Taking psychedelics can dissolve the boundary between yourself and the rest of the world, leaving a profound sense of oneness. Now scientists have revealed that specific changes to the brain may cause this altered sense of consciousness.
The results, published today in Nature, show how taking psilocybin—an active ingredient in magic mushrooms—causes brain networks that typically process the self and the outside world separately to become integrated.
“It reframes our understanding of the psychedelic experience by providing a biological basis for some of the meaning and coherence people report,” says lead author Devon Stoliker, a computational neuroscientist at Monash University in Australia.
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