Taking psilocybin, the hallucinogenic compound found in magic mushrooms, temporarily resets entire networks of neurons in the brain that are responsible for controlling a person’s sense of time and self, finds a study that repeatedly imaged the brains of seven volunteers before, during and after they took a massive dose of the drug.
The findings, published in Nature on 17 July1, could offer insights into why the compound might have a therapeutic effect on some neurological conditions.
Researchers “saw such massive changes induced by psilocybin” that some study participants’ brain-network patterns resembled those of a different person entirely, says Shan Siddiqi, a psychiatric neuroscientist at Harvard School of Medicine in Boston, Massachusetts. “I’ve never seen an effect this strong.”
Most of these changes lasted for a few hours, but one key link between different parts of the brain remained disrupted for weeks.
Hellbound and Down 