Psilocybin therapy for depression has started to show promise, yet the underlying causal mechanisms are not currently known. Here we leveraged the differential outcome in responders and non-responders to psilocybin (10mg and 25mg, 7 days apart) therapy for depression - to gain new insights into regions and networks implicated in the restoration of healthy br...
Clinical research into serotonergic psychedelics is expanding rapidly, showing promising efficacy across myriad disorders. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a commonly used strategy to identify psychedelic-induced changes in neural pathways in clinical and healthy populations. Here we, a large group of psychedelic imaging resea...
Psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy with psilocybin is an emerging therapy with great promise for depression, and modern psychedelic therapy (PT) methods incorporate music as a key element. Music is an effective emotional/hedonic stimulus that could also be useful in assessing changes in emotional responsiveness following psychedelic therapy. Brain responses ...
Background: Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a serious and life-threatening psychiatric condition. With a paucity of approved treatments, there is a desperate need for novel treatment avenues to be explored. Here, we present (1) an overview of the ways through which Public Patient Involvement (PPI) has informed a trial of psilocybin-assisted therapy for AN and (2) a...
In the last 15 years, psychedelic substances, such as LSD and psilocybin, have regained legitimacy in clinical research. In the general population as well as across various psychiatric populations, mental well-being has been found to significantly improve after a psychedelic experience. Mental well-being has large socioeconomic relevance, but it is a complex...
Healthful behaviours such as maintaining a balanced diet, being physically active and refraining from smoking have major impacts on the risk of developing cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases and other serious conditions. The burden of the so-called 'lifestyle diseases'-in personal suffering, premature mortality and public health costs-is considerable. ...
Psychedelics like lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin offer a powerful window into the function of the human brain and mind, by temporarily altering subjective experience through their neurochemical effects. A recent model postulates that serotonin 2a (5-HT2a) receptor agonism allows the brain to explore its dynamic landscape more readily, as ref...
Neuroimaging studies of the psychedelic state offer a unique window onto the neural basis of conscious perception and selfhood. Despite well understood pharmacological mechanisms of action, the large-scale changes in neural dynamics induced by psychedelic compounds remain poorly understood. Using source-localised, steady-state MEG recordings, we describe cha...
This paper formulates the action of psychedelics by integrating the free-energy principle and entropic brain hypothesis. We call this formulation relaxed beliefs under psychedelics (REBUS) and the anarchic brain, founded on the principle that-via their entropic effect on spontaneous cortical activity-psychedelics work to relax the precision of high-level pri...
The search for the universal laws of human brain function is still on-going but progress is being made. Here we describe the novel concepts of connectome harmonics and connectome-harmonic decomposition, which can be used to characterize the brain activity associated with any mental state. We use this new frequency-specific language to describe the brain acti...
Background: Evidence suggests that classical psychedelics can promote enduring changes in personality, attitudes and optimism, as well as improvements in mental health outcomes. Aim: To investigate the effects of a composite intervention, involving psilocybin, on pessimism biases in patients with treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Methods: Patients with T...
In recent years, the scientific study of meditation and psychedelic drugs has seen remarkable developments. The increased focus on meditation in cognitive neuroscience has led to a cross-cultural classification of standard meditation styles validated by functional and structural neuroanatomical data. Meanwhile, the renaissance of psychedelic research has she...
Brain activity can be understood as the exploration of a dynamical landscape of activity configurations over both space and time. This dynamical landscape may be defined in terms of spontaneous transitions within a repertoire of discrete metastable states of functional connectivity (FC), which underlie different mental processes. However, it remains unclear ...
ObjectiveTo explore whether psilocybin with psychological support modulates personality parameters in patients suffering from treatment-resistant depression (TRD).MethodTwenty patients with moderate or severe, unipolar, TRD received oral psilocybin (10 and 25 mg, one week apart) in a supportive setting. Personality was assessed at baseline and at 3-month fol...
Disruptions in social decision-making are becoming evident in many psychiatric conditions. These are studied using paradigms investigating the psychological mechanisms underlying interpersonal interactions, such as the Ultimatum Game (UG). Rejection behaviour in the UG represents altruistic punishment - the costly punishment of norm violators - but the mecha...
BackgroundNatural speech analytics has seen some improvements over recent years, and this has opened a window for objective and quantitative diagnosis in psychiatry. Here, we used a machine learning algorithm applied to natural speech to ask whether language properties measured before psilocybin for treatment-resistant can predict for which patients it will ...
Introduction: It is a basic principle of the "psychedelic" treatment model that the quality of the acute experience mediates long-term improvements in mental health. In the present paper we sought to test this using data from a clinical trial assessing psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). In line with previous reports, we hypothesized that th...
RationalePrevious research suggests that classical psychedelic compounds can induce lasting changes in personality traits, attitudes and beliefs in both healthy subjects and patient populations.AimHere we sought to investigate the effects of psilocybin on nature relatedness and libertarian-authoritarian political perspective in patients with treatment-resist...
Recent evidence indicates that psilocybin with psychological support may be effective for treating depression. Some studies have found that patients with depression show heightened amygdala responses to fearful faces and there is reliable evidence that treatment with SSRIs attenuates amygdala responses (Ma, 2015). We hypothesised that amygdala responses to e...
RationaleRecent clinical trials are reporting marked improvements in mental health outcomes with psychedelic drug-assisted psychotherapy.ObjectivesHere, we report on safety and efficacy outcomes for up to 6 months in an open-label trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.MethodsTwenty patients (six females) with (mostly) severe, unipolar, treat...
