One with the world? A new look at brains transformed by psychedelics.

Participants meditated inside an MRI tube, with and without psilocybin.

The short version

• For about a decade, the mainstream understanding has been that psychedelics cause chaos in the brain.
• Brain networks—the stable patterns of communication that handle vision, attention, or our sense of self, and more—loosen and start talking to each other all at once.
• EEG traces get noisier and more complex.

What happened

“Think of the networks of the brain as highways,” says Devon Stoliker, a neuroscientist at Monash University. “Under psychedelics, these highways break down into many different directions.” In a recent Nature study, Stoliker’s team designed an experiment to test whether these directions are truly chaotic and random.

Why it matters

Researchers gathered 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic before, gave them 19 milligrams of psilocybin, a common psychedelic found in certain fungi, and scanned their brains.

Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.