A psychedelic trip—on “magic mushrooms,” to be precise—may cause physical changes to the brain, a new imaging study finds. The results could one day help explain why people who take psilocybin—a psychoactive ingredient in such mushrooms—can feel a multitude of effects, from bliss and euphoria to anxiety, discomfort and hallucinations, as well as long-term effects of the drug.
“No one has ever properly tested whether and how the brain changes when someone takes psychedelics for the first time,” says Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology at the University of California, San Francisco. Users often describe the first time taking magic mushrooms as a significant experience, he says. But understanding what’s going on at the biological level has so far eluded scientists.
Now, in the new study, Carhart-Harris and his colleagues may have taken a step closer to answering that question. The team gave 28 healthy people who’d never tried a psychedelic 25 milligrams of psilocybin—the equivalent of a “heroic” dose of magic mushrooms, Carhart-Harris says—and looked at their brain using a variety of scanning techniques, including electroencephalography (EEG), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI).
The researchers scanned the brains of the participants brains before and after the dose using both MRI and DTI to track any possible changes to the organs’ activity and wiring, Carhart-Harris says. The team also monitored the participants’ brain using EEG during the trip and asked them about their well-being before and after they took the psilocybin.
After a single dose, the team detected changes in brain activity that correlated with well-being as much as a month after the participants took the drug. When participants’ brain activity was “richer” and less predictable (a measurement that Carhart-Harris and his team refer to as greater “entropy”), they tended to report having increased “psychological insight”—new ways of thinking about themselves, their problems, their past, and more—shortly after the trip.
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