New Psilocybin Research Finds Hidden Structure Beneath the Brain’s Seeming Chaos
For decades, the mainstream scientific consensus on psychedelics has held that these compounds break down the brain’s typical organized activity. Multiple prior studies have backed this idea, showing that when people use psychedelics, electrical signals traveling between neurons become far more diverse and unpredictable than they are in a sober state. This rise in entropy in the brain’s gray matter, the theory goes, explains the bizarre, unscripted, and often deeply memorable experiences that define a psychedelic trip.
But one of the largest neuroimaging studies of psilocybin’s effects ever conducted has uncovered a hidden layer of order beneath this apparent randomness. Published in the journal Nature, the new research indicates that while psilocybin does soften the boundaries between separate brain networks, the brain’s neural responses to whatever a person is experiencing in the moment actually grow far more distinct and clear.
The research team tracked moment-by-moment changes in brain activity across 332 separate brain regions, combining two common tools for measuring neural function: functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG). The study included 62 participants who had never used psychedelics before. Each participant took an oral capsule containing 19 milligrams of psilocybin, then completed one of three activities: meditating, listening to music, or watching a film. Using artificial intelligence to parse the resulting brain data, the researchers identified unique neural activity patterns linked to each type of activity participants engaged in.
What surprised the team most was the effect psilocybin had on these patterns: the more intense a participant reported their psychedelic experience to be, the clearer and more distinguishable these activity-specific neural signals became. Far from becoming lost in a sea of unstructured randomness during a trip, reality leaves a far more distinct, recognizable imprint on brain activity under the influence of psilocybin.
This pattern was visible not just in objective biological measurements, but also in participants’ subjective accounts of their experience. Participants who showed the most clearly defined brain activity patterns also tended to report more intense feelings of immersion and oneness with their surroundings, often describing a blurring of the line between their own sense of self and the external environment.
“Under psilocybin, the brain networks that help us process our inner world and the world around us become less distinct from one another, but they reorganize into patterns that directly reflect what people are experiencing,” explained Devon Stoliker, the study’s lead author and a researcher at Monash University's School of Psychological Sciences in Melbourne, Australia.
Beyond offering a clear biological explanation for the widespread feeling of oneness many people describe during a psychedelic trip, the findings add important nuance to the common idea that psilocybin simply turns the brain “chaotic.” This more nuanced understanding is particularly critical for the fast-emerging field of psychedelic-assisted therapy.
“This shows that context is not just irrelevant background to the psychedelic experience,” Adeel Razi, a professor at Monash University and the study’s senior author, emphasized in a press release. “For treatment, that reinforces why the environment and what a person does and experiences during the psychedelic session matter so much.”
This piece was adapted from an original article published on WIRED en Español, translated from Spanish.
