🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter with the memory of a goldfish. But we never forget when you forward us to a friend. 🐟

Nima Veiseh remembers what he wore last Tuesday. And the Tuesday before that. And every Tuesday going back to age 15… because he has an extremely rare condition where his memory never fades. He also happens to be a data scientist, abstract artist, economist, overachiever and the new CTO of Zendo Project.

We asked Nima how hyperthymesia shapes his relationship with psychedelics, what's behind the integration theory he developed for Zendo, and why the principles of psychedelic harm reduction go way beyond bad trips.

One thing y’all seem to love about Tricycle Day is how we don’t pick sides.

Clinical, spiritual, regulated, decrim. It’s all good by us. We just want these medicines to be accessible to the people who’d benefit.

Psycon is the psychedelic conference and trade show with the same attitude, and they’ve got the programming to prove it.

Their event next month in Denver will have 14 tracks spanning pharmacology, business models, harm reduction, and more.

We’ll be there. Stop by our booth with Althea, say hey, and put a face to the memes.

It didn’t happen all at once. When you live inside your own mind, you assume everyone experiences the world roughly the same way you do. It was probably about three years before friends started pointing out that I could recall conversations and details from specific days with a clarity that surprised people. Only by having others highlight it did I start to pay attention.

I have a rare condition called hyperthymesia. When I joined a study at the University of California, Irvine more than 15 years ago, they’d only identified about 60 cases in the English-speaking world. It’s often described as an extreme form of Eidetic or autobiographical memory. From a particular point in my life onward, I remember every day as if it were recorded on film, with visual, tactile, and sensory detail.

Everyone with hyperthymesia seems to have a different trigger. Mine was the day I met my first girlfriend. They don’t know why that happens, but that’s where the “tape” started for me. Every day since, for more than 25 years, I’ve carried that kind of vivid recall. I joke that forgetting is a privilege I don’t have. 99% of what we observe in a day isn’t useful for survival. It’s noise. But when you have the entire dataset, you start to see through that noise in ways you otherwise couldn’t.

From what I understand, the half-life of an average person's memory is about four to seven days. You have a 50/50 shot of remembering what you wore last Tuesday. Pull that all the way back, and people are roughly the moving average of their most recent five years of memory. In a Freudian sense, everything older lives in the subconscious. You may not be able to access those memories, but they are still there motivating you.

One of the main reasons people use psychedelics is to reconnect with those memories and triggers and come to peace with what has happened in the past. As a hyperthymestic, I don't really have a subconscious in the same way. My subconscious stopped aging at 15. So the thing psychedelics are supposed to do—make the subconscious conscious—I was gifted with that. If you could follow that process all the way to its end, you'd basically arrive where I already am.

So now I see psychedelics as an opportunity to explore structured “side quests.” One is being of service to others, for example by walking friends through a journey. Another is deepening my own vulnerability. As someone who's practiced Vipassana for two decades, I believe in the connection between the body, sensation, and the mind. Psychedelics give you the opportunity to get out of your own way and find signal within the noise. And a third ongoing quest is to refine integration frameworks that can be applied beyond the individual.

Psychedelics might be one of the only chemical opportunities for someone to see the world as a hyperthymestic might: in its beauty, in its crystallized totality, with time standing still. That clarity into the subconscious, time invariant, is something I've only ever seen replicated through a psychedelic experience.

The theory posits that empathic and emotionally attuned support during transitions into or out of altered states facilitates psychological coherence, and mitigates trauma by reinforcing trust, safety, and meaning-making processes that transactional, procedural approaches fail to activate. Those are the three elements: trust, safety, meaning-making.

Altered states are broader than people think. It could be a psychedelic experience, the hypnosis of a movie, or even staring at a text message on your phone. All of these are forms of altered states. And while one is transitioning in and out of them, there's an opportunity to integrate and grow. Managed poorly, the transition creates negative side effects or destructive behavior. Managed well, it helps people grow stronger.

The prescriptive part of the theory is about minimizing noise during the transition. The best example of this principle is Vipassana. The reason the meditation course is free is that if you paid even a dollar, your ego would enter. You'd wonder what you're getting out of it. That level of ego completely unravels the technique. The only way to learn Vipassana, truly, is to submit yourself as an ascetic. There has to be some form of ego death.

The reason this kind of support is systematically undervalued is that a transactional system can't price what it creates. It's priceless, in both senses of the word.

The big question is how to develop psychedelic harm reduction as a field at scale. But before you can answer that, you need to create better tools for understanding what the field actually needs. So that’s where we’re starting. The work sits at an unusual intersection—part research, part systems design, part governance—because the field hasn’t historically had a formal CTO or technical architecture function. It feels like both a privilege and a responsibility to be helping define the technical and data infrastructure for a field that’s still taking shape.

We've trained upward of 6,000 clinicians and first responders in the Zendo methodology. When someone is going through a challenging psychedelic experience, the traditional response is to involve law enforcement or send them to the hospital, either of which can be very traumatizing. What we do instead is sit with them under specific trained protocols and allow the journey to pass, so they can return from their altered state and go home safely.

We started with one-to-one: psychedelic harm reduction for therapists. Then we expanded to one-to-many by training first responders, firefighters, and EMTs. Now we're realizing the skill set maps many-to-many. If you can help someone navigate out of an adverse psychedelic experience, maybe as an executive manager you can use the same techniques to help your team through a crisis that has nothing to do with psychedelic substances.

Everything I do, whether it's a math model, a painting, or a harm reduction framework, is an attempt to capture something in motion and crystalize it into something that stands still, so that it can be understood and felt in the present. I have a background in public policy, engineering, and economics, and I've ended up at the frontier of all three, building through technology.

When I make a painting, I take a vibration or memory, like a guitar chord or the birth of a child, and distill it into a single point of space and time, then explode it onto canvas in layers of paint. It's a hash function. I translate moments in memory and time into a static, timeless artifact. That artifact could be layers of paint, or it could be conditions in a math model.

The world is already moving toward a version of what I experience. Because of how we track and document everything, everyone is going to start feeling a version of what it's like to be hyperthymestic. I've been forced to develop toolkits to manage that for myself. Maybe I can scale those toolkits out to help others. Across all of it, what I'm really trying to do is alleviate human suffering.

Watch his 360° TEDx talk, explore Zendo Project’s training programs, or check out his art.

That’s all for today, Cyclists! Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.