Strangled at Birth
I was born strangled.
A literal story: cord around the neck, oxygen deprivation, blue baby. The midwife handled it — here I am, writing a book. The Czech psychiatrist Stanislav Grof, who spent half a century studying perinatal experience and altered states of consciousness, would call such a beginning an imprint — the first write on a blank disk, around which everything else later assembles.
Grof is an uncomfortable figure: for academic psychiatry, he’s roughly what Vanchurin is for physicists, formally impeccable and substantively insufferable. He has more than four thousand LSD sessions to his name, and legal ones at that — he started in the sixties, when the substance was still permitted; when LSD was banned, he switched to holotropic breathwork and spent the next thirty years systematizing data that wouldn’t fit any model.
The result — four “Basic Perinatal Matrices,” BPMs. Four layers of experience tied to birth: BPM-I — blissful unity with the mother before contractions begin; BPM-II — compression, no way out, walls closing in (contractions have started, but the cervix is still closed); BPM-III — struggle, pushing through the canal, blood, pressure, suffocation; BPM-IV — emergence, light, first breath, “second birth.”
I’m a BPM-III: strangulation, the cord, the struggle. If you take Grof at his word, that first experience formats all subsequent perception — precisely formats, the way a file system formats a disk: the structure is set first, and the data come later. A person with a BPM-III imprint, according to Grof, perceives the world through resistance and pressure that has to be pushed through — as a wall behind which there is something, but which won’t let you through to that something.
I don’t know if Grof is right. Four thousand sessions is, formally, data, but data collected in altered states of consciousness gives a methodological committee a migraine: how do you verify it, how do you reproduce it, how do you tell a “perinatal memory” from a “hallucination stylized as a perinatal memory”?
The honest answer for now is: no way. Grof remains in “here be dragons” territory: his map is detailed, beautiful, and internally consistent, but it’s waiting for verification, like a medieval map of Africa whose coastline was accurate (it was checked), while inland came “terra incognita” and drawings of elephants.
(A short context is needed for the Western reader, because without it the bundle “Grof, psychedelics, perinatal matrices” sounds like New Age, whereas in fact this is perfectly legitimate science. Michael Pollan in 2018 published “How to Change Your Mind,” which became a New York Times bestseller and the basis of a Netflix series; it tells in detail the story of how the FDA in 2017 granted psilocybin “breakthrough therapy” status for treatment-resistant depression. MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, founded by Rick Doblin in 1986, completed Phase 3 clinical trials of MDMA therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder in 2023; the results turned out to be better than any existing PTSD therapy, and FDA approval is expected any day now — perhaps by the time you read this book, it has already been granted. What’s at stake is a regulated clinical protocol going through the standard FDA pathway, far from “alternative medicine.” Grof is now read in serious peer-reviewed contexts; his perinatal matrices are still awaiting validation, but the category itself — “psychedelics as a tool for studying consciousness” — in 2015–2025 climbed out of the semi-underground into the mainstream. I lived through this shift: half of my experiences took place when the substances were illegal in every respectable jurisdiction, the other half when they came out from underground in Oregon, Colorado, and the Netherlands. The context shifted; the data stayed the same.)
I tell you about Grof for a simple reason: the strangled baby is me, and a few things he describes accurately. The sense of a wall and of something being behind the wall; the sense that the visible world is incomplete, and that gaps are visible between things.
Coincidence? Maybe. A tendency to see confirmations? Also maybe. But I’m obliged to mention this, because a scientist who hides his cognitive biases turns into a marketer.
I know I was always a strange child.
“Strange” is its own category. Difficult kids are understandable: they’re loud, they fight, they don’t listen, and there’s a manual for them — strictness, patience, a therapist. Strange ones are wired differently — they look at what other kids don’t: at shadows, at corners, at the folds between things — and in that company I looked, from the very start, at those folds.
No mysticism — I never saw any auras, angels, or visions. What I had was a sensation, constant, in the background, indistinct: the world is “not quite” the way grown-ups describe it. The word “different” doesn’t fit here, the right one is precisely “not quite”; it’s how a photograph looks when it’s been slightly shifted: on closer inspection the contours no longer line up.
