Post: Magic Mushrooms Warp Our Sense of Space, Time, and Self By Disrupting Our Brain Connections, Scientists Say

Psychedelic Brain Getty Images

Magic mushrooms, fungi with psilocybin , have long been prized across various cultures for their hallucinogenic properties. More recently, their potential to treat intractable conditions like depression, addiction, and anxiety has made them a hot—and controversial—area of research. The key to both uses, says researchers, lies in how the compound disrupts connections in the brain, some of which underpin our perception of self, time, and space.

Building on previous observations of this phenomenon, scientists captured detailed functional magnetic resonance images (fMRI) of the brains of seven healthy adults before, during, and after psilocybin doses—as described in a July 2024 Nature paper. “Our participants were real troopers. They came back time and time again,” says Dr. Ginger Nicol, a psychiatrist at the University of Washington and one of the study’s co-authors. The repeated scans—which measure real-time brain activity via blood flow—were crucial to establish what each person’s normal looks like and how that picture changes with psilocybin .

Our brains are organized into networks—disparate regions that work together to perform specific tasks. Higher-order networks help us with complex cognitive activities like planning and problem-solving while lower-order networks manage basic functions like vision and hearing. When we take hallucinogens, two things happen. Components within a network “desynchronize and stop firing together in the way that they typically do,” Dr. Nicol says. At the same time, the networks become less distinct from one another—the boundaries between them blurring. “The brain as a whole becomes more chaotic, more [disordered],” says Vitaly Napadow, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School and Mass General Research Institute, who was not involved in the study.

The largest changes occurred in the higher-order networks controlling focus and attention, which “help us make sense of and give meaning to physical sensations,” says Dr. Nicol. These changes might explain statements made in the throes of a trip such as “I can feel the trees breathing” or “the grass seems friendly,” she speculates. And the more intense the psychedelic experience—as determined by a participant’s responses to a 30-question mystical experience questionnaire —the more disrupted the brain’s normal pattern of activity became.

Among […]

Magic Mushrooms Warp Our Sense of Space, Time, and Self By Disrupting Our Brain Connections, Scientists Say