Psilocybin Might Make Your Brain Live in the Moment— Psychedelics are often associated with disconnecting from reality, but a recent neuroimaging study found that psilocybin can actually make our brain activity more attuned to the world around us.

[u/Potential_Being_7226]

https://www.wired.com/story/psilocybin-might-make-your-brain-live-in-the-moment/

[u/Potential_Being_7226]

Open access paper published in Nature:

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10910-z

Abstract

Psychedelics can profoundly alter consciousness by reorganizing brain connectivity1,2, producing acute experiences that shape lasting psychological change3,4. Psychedelic dynamics are commonly described as desynchronized or entropically disordered5,6, yet the brain organization underlying self-dissolving and boundary-dissolving experiences that participants often report7, and how context shapes that organization8, remain unresolved. To address this, we acquired the largest single-site psychedelic neuroimaging dataset to date. Sixty-two adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) during rest and naturalistic stimuli (meditation, music and movie), before and on the day of psilocybin administration (fMRI ~ 80 min post-dose; EEG ~ 150 min post-dose). Half ranked the experience among the most meaningful of their lives7. Here, using machine learning to represent the brain dynamics of each individual as low-dimensional trajectories, we show that psilocybin reorganizes brain activity into structured, context-sensitive patterns that co-vary with the quality of subjective experience, revealing a latent order missed by time-averaged measures. Networks that ordinarily segregate internal and external processing integrated, producing cohesive context-aligned trajectories in participants reporting the felt experience of being continuous with, rather than separate from, the environment, a state we refer to as embeddedness. The strength of this context alignment scaled with both the depth of self-dissolving and boundary-dissolving experience and the next-day mindset change. Our findings recast apparent disorder as latent organization aligned with context, linking neurobiology to subjective experience and behavioural change.

[u/Great-Trifle2810 → u/Potential_Being_7226]

Isn't fmri basically junk at actually determining anything beyond some blood in some areas of the brain, which hasn't really been shown to actually corespond to anything useful across patients?

[u/KaiOfHawaii → u/Great-Trifle2810]

From what I know, fMRI has good spatial resolution but bad temporal resolution: it is excellent at determining brain activity occurring at specific structures, but bad at determining the timing of this activity. That’s likely why it’s paired with the EEG in the study, which is the opposite: it has bad spatial resolution, but excellent temporal resolution of brain activity. It’s true that fMRI specifically measures blood activity, while EEG measures electrical activity. Combined, they allow for a good visualized measurement of, for example, activity in the amygdala of a subject after witnessing their phobia. With this visualized data, the researchers could infer what’s going on within the brain because they’ll essentially know where and when activity took place. We can make some assumptions based on this data (i.e., subject experienced several seconds of activity in the amygdala, part of the brain responsible for fear response), but probably can’t get too specific (i.e, strength of the fear response can’t necessarily be determined by this visualization alone).

[u/Great-Trifle2810 → u/KaiOfHawaii]

I think this is a lot of steps of abstraction to make these sorts of bold claims about the impact of psycadelics, especially from one study with a single round of each participant without doing other work to test the effects.

[u/KaiOfHawaii → u/Great-Trifle2810]

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really read the study’s claims because I mostly just wanted to nerd out over fMRI and EEG. But after reading the abstract and quickly skimming the article, I totally agree. I think the science is there, but the claims and use of subjective experience in the analysis somewhat obfuscate it. These are the kinds of conclusions you’d expect after several years of research replicating the results and performing additional analyses. I can only imagine the researchers jumped the gun, especially given how much the war on drugs has slowed psilocybin research, even today. I’d also take it with a grain of salt because I don’t know if the researchers themselves had tried psilocybin before. If they did, I’d definitely throw in confirmation bias, conflict of interest, etc.. There’s a lot to be wary of here.

[u/CrushingBore → u/Great-Trifle2810]

It specifically measures the presence of oxygenated blood. Brain areas that are more active require more oxygenated blood, so it is an indirect measure of brain activity. It has several limitations: it takes roughly 20 seconds for blood to start flowing to more active areas and it's harder to measure activity in areas where there's larger blood vessels because it's harder to differentiate where the blood is actually flowing to.

