This idea's been passed around the psychedelic community, even so far as to suggest a drug like LSD or DMT changes your brain chemistry enough that you receive a different form of consciousness, endowing one with everything from the ability to commune with "machine elves" to providing a priori insight into the unitary nature of existence. Unfortunately these ideas get weaved within New Age-type thinking and I tend to lend them no credence. [1]

Similarly, if consciousness is a fundamental component of the Universe/reality, it may not supervene (a technical term in philosophy) on the physical structures of the brain. [2]

[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1340425/

[2] See the arguments of the philosopher David Chalmers.

I got interested in the notion of plant intelligence lately; my conjecture is: mushrooms produce psilocybin for themselves, to improve their own creativity and/or life experience :)

The brain has a fascination with itself.

It's "substance dualism" or "Cartesian dualism", if you're assuming that the "elsewhere" is somewhere non-physical. If you're assuming the elsewhere is somewhere in the material world, I don't know if there's a word for that, but its been discussed a couple times -- most memorably in Anathem, the Neal Stephenson book where I stole my username from :)