After a high dose of psilocybin, the brain desynchronizes at a massive scale, causing loss of our sense of self, time, and space. This may drive the burst of plasticity caused by psychedelics. The next day, brain activity has largely returned to normal, but an echo remains – a reset of circuits critical to the sense of self.

Our study is out today in @Nature nature.com/articles/s4158… We tracked brain changes in healthy adults before, during, and for weeks after a large dose of psilocybin, and again 6+ months later.

Psilocybin caused profound and widespread desynchronization to brain activity, altering connections across cortical networks and subcortical structures (paralleling @Carhart-Harris’s entropic brain hypothesis).