Magic mushrooms temporarily 'dissolve' brain network responsible for sense of self

Psilocybin, the compound that makes magic mushrooms trippy, works its magic by desynchronizing the brain network responsible for a person's sense of self, new research finds.

Psilocybin warps people's sense of time and space, as well as shifts their feelings of connection to the world around them. While most of these subjective effects wane pretty quickly, the new study finds that some changes in the brain persist for weeks after a high dose of psilocybin.

This is the first time such persistence has been detailed in humans, and the findings may help explain why psilocybin is a promising treatment for depression and other mental health conditions, said lead study author Dr. Joshua Siegel, a psychiatrist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.

"If there's this plasticity [in the brain] and there's this clinical response, we expected there would be a change in connectivity and activity," Siegel told Live Science. "This is the first study really to provide a compelling answer as to what that is."

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Studies have found that psilocybin works by plugging into brain cells that react to serotonin, a chemical messenger. Brain scans of people with and without depression suggest the drug encourages some parts of the brain to forge new connections and sync their activity. Meanwhile, the activity of other brain networks gets disrupted and falls out of sync.

To probe these effects further, Siegel and colleagues used precision functional mapping, which involves getting large amounts of brain-activity data from just a few participants. In the study, published Wednesday (July 17) in the journal Nature, seven participants had their brains scanned with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a technique that tracks blood flow to infer the activity of different brain regions.