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Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain
Healthy adults were tracked before, during and after high doses of psilocybin and methylphenidate to assess how psychedelics can change human brain networks, and psilocybin was found to massively disrupt functional connectivity in cortex and subcortex with some changes persisting for weeks.
Task-related reductions in network desynchronization provide strong evidence for context-dependent effects of psilocybin on brain activity and FC 65 and fill an important gap between preclinical studies of context dependence 66, 67 and clinical observations 68. Meanwhile, previous resting fMRI studies have reported a range of acute changes following ingestion of psilocybin 55, 63, ayahuasca 73 and LSD 56, 74, which broadly converge on a loss of network connectivity and an increase in global integration 24, 75. Healthy young adults ( n= 7, 18–45 years) were enrolled between April 2021 and March 2023 in a randomized cross-over precision functional brain mapping study at Washington University in Saint Louis (see Supplementary Methods for inclusion and exclusion criteria).
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