Psychedelics are inherently chaotic drugs, dissolving the boundary between self and surrounds by sowing discord in the brain.
Many describe the results as profoundly life-changing. And yet despite years of research into the biochemistry of compounds such as LSD, it remains unclear how a bright new order manifests from what is essentially a breakdown in neurological harmony.
A record five-year, single-site brain-imaging study conducted by researchers from Monash University in Australia has now found evidence of the role the environment plays in resynchronizing the brain’s networks following a dose of psilocybin – the chemical that makes some mushrooms “magic”.
Like most psychedelics, psilocybin’s effects are the result of interactions with a specific type of serotonin receptor in the brain, which both triggers the characteristic hallucinations and euphoria and induces neural plasticity.
This potential to deconstruct and rebuild critical networks in the brain makes psilocybin an attractive therapeutic tool in treating mental health conditions such as depression, PTSD, and anxiety.
“Psychedelics may offer a different treatment model from conventional daily medications, potentially producing meaningful psychological change after one or a small number of supported sessions,” senior author and computational neuroscientist Adeel Razi told New Atlas.
“But the important question is not whether they replace existing treatments, but which patients benefit, under what conditions, and how reliably those benefits can be achieved.”
Critical to psilocybin’s application is the drug’s complex relationship with an individual’s mindset and their environment. Unlike many psychiatric prescriptions, the clinical effectiveness of psychedelics can’t be divorced from the context in which they’re taken.
“What makes psychedelics unusual is that the experience itself may be a substantial part of how the treatment produces lasting psychological change,” first author and neuroscientist Devon Stoliker told New Atlas.
Until now, research has largely focused on time-averaged brain connectivity across groups of volunteers, making it difficult to see how order can emerge dynamically in individual brains over time in different settings.
The researchers behind this latest investigation compared EEG and functional MRI brain scans of 62 healthy adults taken before and after a dose of psilocybin, producing the largest single-site psychedelic neuroimaging dataset to date.
None of the volunteers had previously taken psychedelics, making their experience truly novel.
Shortly after participants had taken psilocybin, they were presented with a brief, five-minute naturalistic movie, followed by five minutes of rest, another five minutes of audio-guided meditation, and seven minutes listening to music – all with their eyes closed.
By tracking brain activity moment-by-moment across each of these settings using a machine-learning program, the researchers found that what seemed like disorder in their brains contained paths with structures that aligned closely with different contexts.
Significantly, the appearance of order was strongest in those who confessed to having a profound and positive experience, one characterized by a strong separation between their sense of self and their surroundings. “Ego death”, or what the researchers describe as self-dissolving and boundary-dissolving experiences, could be key to the benefits of psychedelic treatments.
“The boundary between self and world may not be fixed,” says Stoliker. “Our findings suggest brain systems actively maintain this distinction, and psilocybin can temporarily dissolve it.”
The next step is to determine whether the study’s individual brain signatures can be generalized enough to predict meaningful therapeutic change.
For now, it’s becoming clear that the experience of psychedelics can’t be treated as an inconvenient side-effect, but may be the secret to pulling a new order of mind from the chaos.
Source: Monash University via Scimex
This research was published in Nature.
