Michael Angyus
Neuroscientist & Engineer
About me
I earned bachelors degrees in chemical and biological engineering before completing a master’s in Translational Neuroscience at Imperial College London, where my research with the Centre for Psychedelic Research focused on psychedelic neuroscience, EEG, brain dynamics, and predicting responses to psychedelic experiences.
My undergraduate research in the Wiedenheft Lab focused on viruses and single celled organisms - tiny biological machines which maintain themselves through purely natural unfoldings of thermodynamic laws. Every living creature functions this way, and I wanted to understand how such natural unfoldings could give rise to not just the body I lived in, but my own mind and consciousness.
There’s something very Zen about this idea: Living creatures, including you and I, are natural cascades of matter following the core laws of the physical universe. We experience free will and use it to pursue good, but what if the biology that drives us is deterministically responsible for our perception of good and evil? Is the spirit within us (our intuitive guide towards good and evil), something that can be understood scientifically? Can we use that science to develop ourselves in a way that doesn’t involve religious dogma?
These are the kinds of questions I hope to answer as I connect with and learn from the experts in this field. I’ve created this education platform to invite any curious mind to join us as we discover the connection between brain, mind, and soul.
More Background on Me
This is my personal site which includes broader thoughts and more personal work. For a more professional description of my work and background, visit my LinkedIn
Psychedelic Research Experience
Predicting the Psychedelic Experience (with Imperial College London)
I have worked in psychedelic research since I began attending lab meetings for the Imperial College Centre for Psychedelic Research in the summer of 2021. My first project was the validation of the Imperial Psychedelic Predictor Scale, which predicts the type of experience someone will have based on how they feel just before consuming the psychedelic (Angyus et al., 2024, Psychological Medicine). This project opened my eyes to the various factors which contribute to the nature of the psychedelic experience. While we’re a long way from knowing exactly how to optimize the context in which psychedelics are taken, scientists are working hard to collect evidence for the safest ways to use psychedelics. This growing evidence base is increasingly informing clinical practice, public discussion, and policy around psychedelics.
Brain Entropy and Psychedelics (with Imperial College London)
My second project focused on brain entropy, a prominent concept in psychedelic and consciousness research developed in part by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London. I was drawn to these ideas because they connected with the perspective on biology I developed during my undergraduate training in chemical and biological engineering. Living systems maintain highly organized states in a universe governed by thermodynamic processes that tend toward increasing entropy, and the brain plays an important role in maintaining the stable models and behaviors that allow an organism to survive. Psychedelics appear to temporarily disrupt some of this stability: one of the most consistently reported findings in psychedelic neuroimaging is an increase in the complexity or diversity of neural activity alongside a breakdown in normally stable patterns of brain organization. What fascinated me was the possible relationship between this loosening of neural structure and the subjective dissolution of familiar structures of thought, perception, and self. Studying these questions also introduced me to the rapidly expanding set of computational tools being used to extract meaning from complex brain data. New mathematical approaches allow researchers to examine neural activity from increasingly different angles, making this an especially exciting time to study the relationship between brain and mind - and psychedelic research offers an unusually powerful window into that relationship.
Training in Well-Being and Altered States
Trained Psilocybin Facilitator
My time in computational neuroscience left part of me wanting more direct human connection and service. In the fall of 2025, I enrolled in InnerTrek’s Psychedelic Facilitator Training Program, designed to meet the training requirements for licensure through Oregon Psilocybin Services.
The program gave me practical experience supporting people through psychedelic experiences using a non-directive approach. Through extensive role-play, ethical training, and supervised practice, I learned how to create a supportive environment without trying to control or interpret another person’s experience. It also gave me new ways to apply lessons from years of meditation and yoga practice to the care of others.
Just as importantly, the training connected me with a community of people approaching psychedelics not only as an area of scientific interest, but as a practice requiring care, humility, and responsibility.
Certified Yoga Instructor
I was first introduced to yoga in a high school course at Lincoln High School in Portland, Oregon. As a three sport athelete, I immediately fell in love with a practice that could take care of my body and mind. I enjoyed it enough that for my final project I asked to take over the class and lead my fellow students through a session.
This passion continued in college courses, regular Yoga class attendance, and personal practice for 10+ years before earning my 200HR Yoga Teacher Training certification. While I had developed a distinguished intuition for shifting my mind into bodily awareness and addressing the needs of my health through meditation and feeling, the official training exposed me to ancient yogic literature that I had not deeply explored during my years of practice. It deepened and blended my understanding of meditation with my practice of yoga, something I am proud to offer to my clients.
