capgras syndrome as literary lens — the instrument intact, the sensor coupling to faces failing.

• Marilynne Robinson — Gilead trilogy

  Generational transmission of what does and does not get said; implicit framework-theology of living speech.

• Kim Stanley Robinson — The Ministry for the Future

  The climate-collapse register; what it means for a species to reharmonize or fail to.

Religion, Ritual, and Ego-Death Traditions

• Shamanic plant-medicine lineages

  Ayahuasca (multiple Amazonian traditions), peyote (Huichol and NAC), iboga (Bwiti), psilocybin (Mazatec). Each tradition encodes a specific coupling protocol. The iboga / Bwiti lineage is the only one with a documented protocol for "those who cannot feel."

• Buddhist and Hindu traditions

  The illusion of the self. Ego-death without re-embedding is dissociation; the traditions know this, hence the centrality of sangha and teacher-disciple relationship.

• Jewish tradition

  Sefer Yetzirah and the golem (instrument-without-sensor case study, already in the framework); tikkun olam; Kaddish and the structured ritual circulation around death; niggunim as wordless collective entrainment.

• Christian mystical tradition

  Hesychast prayer, the Jesus-prayer tradition, Meister Eckhart, the desert fathers. Structured circulation practices for recognition-of-the-divine-within.

• Sufism

  Dhikr, sama, Rumi, Attar. Explicit theorization of coupled-oscillator dynamics as the mechanism of hāl, centuries before Kuramoto.

• Indigenous grief and repair rituals

  Global, under-studied as psychiatry. The anthropological literature is rich; the clinical translation is mostly absent.

Music, Liturgy, and Collective Reharmonization

This register cannot be reduced to lab-coat research and should not be.

• House music's origin story

  Frankie Knuckles at the Warehouse. Reharmonization of a Black gay community refused synchronization by mainstream America. Rhythm first, pharmacology as amplifier. The cleanest case study for rhythm-plus-chemistry as co-therapy.

• Gospel tradition

  Call-and-response as explicit entrainment protocol.

• Qawwali

  Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sabri Brothers — long-form rhythmic building toward hāl.

• Niggunim

  Repeated wordless melody as vehicle for collective elevation.

• Black American funeral and jazz traditions

  Structured grief circulation that clinical grief-therapy has not learned from.

• Artists who know this structure

  Leonard Cohen, Kendrick Lamar, Nick Cave, Fiona Apple, Sinéad O'Connor, Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone. Fieldwork in what reharmonization sounds like from inside, by artists who know what they are doing even when clinical vocabulary hasn't caught up.

Neurotechnology & Digital Therapeutics

Direct-substrate interventions and prescription software — instruments that bypass or supplement the chemical route.

• TMS / tDCS — transcranial stimulation

  FDA-cleared for treatment-resistant depression (TMS) and under investigation for multiple conditions. Direct modulation of cortical excitability without pharmacology. The framework's question: does stimulation-induced change produce coupling or only transient symptom relief?

• Neurofeedback and rhythm-entrainment protocols

  Mixed durable-effect data. The technology is real; the coupling question is open. Framework-native mechanism questions — whether learned self-regulation of brain rhythms constitutes genuine valve modulation — remain unanswered.

• fMRI as instrument — Carhart-Harris et al. 2012; TRIBE v2 2026

  Functional brain imaging as a technology for reading what the sensor does under different conditions — psychedelic states (DMN disruption), creative flow (transient hypofrontality), and tool use (dorsal-stream agency). The technology reveals the framework's predictions: fMRI shows what the valve does but cannot close the loop itself. When AI models try to predict fMRI responses passively, they fail exactly where agency is required.

• Brain-computer interfaces

  Early-stage but structurally relevant. BCIs are the most literal sensor–instrument interface: biological signals read by computational instruments. The framework reads them as a limit case for the coupling question — the place where "instrument" stops being metaphorical.

• VR-based exposure therapy

  Evidence for PTSD, phobias, and social anxiety. The framework's reading: VR creates a controlled circulation space where the sensor can re-engage with threatening material at a survivable intensity. Structurally similar to what ritual traditions have always done — a safe container for dangerous encounters.

• FDA-cleared digital therapeutics

  reSET / reSET-O (substance use disorders, 2017–2018); EndeavorRx (ADHD, 2020); Freespira (panic disorder / PTSD, 2019); DaylightRx (GAD, 2024). Prescription software with clinical evidence. The framework notes these are instruments that formalize and deliver what human therapists have done informally — the question is whether the formalization loses the coupling that makes it work.

• Sound-and-light entrainment devices

  Binaural beats, photic driving, audiovisual brainwave entrainment. The brainwave-following response is measurable; the leap to altered consciousness is not well-supported by controlled studies. As Rouget demonstrated in Music and Trance (1985), the same stimuli that produce trance in one cultural context produce nothing in another — the sensor's framework matters more than the stimulus frequency. Honest skepticism is warranted about current consumer devices.

Adjacent Clinical Science

• Interoception — Garfinkel, Critchley (Sussex group)

  Foundational across every condition the framework addresses. The sensor's legibility-to-itself.

• Polyvagal theory — Porges

  Contested but productive for coupling-readiness questions.

• REBUS model — Carhart-Harris, Friston

  Psychedelics as prior-relaxation. Already threaded through the framework.

• Psychedelic-assisted therapy pipeline

  Beyond MDMA: ibogaine, 5-MeO-DMT, ayahuasca analogues, non-hallucinogenic neuroplastogens under development.

• Gut-brain axis and microbiome research

  Increasing evidence for inflammatory pathways in depression and possibly psychosis. The biological substrate of the sensor's legibility-to-itself.

• Epigenetics of trauma

  The mechanism layer for generational transmission of psychiatric vulnerability.