Shake the snow globe

Shake the snow globe is Robin Carhart-Harris’s metaphor for the disruptive, potentially therapeutic effect of a high-dose psychedelic experience: entrenched patterns are shaken loose, creating a temporary interval in which thought may become more flexible and new patterns may take shape. The image turns an abstract account of brain entropy into a simple physical action, while preserving a crucial uncertainty: disruption can make change possible, but it does not guarantee what will settle into place afterward.

Entropy as an opening

In Carhart-Harris’s entropic brain account, the snow globe names a mind whose familiar patterns have become too fixed. Psychedelics temporarily increase entropy, disturbing the system’s usual organization and making room for alternative thoughts and narratives to coalesce as it settles. Here, disorder is not simply deterioration. It can be a short-lived loosening of constraints, valuable especially where mental rigidity keeps a person repeating destructive patterns.

That proposal reverses the everyday suspicion of entropy as mere breakdown. A temporary loss of settled order may be useful when the order itself has become restrictive. In this sense, the metaphor does not promise that shaking will produce a better arrangement; it describes a change in conditions, from a system dominated by established paths to one in which other paths can become possible. The therapeutic hope lies in that opening, not in disruption for its own sake.

Worn trails and new routes

Mendel Kaelen develops the image through a snowy hill. Repeated thoughts resemble sleds drawn into a few well-traveled tracks; the more often those routes are used, the harder it becomes to move in another direction. Many such familiar neural connections pass through the Default mode network, associated in the account with rumination, self-referential thought, and thinking about thinking. The metaphor makes rigidity cumulative: each repetition deepens the route that subsequent thought is likely to follow.

Psychedelics, in Kaelen’s extension of the image, temporarily flatten the snow. The old trails lose their hold, and thought can travel in new directions, literally laying down other paths. While the snow is fresh, a small influence—a song, an intention, or a therapist’s suggestion—may have an unusually strong effect on the mind’s future course. This helps explain why the image is not only about the drug’s immediate disruption. It also points to the conditions around the experience and to what may guide a person while familiar tracks are less dominant.

Therapeutic use and evidential limits

The snow globe metaphor belongs to a wider set of descriptions of possible therapeutic change. Matthew Johnson’s phrase for the process is a mental reboot: a jolt out of destructive patterns that could allow new ones to take root. Carhart-Harris also compares the effect to annealing in metallurgy, where energy makes a system flexible enough to bend and change. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University describe a similar interval of maximum plasticity in which, with proper guidance, new patterns of thought and behavior may be learned. These are related models, not proof that the brain literally behaves like snow or metal.

The account connects the models to observed brain changes. Neuroimaging at Imperial College London has found changes in activity and connectivity during psychedelic states, including changes in the Default mode network; subsequent work in several laboratories using psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca has replicated relevant imaging findings. Such observations lend support to the metaphors by identifying measurable changes, but do not make the metaphors themselves complete explanations. The proposed therapeutic contrast is also bounded: depression, anxiety, obsession, and addiction are placed toward excessive order in Carhart-Harris’s spectrum, while psychosis lies toward excessive entropy and may therefore not respond to psychedelic therapy.

Personal meaning and what lasts

The image also clarifies why the book’s narrator turned to psychedelics. Reading Carhart-Harris’s paper brought the aim into focus: to shake a mind shaped by long experience and deeply worn habits, and to test whether everyday mental life could be renovated by admitting more uncertainty. With age, familiar expectations can provide quick, serviceable answers; their usefulness may also make thought less fresh. The snow globe gives that tension a concrete form: experience builds reliable tracks, but reliability can become a kind of confinement.

Whether the new connections formed during a psychedelic experience endure remains an open question. Research associating psychedelic experience with long-term changes in openness suggests that some kind of learning may occur, but the lasting fate of the connections has not been established. Recollection, integration, or meditation might reinforce what was experienced, much as repeated use strengthens neural circuits; that possibility remains speculative, and there has been little direct mapping of the brain before and after psychedelic use to establish lasting change. The metaphor therefore ends not with a settled new landscape, but with a question about whether any freshly made path will survive after the snow settles.