Psilocybin Desynchronizes the Human Brain

Lots of people have a lot of negative stuff to say, but my take is: if you do psychedelics, you need to do the work and you need a firm ground before that. We have research that it might help with PTSD, depression, etc. but it's not like you just take it and you're done. It's a powerful substance and with power comes responsibility. I like to think of it more as an enhancer as to what's inside your head anyways. If that's fucked already, how are psychedelics gonna help you?

It's interesting that brain hypersynchronicity is a known source of epileptic seizures (among other things). This potentially could be a treatment for this specific problem.

See e.g.

  * https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S089662731930964X
  * https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1528-1167.2010.02805.x

I can't think of anything in the world I would enjoy doing less than completing "a simple auditory–visual matching task" while in an MRI scanner on shrooms.

This concerns Functional Connectivity[0], which is basically a measure of how temporally correlated regions are; those that fire in sync or in a strongly correlated pattern are functionally connected.

Essentially, the TL;DR of this study is that psilocybin's 5-HT2A agonism seems to reduce synchronized FC activity not just in neurons but the whole brain: psilocybin makes parts of the brain overall that otherwise work together (in a time-correlated sense) stop displaying time-correlation. These results were seen most in the Default Mode[1] network, which is more or less the brain system in operation when you are inside your head — daydreaming, thinking, remembering, etc. — as opposed to processing visual cues or observing the physical world.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynamic_functional_connectivit...

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network — this article is one of those that just blows my mind clean out my ears (heh); the brain is such a wonder.

Feedback in an anlog signalling system producing delays, reflections, geometric and clipped artifacts is something anyone who has used a guitar effects pedal is familiar with. I have a surprising number of old comments on this site about how hallucinogens just impair signalling and the results are geometric for the same reasons. This article says it impairs the equivalent to the CLK signal, which sounds just about right.

Don't be disappointed about it not being another spiritual dimension, they discovered we literally have effects pedals for our brains. This is the coolest thing ever. We could probably classify hallucinogenic artifacts by chorus, delay, flange, harmonics...

This is an interesting combination with this post from yesterday (Study reveals how anesthesia drug propofol induces unconsciousness): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40981421

Their conclusion in that paper is that Propofol derails the brain’s normal balance between stability and excitability, which induces unconsciousness.

incredibly powerful drug. we should be training a legion of mystics using psilocybin instead of criminalizing it and obfuscating the implications of its use

PSA: My buddy shot himself in the head while we were on shrooms in our twenties. He thought he meant God, took a shower picked up a gun and shot himself in the head.

While I've had trips since then and do get benefits from those experiences. People without experience should be careful, especially if you have a history of mental illness. He did have a history to some degree but not overtly.

>Healthy adults were tracked before, during and for 3 weeks after high-dose psilocybin (25 mg) and methylphenidate (40 mg), and brought back for an additional psilocybin dose 6–12 months later.

Not simultaneously I hope.. that sounds like it would be a rough ride

While it's amusing in the short term, the long term side effects for me were awful. I felt like my brain was slow and unfocused, I was no longer quick in conversation or able to concentrate as well as usual, I felt disconnected from myself, sort of like when you recall a memory so old that it seems like it belongs to someone else, I had a headache for almost 3 weeks.

Throwing this in here as there are a fair few "dude just take drugs" comments and worry they might be the religious types.

Cool paper.

I know some tech people have been donating to psilocybin research - is there any apparent connection to this study?

> MEQ30 Mystical Experience Questionnaire

n = 7 is really low, but interesting study. Would love to see a n = 1000 study of this.

While the analogies are often useful, everyone reading HN comments should be very aware and very skeptical of just how often computer/tech people rely on computer/tech analogies to understand things that are fundamentally not computers/tech.

It is very very easy for smart people with functionally specific jobs/hobbies/ways of thinking to see all reality through that narrow window. It often leads to important details being glossed over or entirely missed. The more self-confident ones quickly start seeing the analogies as fundamental facts, usually with negative consequences like loss of empathy or a tendency to see big picture generalizations as specific universal truths.

Mushrooms have had a similar effect on me at times. You can start feeling like you KNOW big sweeping Truths. Similar to religiously “knowing” something. And that feeling of knowing is hard to overcome. But it is just a feeling.

Reading this feels an awful lot like watching the video about the retro encabulator.

LSD is better, sorry :/

This can be a good thing, to reboot your brain