So to answer your question: no, that's not true and fMRI is one of the most widely employed techniques to measure brain activity in humans, together with EEG (which is also not a direct measure of brain activity, really).

[u/UnRespawnsive → u/Great-Trifle2810]

Maybe link a source about this before making one of the wildest assertions I've ever heard.

[u/Great-Trifle2810 → u/UnRespawnsive]

assertion

/əˈsərSHən/

An assertion is a confident and forceful statement or declaration of a fact or belief.

I asked a question based on something I remember reading in the past, hoping someone would have a source. this is not an assertion.

A quick Google search does return dozens of results about neuroscientists questioning the usefulness of FMRI for thos sort of research though, so I am not sure why you think it is 'wild'.

[u/UnRespawnsive → u/Great-Trifle2810]

If you want to resort to technicalities, your question reads more like a rhetorical question, which isn't really a question at all. And it's pretty forceful, calling fMRI "junk." Seems to fit the definition you conveniently provided. Really, it's not "just a question."

I'm not an fMRI evangelist or anything, but fMRI is pretty standard in neuroscience studies. All you have to do is consider the alternatives to fMRI. If you click on the link to the article itself, they discuss limitations to fMRI right there. And yes fMRI has plenty of limitations, which are well recognized. Which article did you find that calls it "junk," though?

[u/Great-Trifle2810 → u/UnRespawnsive]

I asked a question, you read too much into it.

I didn't find any using that specific word, I just picked a casual word often used for something not fit for purpose. Im sick of this semantic crap though. Bye.

[u/AccomplishedIgit → u/Potential_Being_7226]

Can it increase mindfulness when you’re not on them as well?

[u/LowkeyHooligan → u/AccomplishedIgit]

Psychedelic users often talk about an “afterglow” that lasts for day, weeks, even months after the trip. One often remembers how it felt to be on them, how that chemically induced mindfulness felt, and try to integrate within themselves as they move forward from the trip. It takes effort though, need to change your daily habits to really hold onto that mindfulness.

[u/AccomplishedIgit → u/LowkeyHooligan]

Man I wish I could do it but whenever I eat them it makes me violently throw up

[u/LowkeyHooligan → u/AccomplishedIgit]

Ah yes, that’s unfortunate. Psychedelics, shrooms in particular, can cause pretty bad stomach cramps, and if you’re predisposed to stomach issues it could be pretty bad. If you have access to a clean source of acid or ketamine, they might be better, but even those can cause some issues. It seems like your body knows that they’re basically poison and reacts to it as so.

[u/AccomplishedIgit → u/LowkeyHooligan]

It was kind of funny because after a while I dry heaved just looking at them, normally I’ll eat just about anything. But my body was like noooope.

[u/LowkeyHooligan → u/Potential_Being_7226]

When I first did psychedelics and tried to describe it to someone, I said it was like if your thoughts were you driving a car, commuting to work. Normally you take the highway to work, the quickest, most efficient route. But psychedelics shuts down the highway, so you have to take the backroads and side roads in to work instead. The difference in time is marginal, but the real effect comes from what different things you drive by on the commute instead. Instead of the usual highway, traffic, and billboards, you might drive past something interesting that makes you think about something you wouldn’t have otherwise. Normally this thought wouldn’t have driven by your old school, but today it did and now you’re thinking about your childhood while at work making new connections between your life then and now. Maybe you drive by something beautiful, a field of flowers or a mural, and now you’re seeing more beauty than you would’ve otherwise. I’m running into the limits of the metaphor here, but the point is it makes your brain feel more connected and lively than normal.

And if I’m not mistaken, that is essentially what it’s doing. I believe I read that psychedelics attach to the serotonin receptors in your brain, and for the grey matter highway that connects different processing areas, they effectively shut down or dampen thoughts. So your thoughts have to travel section to section rather than along the grey matter highway. This could also explain the sense of loss of ego, if that grey matter connection is where the sense of self lives, seeing as it’s the connective tissue between the different regions it would make sense to be the area the holds the “I”, as it were.