Experienced Zen Meditation Practitioner
In 2016 I began reading Zen Mind Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki (Suzuki Roshi). Every night for an entire semester, I would read a chapter and then sit in meditation for 20 minutes. At first the words didn’t make much sense, but slowly, with practice, the illogical writing began to describe my experiences perfectly. It was through this that I learned the value of pairing minimal educational content with deep real world practice. For a mind that was always racing to understand the world scientifically, with words rushing by as best fit explanations for my universe, the complete cessation of thoughts and arrival at pure, uninterrupted moments of peaceful joy and experience were transformatively valuable.
I had the pleasure of visiting Japan for a conference in 2024, and used the opportunity to make the trip to Eiheiji monastery, an 800 year old temple established by the founder of Soto Zen, Dogen Zenji. Suzuki Roshi (the guy who wrote the book that introduced me to Zen) had trained at this very place. During my visit, I found myself briefly alone near the memorial containing Dogen’s remains. For several minutes I simply sat there. The monastery is tucked into the mountains of Fukui Prefecture, surrounded by enormous trees, running water, old wooden buildings, monks, bells, and long stretches of quiet. It remains one of the most meaningful places I have ever meditated.
There was something extraordinary about realizing that a tradition carried across centuries, languages, and an ocean had profoundly changed my own relationship with my mind. I remain deeply grateful for Zen practice, and passionate about helping other people discover what meditation can offer them.
Bonus! (My Music)
You’ve made it this far, which means you might care enough to learn about my creative work :) Lucky you!
MICHAEL → ALCHEMI
You have to break yourself down to find out what you can become. I’ve noticed that when making art, I’m proudest and most fascinated by my creations when I let go of any identity or outcome and allow the work to transform me as I am creating it. For this reason, I broke down my identity, MICHAEL, and rearranged it into an artist name, ALCHEMI, to remind myself that I don’t know who I will be on the other side of my creative act, and that great work comes from the allowance of personal transformation.
Alchemy is the transformation of ordinary matter into gold, and more importantly, it is expected that the alchemist performing the transmutation is transmuted by the process. One of my favorite books is The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I think this book perfectly describes the experience of discovering and pursuing something your deeper self believes you should do, and being transformed by the conflicting process of actually pursuing that dream. The entire life can be viewed as a creative act, as iterative transformation and growth, all in an engagement with the universe we emerge from. Remaining vulnerable and open to transformation (maintaining a beginner’s mind), seems to be a highly effective approach to producing interesting and meaningful work. My music reminds me to pursue science in this way.
My Creative Process:
I began making music in college when some friends showed me how to use garageband. My creative process usually involves meandering on my guitar and recording layers that speak to me in that moment. I often sit down with a feeling, something unprocessed that wants to be said, and I believe this feeling determines which layers of music speak to me in a given session. I then add drums and other instruments using my keyboard, always controlling with my hands every sound that enters the song. At some point, the layers of music start to pull at my voice, and I press record and sing whatever comes to mind. Most of my music is freestyled, multiple takes spliced together and sometimes re-recorded after thinking of a better line. Nearly all of my songs are created in a single sitting. It has to be this way because the emotion I’m expressing is often gone the next day. From this, I have put together two albums, learned the basics of guitar, the keyboard, singing, and how to produce in Logic Pro.
My Two Albums:
My first album, Stories Told In Blue Wind, was primarily recorded in London and France, during my master’s and the year that followed. This first album captured emotions of transformation, travel, love, connection to nature, freedom, and really just the experimentation of a new hobby which brought me an immense joy and vulnerability which I think can be felt in the music. Each song carries a cohesive theme and I encourage people to really listen to the lyrics, I had a lot of fun layering messages and telling stories.
The second album is a more cohesive work, recorded in a tiny attic crawlspace at my parents house which I filled with tapestries and LED strip lights as I explored scales on my electric guitar. The Womb, starts off underwater, inside the confusing and frightening process of beginning a creative act. The album moves forward with existential questions about life. Do we get a choice to live? What should we do with our one life? What does it mean to live? The album moves forward with an exploration of the world through different sounds, inspired by african drums I absorbed in my trips to Uganda, and a reconciling of that foreign sound with the electric guitar which we start the album with. The later songs unify the sounds as well as the themes, finding joy through connection and endurance of life through community and faith. Both of these albums helped me in deep ways, perhaps the words and sounds can help you as well!
The first song on the first album is the very first song I wrote. You can watch me develop as an artist as you go through the album.
The second album plays with themes of life and death, existential meaning, connection between cultures, and acceptance.