Concretely: I remember being six or seven, sitting in the kitchen, my mom is cooking something, and suddenly, for a split second, everything freezes. Between one instant and the next a pause becomes visible, a gap, as if between frames of film. Just now the world was continuous — and suddenly it turns out to be discrete, assembled from separate pieces with nothing between them. And that “nothing” lasted — not long, but noticeably.
Then everything went on as if nothing had happened: mom was cooking, the kitchen was in place, and I couldn’t explain what had just happened — because, formally, nothing had. It just became visible for a second that the world was assembled out of parts, and that there were gaps between those parts.
This repeated rarely, once every few months, randomly and on no schedule, usually in quiet moments — when there was nothing to do, when attention was scattered, when you weren’t looking. Like peripheral vision: out of the corner of your eye you catch movement, turn your head, and there is nothing, because a direct gaze isn’t the right instrument for the task.
The problem is that a child has nothing to compare against: there’s no “normal” perception to push off from, and you don’t know that you see the world differently — you’ve simply never seen another world. It’s like a fish that doesn’t know it lives in water: for the fish, water is not a medium, for the fish water is everything.
That’s why I was in no position to formulate it and tell my mom, “I can see events assembling before they happen.” I couldn’t see it clearly, I felt it — the way one feels a change in pressure: with the body, beyond ears and eyes. Something’s not right, and it isn’t clear what exactly — but something definitely is.
Once, around the age of ten, I did try. I told my mom: “It seems to me that everything around is as if painted. And as if there’s something else behind it.” My mom looked at me with an expression I would later learn to recognize: alarm masked as calm. “You just think too much,” she said. “Go outside.”
I went, and didn’t try to explain anything for the next twenty years.
Teachers said, “Head in the clouds.” Parents: “Too thoughtful.” The psychologist: “A rich inner world.” Three ways of saying the same thing: we don’t understand what’s going on with you.
I didn’t understand either — for twenty years I didn’t. And then I started.
The first thing that can be dated happened either at school, or at my first trance party, or the first time I was truly scared — scared enough that the world shifted for a second and something else appeared beneath the usual picture.
I don’t remember exactly, and that matters: “folds in reality” form gradually, by accumulation, like a crack in a wall whose appearance can’t be dated. It seems as if it had always been there, and one day you simply noticed it.
I noticed — and could no longer stop noticing. The way a person who has seen a wire sticking out of a wall in a restaurant from then on sees only a stage set: behind its beautiful surface, the wires, pipes, and concrete are now distinguishable. There’s no un-seeing it: the wire becomes part of the picture forever.
For twenty years I looked for an explanation — more precisely, for twenty years of background unease that periodically came to the foreground. To call it “a continuous search” would be a lie.
The first attempt landed on psychology: at sixteen or seventeen — Jung, Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious. I read and thought: there it is. The collective unconscious as a shared layer to which everyone is plugged in; archetypes as patterns existing before individual experience; mandalas, shadows, animuses as a structure preceding content.
Jung was describing a world you can’t peer into with instruments, and his model worked like good poetry: it persuaded, but didn’t yield to measurement. By seventeen I was already poisoned by physics textbooks and demanded of any beautiful explanation a point of support, and Jung didn’t have one. Jung matched the sensation, but the verification didn’t work out.
The second attempt landed on neuroscience — around twenty to twenty-two: Ramachandran, Sacks, Damasio. The brain treated as a machine, consciousness as a function of the cortex; illusions, synaesthesia, phantom limbs — a world in which everything has a neural explanation. Gaps? Temporal lobe. A sense of unreality? Depersonalization — here’s the DSM code, here’s the SSRI, next patient.
Elegant, measurable — and still beside the point. Neuroscience explained how I felt the gaps, but said nothing about why. What evolutionary function is there in the sensation that the world is assembled from parts, why would the brain show the host the folds of reality — bug or feature?
Neuroscience answered unambiguously: bug, glitch, noise, treat it — and that unambiguity was what kept me from being convinced, because it was too definitive for a phenomenon nobody had properly described.
