New research shows similarities in our brain patterns during dreams and mind-expanding drug trips. Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and magic mushrooms can profoundly alter our perception of the world but there is insufficient knowledge about what physically happens in the brain. This research, published in Human Brain Mapping, takes a look at the effects of the psychedelic substance in magic mushrooms, called ‘psilocybin,’ using data from brain scans of volunteers who took them.
“What we have done in this research is begin to identify the biological basis of the reported mind expansion associated with psychedelic drugs,” said Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris from the Department of Medicine, Imperial College London. “I was fascinated to see similarities between the pattern of brain activity in a psychedelic state and the pattern of brain activity during dream sleep, especially as both involve the primitive areas of the brain linked to emotions and memory. People often describe taking psilocybin as producing a dreamlike state and our findings have, for the first time, provided a physical representation for the experience in the brain.”
Psychedelics are not like other psychoactive chemicals, people who take psychedelics describle the results as - ‘expanded consciousness,’ including enhanced associations, vivid imagination and dream-like states. Lead author Dr Enzo Tagliazucchi from Goethe University, Germany said: “A good way to understand how the brain works is to perturb the system in a marked and novel way. Psychedelic drugs do precisely this and so are powerful tools for exploring what happens in the brain when consciousness is profoundly altered. It is the first time we have used these methods to look at brain imaging data and it has given some fascinating insight into how psychedelic drugs expand the mind. It really provides a window through which to study the doors of perception.”
Dr. Carhart-Harris added: “Learning about the mechanisms that underlie what happens under the influence of psychedelic drugs can also help to understand their possible uses. We are currently studying the effect of LSD on creative thinking and we will also be looking at the possibility that psilocybin may help alleviate symptoms of depression by allowing patients to change their rigidly pessimistic patterns of thinking. Psychedelics were used for therapeutic purposes in the 1950s and 1960s but now we are finally beginning to understand their action in the brain and how this can inform how to put them to good use.”
During the research on magic mushrooms, reasearchers applied entropy which was originally developed to quantify the energy lost in mechanical systems. Entropy also has another use, to measure the range of randomness of a system. Reserchers used this concept to analyze the level of entropy for different networks in the brain while in the psychedelic state. The result of this analysis was that there was a remarkable increase in entropy in certain primitive parts of the brain revealing an increased number of patterns of activity that were possible under the influence of psilocybin or in simpler words there is in expansion in brain potential or consciousness because of a much larger range of potential brain states being available.
The research also showed that volunteers who had taken psilocybin had more disjointed and uncoordinated activity in the brain network that is linked to high-level thinking, including self-consciousness.
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