Orientation Explorer

The data underlying this research comes from the Erowid Experience Vault, maintained by Erowid Center — a nonprofit organization providing accurate, unbiased information about psychoactive substances to the public since 1995 through Erowid.org.

Visit Erowid.org to explore the archive and support their mission.

This tool accompanies the paper “Quantitative analysis of subjective experience reports of orientation and directionality in psychedelic experiences” led by Sean Noah at the UC Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics.

The study asks a deceptively simple question: when people describe psychedelic experiences, how do they talk about where they are? Not physically — but the felt sense of location, movement, and orientation. “Falling through reality.” “Spiraling inward.” “Floating everywhere and nowhere at once.”

Using natural language processing methods including large language model functions, Noah and colleagues analyzed approximately 40,000 subjective experience reports from the Erowid Experience Vault to identify and quantify these orientational and directional metaphors. The analysis pipeline extracted concise orientation phrases from free-text narratives, embedded them in a shared semantic space, and organized them through unsupervised clustering into a data-driven taxonomy.

The findings show that psychedelic reports contain significantly more orientational language than non-psychedelic substance reports — not just in frequency, but in qualitative diversity. Where other substance classes tend toward single-axis spatial shifts, psychedelic experiences frequently involve multi-component transformations: simultaneous changes in directionality, boundary relations, and perceived motion. The study identifies 16 qualitative categories of orientation — from UP/DOWN and IN/OUT to EDGES, ROTATION, and EVERYWHERE/NOWHERE — and demonstrates that individual psychedelic substances exhibit distinguishable orientational profiles.

The codebase parses the research datasets into a queryable structure and serves them through three interlocking views:

Orientation compass — A radar chart mapping the 16 qualitative categories as spokes. Select any psychedelic substance to see its orientational fingerprint; overlay a second substance to compare profiles directly.

Phrase explorer — The actual metaphorical phrases extracted from experience reports, scored by cosine similarity to category exemplars. Click any phrase to find the source passages where it appears.

Experiential flow — An animated particle visualization where each selected phrase becomes a swarm of particles whose behavior is driven by its directional semantics. Particles spiral, fall, float, or scatter based on the keywords in each orientation phrase.

Beyond movement behavior, the Experiential flow canvas carries five visual channels that each encode the underlying research data. Read together, they turn a phrase's swarm into a compact data signature:

• Color — Encodes the direction's vertical orientation along a physical spectrum: rising movements (up) sit at the infrared / red end and sinking movements (down) at the ultraviolet / violet end, with the horizontal and ambient directions spanning the visible colors in between. A single colour handler derives every hue from this one axis, so the same direction always reads as the same colour across the particles, the colour key, and the phrase-cluster list.
• Density — The size of a phrase's swarm grows with how often that phrase occurs in the corpus (its cluster size), on a square-root scale. Square-root sizing is the standard perceptual compromise — the same correction used for area and bubble encodings — keeping rare phrases visible while common phrases still read as clearly denser, without the magnitude distortion of a logarithmic scale. Density is referenced against the whole corpus, so it stays a selection-independent cue to prevalence.
• Speed — How fast the particles move reflects the tempo of the movement metaphor itself. Energetic directions — soaring, plunging, rushing through, scattering — move quickly, while settling, ambient states — floating, drifting, lingering in between — move slowly, over a deliberately slow baseline that keeps the overall motion contemplative.
• Streaks — Each particle draws a short fading trail behind it, and the canvas wraps: a particle that exits one side re-enters from the opposite side. At the moment of wrapping, the trail connects the exit and re-entry points, drawing a straight line across the full field in the phrase's color. These long streaks therefore mark complete traversals— they appear only when a phrase's directional pull is strong and sustained enough to carry particles across the entire canvas. Their axis shows the direction of travel: horizontal streaks for lateral movement, vertical for rising or falling, both for radiating phrases that push outward through every edge. The more often a swarm streaks, the steadier its momentum.
• Pulse — Each particle lives for a few seconds, fading out before it respawns elsewhere in the field, so a swarm continually twinkles. When a phrase carries a strong directional metaphor the particles stream and trail and that motion dominates; when a phrase has no recognized directional keyword — for example, taking me away — the particles barely travel and the pulse becomes the dominant texture: a shimmering cloud that holds its place. That blinking is itself an indicator, marking orientation language the keyword model reads as directionally neutral or unclassified, set apart from phrases with a clear directional pull.

Hovering the dots of any swarm reveals the source passages behind that phrase — Erowid report excerpts where it occurs, with the phrase highlighted (when exact occurrences are scarce, the set is broadened to close keyword matches). Click or tap a swarm to lock the card open and explore it: filter the passages by substance and scroll the full set, so the visualization stays anchored to its evidence.

The visualization tool is built with Next.js, TypeScript, D3.js, p5.js, and Supabase (PostgreSQL). Data from the research pipeline was parsed and structured for interactive querying through the following process:

• Passage data — 21,591 orientation passages extracted from Erowid experience reports across 30 psychedelic substances, stored with substance metadata and full passage text.
• Category phrases — Approximately 786 orientation phrases assigned to 16 qualitative categories via cosine similarity to exemplar seed phrases. These were extracted from the research team's seed match tables using OCR and cross-referenced against the passage corpus.
• Cluster hierarchy — 2,047 nodes from the Ward hierarchical agglomerative clustering of orientation phrase embeddings, parsed from the research team's Plotly treemap output. This includes 1,024 leaf-level HDBSCAN clusters and 1,023 merge nodes with medoid phrase labels and linkage distances.
• Substance-category rates — Pre-computed prevalence rates for each substance across all 16 categories, derived by matching category-assigned phrases against passage text.

The research pipeline used OpenAI's o3-mini model for passage and phrase extraction and text-embedding-3-large for semantic embeddings. The clustering combined HDBSCAN for first-order grouping with Ward linkage hierarchical agglomerative clustering for the taxonomy. Full methodological details are in the paper.

Future versions of this tool may incorporate additional datasets, expanded scope beyond psychedelic substance classes, and refined phrase-level data as the research evolves.

The Explorer encodes its state in the URL so any view can be shared or bookmarked — the Share buttons copy a link, and opening one restores that exact view. Each query parameter maps to a piece of application state:

• flowPhrases — Pipe-separated orientation phrases to visualize in Experiential flow, e.g. ?flowPhrases=spiraling|melting. Opening a link with this parameter scrolls to the flow view and rebuilds the particle swarms for those phrases.
• section — Which view to scroll to on load: compass, phrases, or flow.
• substance — The primary substance (by slug) shown on the orientation compass.
• compare — Comma-separated substance slugs overlaid on the compass for comparison.
• category — The selected compass category (a spoke of the orientation compass, e.g. ROTATION). It drives the phrase panel beside the compass, which lists that category's metaphorical phrases ranked by cosine similarity and the category's prevalence across substances.
• phrase — A phrase selected within that panel — it opens the matching source passages (the phrase panel switches from its ranked list to the passage reader for that phrase). This pair of category + phraseis what makes a compass deep-link reproduce the exact phrase-explorer view, which isn't obvious from the parameter names alone.