Toward a Biologically Plausible Account of Attention-Guided Neural Plasticity: A Theoretical Integration of the HCOS Framework with Neuroscientific Evidence on Psilocybin and Mindfulness

This is a theoretical hypothesis paper. It does not report primary data and does not validate any of the constructs it describes. Its purpose is to identify structural consistencies between an existing theoretical framework and recent neuroscientific findings, and to derive from those consistencies a set of testable, falsifiable hypotheses for future empirical investigation. Recent neuroscientific research on psilocybin has produced two findings of broad theoretical relevance. First, a single dose induces rapid, persistent structural neuroplasticity in the frontal cortex in rodents, including increased dendritic spine density persisting for at least one month (Shao et al., 2021). Second, in rodent models, the pattern of synaptic reorganisation following psilocybin is activity-dependent and network-specific: neural circuits that are active during the acute psilocybin state are selectively strengthened, while inactive circuits are weakened (Jiang et al., 2025). The translation of these findings from rodents to humans is inferential at the structural level, though functional connectivity evidence from human neuroimaging is well established (Siegel et al., 2024). Independent evidence from human studies indicates that voluntarily directed attention modulates the direction of synaptic plasticity in the human motor cortex under laboratory conditions (Kamke et al., 2014), and that sustained attention training is associated with structural changes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus (Fox et al., 2014; Gotink et al., 2016). The mechanism underlying these changes in naturalistic practice settings has not been isolated. This paper proposes that these bodies of evidence are structurally consistent with the Human Consciousness Operating System (HCOS) framework, specifically its AIR principle (Attention–Intention–Realization) and the Paradox of Balance. Structural consistency is explicitly distinguished from mechanistic equivalence throughout. The HCOS Diagnostic Questionnaire (HCOS-DQ) and Alignment Index (AI-X), the proposed measurement instruments of the framework, are unvalidated provisional instruments at the time of this writing. Three falsifiable hypotheses are derived, each contingent on prior psychometric validation of these instruments. Limitations, alternative explanations, and the specific inferential gaps in the argument are explicitly addressed.