Writings on consciousness and extreme suffering.
December 26, 2025
How I went from severe impostor syndrome to full remission in one night through a combination of MDMA and CBT. I discuss optical holography as a lens to find a mechanistic explanation.
December 17, 2025
Peter Singer's latest column on Project Syndicate is about cluster headaches and the urgent need to legalize psychedelic treatments.
November 21, 2025
Today we're announcing a new cluster headache advocacy and research initiative: ClusterFree. Learn more about how you (and anyone) can help.
October 18, 2025
DMT has emerged as potentially the most effective acute treatment for cluster headaches. We summarize some of the evidence we have.
August 24, 2025
Assorted notes and reflections from a week-long self-guided retreat on Buddhist emptiness teachings following Rob Burbea's talks.
July 26, 2025
In the US, one QALY is valued at around $100,000–$150,000. How might one go about deciding the dollar value of averting a DLES?
June 21, 2025
A suggestion to use more nonviolent communication on the EA Forum.
May 18, 2025
My impressions from the first-ever international research symposium on cluster headache at the Karolinska Institutet.
May 9, 2025
Transcript of a conversation between Atai Barkai and QualiaNerd on the "psychophysical parallelism".
May 7, 2025
If you, like myself, practice both meditation and asana yoga, you can likely get more juice out of your yoga sessions and accelerate your progress in meditation with some simple tweaks.
April 26, 2025
The idea that we can substitute carbon-based neurons with functionally equivalent artificial neurons doesn’t withstand closer scrutiny.
March 21, 2025
In this talk at Newspeak House in London, I discuss the importance of addressing extreme suffering, highlighting cluster headaches as a vivid example of severe pain that's often overlooked by common global health metrics.
February 18, 2025
Kidney stones cause an immense amount of suffering worldwide. We investigate chanca piedra as a promising preventive treatment.
February 16, 2025
My attempt to make indirect realism as intuitive as possible using simple illustrations. I then explain how one can get to panpsychism quite naturally.
November 1, 2024
I aggregate medical data from a few dozen papers to estimate the burden of pain from 'suicide headaches' globally.
July 11, 2024
I share a few intuition pumps that I have found helpful when thinking about consciousness in non-functionalist/computationalist terms.
