What do psychedelic mushrooms do to your brain

Possible Effects: After eating shrooms, participants in a Switzerland study were more likely to choose cheerful images over sad ones, leading researchers to suggest psilocybin could treat depression if combined with therapy. Shrooms, though, forge new communication channels that allow, for example, the sight and auditory cortices to chat. Possible Effects: Totems of art sing the praises of mushrooms. Where: Lateral ventricles, parts of the temporal and frontal lobes Brain Activity: Brain scans of schizophrenia patients often show differences in the above spots, which may help explain the adverse effects that have been reported when these individuals try shrooms.

Narrator: Think of it like an orchestra. Normally, the brain has different musical groups that each play independently. Johnson: A sextet there, here's a quartet there. This one's playing jazz. This one's classical, and a number of other ones. Johnson: So there is this communication between areas that are normally kind of compartmentalized and doing their own thing.

Narrator: Scientists believe that it's a combination of these effects that make psilocybin so useful for combating depression and addiction. When new areas in the brain start talking to each other, for example, you might have new insights into old problems. And that's why some experts describe tripping as a condensed version of talk therapy. And then dissolving your ego, Johnson says Narrator: And there's actually an increasing amount of research to prove it.

And research on addiction is equally promising. Yet despite these results, psilocybin is still listed as a Schedule I drug, a category reserved for compounds that have no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse. This lowered activity also appeared to be associated with stronger subjective effects of the drug, such as emotional and mystical experiences. The researchers also found that psilocybin changed the way that the claustrum communicated with brain regions involved in hearing, attention, decision-making and remembering.

With the highly detailed imaging of the claustrum provided by fMRI, the researchers next hope to look at the mysterious brain region in people with certain psychiatric disorders such as depression and substance use disorder. The goal of these experiments will be to see what roles, if any, the claustrum plays in these conditions.

The researchers also plan to observe the claustrum's activity when under the influence of other psychedelics, such as salvinorin A, a hallucinogen derived from a Mexican plant.

Materials provided by Johns Hopkins Medicine. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Science News. Their findings were published online on May 23, , in the journal NeuroImage.

Journal Reference : Frederick S. Barrett, Samuel R.