How Shrooms Work & Affect the Brain: What Psilocybin Really Does to Your Head

[Buster's Uncle]

How Shrooms Work and Affect the Brain: What Psilocybin Is Really Doing to Your Head
Mic
Kathleen Wong  April 18, 2016



In a 2014 study, the psychedelic effect of magic mushrooms on the brain was found to bear similarities to the brain activity displayed when we're in dreamland, according to Live Science. For the study, scientists injected psilocybin, the main chemical in shrooms, into 15 participants. Afterward, they monitored their brain activity to see what sort of patterns were produced.

In the brain scans, the areas that deal with emotion and memory, like the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex, lit up in tandem — this is similar to the activity the brain displays when we're dreaming. According to the New York Times, shrooms and their effect on brain activity may be an effective avenue for treating depression and PTSD, but its classification as a Schedule I drug makes scientific research difficult.

Although further research is needed, these results support the age-old feeling of one's mind "expanding" while on psychedelics. "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," study author Robin Carhart-Harris said, according to Live Science.





On the other hand, researchers found that the brain areas that deal with "high-level" thinking were not as synchronized under the psilocybin's influence.

Other research has found mushrooms to affect serotonin receptors in the brain, making them connect in unusual ways, which leads to the sensory-overloading "trip."

Another psychedelic, LSD, has been found to cause an increase in the flow of blood to the brain as well as increased activity in the parts of the brain that deal with the senses of vision and hearing, awareness and motion.


https://www.yahoo.com/news/shrooms-affect-brain-psilocybin-really-152600718.html?nhp=1

[Buster's Uncle]

How Magic Mushrooms Really 'Expand the Mind'
LiveScience
By Rachael Rettner, Senior Writer   |   July 03, 2014 07:34am ET



Some parts of the brain become more synchronized when a person is taking magic mushrooms, possibly explaining why people feel psychedelic drugs expand their mind.  Credit: Haakon Nygård/Shutterstock.com

 
 
Your brain on psychedelic drugs looks similar to your brain when you're dreaming, suggests a new study that may also explain why people on psychedelics feel they are expanding their mind.

In the study, the researchers scanned the brains of 15 people before and after they received an injection of psilocybin, the hallucinogen found in magic mushrooms.

Under psilocybin, the activity of primitive brain areas thought to be involved in emotion and memory — including the hippocampus and the anterior cingulate cortex — become more synchronized, suggesting these areas were working together, the researchers said.

This pattern of brain activity is similar to that seen in people who are dreaming, the researchers said.

"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," study researcher Robin Carhart-Harris, of Imperial College London in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "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."

In contrast, the activity in brain areas involved in "high-level" thinking (such as self-consciousness) were less coordinated under psilocybin, the study found.

Finally, using a new technique to analyze the brain data, the researchers found that there were more possible patterns of brain activity when participants were under the influence of psilocybin, compared with when they were not taking the drug. This may be one reason why people who use psychedelic drugs feel that their mind has expanded — their brain has more possible states of activity to explore, the researchers said.

The researchers caution that, because some techniques used in the study are new, more research is needed to confirm the findings. The study is published today (July 3) in the journal Human Brain Mapping.


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