The third attempt landed on AI — my profession, and perhaps my way of building a model of what I feel but can’t describe. Neural networks, learning, patterns, data out of which structure assembles itself without anyone laying it in. You take a million photos of cats and the network itself finds “cat”; nobody told it what a cat is, it found the cat in the data as a pattern that was there but that nobody had specified.
The connection finally came together — quietly and not all at once, by degrees. If a neural network finds a pattern nobody specified, then maybe I also find a pattern nobody specified? Maybe the “gaps” are a pattern in the data that my brain detects in the same way the network detects a cat, and that science simply hasn’t described yet?
Maybe everything is just like that — and maybe not, and it’s from this “maybe” that the key part of this whole story begins.
The tendency to see confirmations is the most elegant trap evolution has set for smart people.
(It doesn’t work on the dumb, because the dumb don’t build theories, don’t look for patterns, and don’t assemble any data into a picture. The tendency to see confirmations is a disease of those who think: the smarter the person, the deeper the trap, because a smart person can justify anything.)
Here is how it works: you want the world to be multi-layered, you feel it from childhood, you spend twenty years looking for confirmation — and, of course, you find it. The brain is a neural network trained on your own data: it filters out what doesn’t fit and amplifies what does, and every “crack” becomes a confirmation, while every objection gets written off in one phrase: “they just don’t see.”
A classic plot, textbook of cognitive biases, chapter two.
It’s possible that this is what I’m doing: fitting the data to a picture I want to see, and this whole book — intricate, carefully argued, with citations and reviews — works as self-deception.
Maybe.
But there are three arguments against — specifically arguments, since I have no proofs; the difference matters.
First: the data isn’t mine. Vazza and Feletti don’t know about my “gaps,” Vanchurin doesn’t keep Grof in his bibliography, and Jung is an outside author for Levin; five independent lines of research, five independent groups of scientists, and none of them set themselves the task of confirming my sensation. And all five, nevertheless, point in the same direction. The tendency to see confirmations explains why I stitched them into one picture, but doesn’t explain why they connect at all.
Second: I’m not the first to find himself in such a situation. The historian of science Thomas Kuhn described it back in 1962: “anomalies” accumulate within a paradigm until they reach critical mass. Planck balked at introducing the quantum; Einstein didn’t want to allow an expanding Universe into his equations and even tweaked the cosmological constant so that it wouldn’t expand — later he would call this his greatest mistake. In the end the data forced them both. Maybe here too they are forcing; maybe not — honestly, I don’t know.
Third: I may be wrong, and that doesn’t frighten me. It’s worse when a person cannot be wrong: he has “the truth” in hand, and, by his own feelings, he knows. I have no truth — I have data, a sensation, and a question, three ingredients out of which sometimes science comes and sometimes delusion. The difference is established afterward, not before.
I’m telling you this without counting on pity and without a claim to the “authority of the one who survived.” A scientist writing about cracks in the picture of the world is simply obliged to answer the question: where, exactly, does he know the cracks are from?
My answer is: from the same place a bacterium “knows” that a photon is a wave — from direct experience. The textbook has nothing to do with it. I, a strangled strange child, grew up to be an AI researcher and discovered that the world I had spent twenty years feeling to be “not quite right” really is not quite arranged the way the textbooks say.
But this is not yet an answer — it’s only a claim. The answer itself will come in the following chapters, unfolded in data, formulas, and paper numbers.
For now, one more observation — personal, with no claim to scientific status.
Twenty years of searching taught me one thing. “The world is multi-layered” is a hypothesis that still requires proof; “I am special” is narcissism; and a fact, however, is this: a sensation is not proof, but a sensation is data. First-person data: unreproducible, unverifiable, subjective — and nevertheless data, which one can either ignore or take under consideration and see what comes of it.
It’s possible that this is the confirmation of one’s own expectations, the classic trap: you want the world to be multi-layered, and you find confirmation, ignoring everything that doesn’t fit.
Maybe.
Or maybe a bacterium that “feels” a photon knows more about it than the physicist who measures it — and of course I don’t know this for sure, but I keep working anyway, because I have no other data.