In an effort to advance efforts to utilize psilocybin’s ability to treat mental illness, a new study explains exactly how the drug impacts the brain.
It’s well established that taking psilocybin — the active compound in magic mushrooms or “shrooms” — typically leads to a psychedelic experience, and research suggests this experience can have a positive effect on those suffering from some mental illnesses.
But much about how the substance precisely impacts the brain remains unknown, and these details are necessary to allow physicians to be able to harness the drug’s therapeutic potential to treat individuals with mental illnesses such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
A new study, conducted by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, aims to fill this knowledge gap in an effort to provide a kind of guide to other scientists to help them evaluate the effects of psychoactive drugs on brain function.
Published in Nature, the study found that psilocybin changes a critical network of brain areas involved in types of introspective thinking, including daydreaming and remembering. These acute effects are profound yet temporary, they found, though some lingering effects remain after the psychedelic trip has ended.
“There’s a massive effect initially, and when it’s gone, a pinpoint effect remains,” said co-senior author Nico U. F. Dosenbach, M.D., Ph.D., a professor of neurology, in a statement. “That’s exactly what you’d want to see for a potential medicine. You wouldn’t want people’s brain networks to be obliterated for days, but you also wouldn’t want everything to snap back to the way it was immediately. You want an effect that lasts long enough to make a difference.”
The researchers worked with seven healthy adults who agreed to take a high dose of psilocybin or methylphenidate, the generic form of Ritalin. Each participant received consistent support from trained experts throughout the experience who helped prepare them for what was to come, offered guidance during the psychedelic trip, and helped them process it after it was over.
Each participant received MRI brain scans before, during, and up to three weeks after the experience. Four of the participants repeated the experiment six months later.
Ultimately, they found that psilocybin destabilized the brain’s functional networks — a system critical to how the brain thinks about the self in relation to the rest of the world. It specifically desynchronized the default mode network, which is an interconnected set of brain areas that are simultaneously active when a person isn’t thinking about anything in particular.
When the acute effects of psilocybin wore off, the network became in sync once again, but small changes persisted for weeks — which may explain the lasting mental health benefits some individuals experience after taking psilocybin. In comparison, the default mode network remained stable throughout the entire experiment in the participants who took methylphenidate.
The researchers were able to create a visual representation of these effects using brain scans, showing the exact ways in which psilocybin disrupts normal brain functioning to create a psychedelic trip.
While an individual’s functional brain network is typically one-of-a-kind, the brain networks of people who took psilocybin were so distorted that they became unidentifiable until the trip had ended.
“The brains of people on psilocybin look more similar to each other than to their untripping selves,” Dosenbach said. “Their individuality is temporarily wiped out. This verifies, at a neuroscientific level, what people say about losing their sense of self during a trip.”
They found that the drug temporarily halts the brain’s ability to think about the self in relation to the world. First author Joshua S. Siegel, M.D., Ph.D., an instructor in psychiatry, said this makes the brain more flexible and potentially more able to come into a healthier state in the long-term.
The researchers hope their study will help improve precision in clinical trials and help to identify the specific factors that determine who may benefit from certain treatments and who may not.
They also emphasize that their results should not be taken as a reason to self-medicate with psilocybin, as the drug is not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and there are risks to taking it without the supervision of trained mental health experts.
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