Orientation Explorer

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 phrase movement behavior is driven by directional semantics. Particles spiral, fall, float, or scatter based on the keywords in each orientation phrase.

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 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.