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A new analysis broadens our understanding of psychedelics, such as the psilocybin produced by the mushrooms above, and how they affect the brain. Jahi Chikwendiu, The Washington Post\/Getty Images<\/p>\n
Psychedelics can make people experience themselves and the world in striking ways\u2014forms morph and sounds distort, and they can even lose their sense of self, a fleeting condition known as ego death. But what happens inside the brain to cause such sensations isn\u2019t fully understood.<\/p>\n
A new comprehensive analysis published today in the journal Nature Medicine significantly advances this understanding. The research pooled results from nearly a dozen brain imaging studies from the U.S., Europe, and South America and revealed that psychedelics generate a high degree of chatter<\/a> between regions of the brain involved in sensory perception and those for thinking.<\/p>\n \u201cUsually, the brain\u2019s perception of the external world is very distinct from our memory and abstract thinking,\u201d says Manesh Girn<\/a>, a neuroscientist who led the research at the University of California, San Francisco.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is suggesting the psychedelics might close that gap between how we think and how we perceive\u2014between the internal and external,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n Understanding psychedelics\u2019 functions has become increasingly important as interest in their ability to treat mental health conditions like anxiety and depression explodes. \u201cPsychedelics are an emerging therapeutic, so knowing more about how they work can help us theoretically optimize their healing potential,\u201d says Matthew Johnson<\/a>, a psychedelic researcher at Johns Hopkins University who was not involved with the paper but is part of the international consortium of scientists who are coming together to analyze this and other data on psychedelics.<\/p>\n (These drugs could be a game-changer for end-of-life care<\/a>.)<\/p>\n Providing a consistent analysis<\/p>\n Typically, researchers investigate a drug\u2019s mechanism before testing it in humans, but since initial research on psychedelics was conducted more than fifty years ago, before the advent of effective brain scanning technology like the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) used in this analysis, scientists are working to catch up now.<\/p>\n Visualizing the brain is also important to confirm that the psychedelic itself\u2014rather than expectations about the drug\u2014creates the health improvements. Because the hallucinogenic effects are obvious, researchers cannot prevent people from knowing whether they received the drug or a placebo in so-called \u201cblinded\u201d studies, possibly influencing the results.<\/p>\n (Can psychedelics live up to their hype<\/a>?)\u00a0<\/p>\n Prior imaging studies have been small, often analyzing fewer than a dozen individuals each. This has led to inconsistent findings and difficulties drawing reliable conclusions. For example, some research has highly emphasized disruptions to the brain\u2019s default mode network<\/a>\u2014the area responsible for defining our sense of self\u2014during a psychedelic experience while others focused on altered activity across many parts<\/a> of the brain.<\/p>\n For this research, Girn and his colleagues involved scientists at seven institutions in five countries who shared imaging data from more than 500 scans of 267 subjects (some took a psychedelic more than once). The researchers applied a standardized framework to analyze the disperate data.<\/p>\n \u201cThis paper is a tour de force that applies consistent analyses to several independent psychedelics datasets, and it seems they come as close as possible to the truth in how psychedelics change fMRI signals at the population level,\u201d says Amy Kuceyeski<\/a>, a neuroscientist who conducts brain research at Weill Cornell Medicine in New York, who was not involved with the study.\u00a0<\/p>\n Inducing fundamental changes in the brain\u00a0<\/p>\n Brain images analyzed in the new study came from people experiencing the effects of \u201cclassic\u201d psychedelics, a category that includes psilocybin, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), mescaline, dimethyltryptamine (DMT), and the DMT-containing brew, ayahuasca. (All are schedule 1 drugs that remain illegal at the federal level in the United States, outside of clinical trials.)<\/p>\n While not everyone\u2019s brains reacted the same\u2014especially across different psychedelics\u2014the similarities were striking, Girn says.<\/p>\n The analysis confirmed that the compounds don\u2019t impact a single part of the brain but \u201cfundamentally change how the brain is processing information and relating to the world, and that can shake people up in ways that could be conducive to therapeutic change, in terms of breaking people out of ruts and usual ways of perceiving,\u201d Girn says.<\/p>\n This expanded integration of information across regions of the brain \u201cmay be how [psychedelic therapy] can break down rigid cognitive patterns and increase flexibility of thought, which has been proposed as one explanation of how they can produce healing in patients with depression and addictive disorders,\u201d says Christopher Pittenger<\/a>, director of Yale University\u2019s Program for Psychedelic Science, who was not involved in the research but has studied psilocybin as a treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder<\/a>.<\/p>\n