Rewriting the Machine: Psychedelics, the TPJ, and Neurodivergent Chronologies

 

This isn’t theory to me. It’s not an abstract interest or a high-minded debate topic. This is fieldwork I’ve done in my own skull. There’s no lab coat, but I’ve conducted experiments. I've collected the data. And the data is me.

Over time, I’ve come to notice a very specific and peculiar breakdown in how I perceive time—more precisely, how I record it. Minute to minute, hour to hour, across the span of a single day, I’m weirdly precise. I can often tell you exactly how long it’s been since something happened—without looking at a clock. It’s like I’ve got some kind of internal metronome ticking perfectly in real time.

But zoom out—start asking me about past jobs, years, birthdays, or historical events I lived through—and the signal breaks down. Not just a little. It collapses. The farther back something sits in my memory, the more foggy and unlocatable it becomes in terms of actual calendar placement. I can tell you how it felt, the weather that day, what I was obsessing over—but don’t ask me if it was 2016 or 2019 unless I’ve got my cheat sheet on hand. Which I do. Because I have to.

At first, I thought this was just a personal quirk. But over time I noticed something else. The more I spoke with others—particularly those who also sit on the neurodiverse spectrum—the more this fractured time perception showed up as a shared trait. Turns out, I’m not alone in this. There’s growing research suggesting that people with high autistic traits often experience time differently. Short durations may feel longer, and the ability to place past events in sequence or assign them to a rough date range can be consistently poor. The temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is heavily implicated in this, functioning as a key integrator of sensory, spatial, social, and temporal data. And it turns out that in neurodiverse individuals, the TPJ tends to be… different.

Now here’s where it gets more interesting.

I've taken psychedelics. LSD, specifically, and more than once—but not casually, not for spectacle or for chemical escape. I learned early on that the drug does something deeper for me than it does for many neurotypical people I’ve talked to. While they get kaleidoscopes and giggle fits, I get a whiteboard. A workshop. A goddamn BIOS update screen. I began using it not for fun, but for rewiring. I would identify a pattern in my thinking that I wanted to change—some stuck trauma-loop, a social hangup, a compulsive overreaction—and I’d drop acid like someone pulling open the config file of their mind and editing it by hand.

I was conducting intentional cognitive reframing—psychic neurosurgery with a molecule as my scalpel.

And it worked.

It didn’t overwrite me. It didn’t erase me. But it let me introduce new frames into the loop. I could intentionally anchor new interpretations of events, try on different internal narratives, and—most importantly—reassign value to emotional reactions I didn’t want to keep feeding. The high made it vivid. The integration after the trip made it permanent. Again, I thought this was just a personal hack—until I started digging into the neuroscience.

Turns out, LSD does affect the TPJ. Strongly. It increases global brain connectivity, especially in areas related to self-processing, social perception, and time orientation. This is why so many people on psychedelics report ego dissolution—that sensation of becoming boundaryless, disconnected from self, floating in a spaceless, timeless awareness. But for someone like me—someone whose TPJ may already be wired atypically—this disintegration isn’t chaos. It’s clarity. The noise drops out and I can see the machinery underneath my own cognition.

My experience is not unique. Neurodiverse people report overwhelmingly that psychedelics hit different for them. They don't just inspire awe—they facilitate transformation. The sensory deluge is something many of us already live with daily; what psychedelics do is offer a new vocabulary for managing that input. They amplify the perceptual differences that already exist, then give us access to tools we were never handed by traditional therapies, educational systems, or social environments.

So the questions started to form:

·       Why is time fractured for me?

·       Why does LSD offer me such targeted insight?

·       Is the TPJ the axis of this internal discrepancy?

The answers, while incomplete, keep pointing in the same direction: yes. The TPJ sits at the crossroads of sense, space, and self, and when it's out of sync—due to divergence, trauma, or some other variable—you get a consciousness that doesn’t fit the mold. You get a brain that thinks in packets instead of streams. A mind that can’t keep up with your HR onboarding dates, but can recall every sensory detail from a moment fifteen years ago. You get a timeline that's accurate at the surface but scrambled at depth.

And sometimes, if you’re lucky—or chemically brave—you get the ability to re-thread it all manually.

I don’t think psychedelics are a cure. But they are a key. Not to fix what’s broken—but to map what’s different. And in mapping that terrain, we can stop pretending that neurodivergence is a disorder to be corrected and start realizing it’s a configuration to be understood—and sometimes even optimized.

This isn't just mental health. It's cognitive cartography.

And I’m still drawing the map.