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Your brain on shrooms — how psilocybin resets neural networks

The psychedelic drug causes some lasting changes to the communication pathways that connect brain regions.
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  1. Max Kozlov
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Animated heat map of an individual’s brain activity before, during and after psilocybin has been consumed.

This heat map shows how patterns of resting brain activity (blue and green) change when psilocybin is taken (red and yellow), then return to normal as the drug wears off. Credit: Sara Moser/Washington University

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Taking psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, temporarily resets entire networks of neurons in the brain that are responsible for controlling a person’s sense of time and self, finds a study that repeatedly imaged the brains of seven volunteers before, during and after they took a massive dose of the drug.

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Nature 631, 721 (2024)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02275-y

Read the related News & Views: ‘A psychedelic state arises from desynchronized brain activity’.

References

  1. Siegel, J. S. et al. Nature https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-024-07624-5 (2024).

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  2. Carhart-Harris, R. et al. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 109, 2138–2143 (2012).

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  3. Barrett, F. et al. Neuroimage. 218, 116980 (2020).

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