From The Washington Post -
Psychedelic mushrooms put your brain in a “waking dream,” study finds
Psychedelic mushrooms can do more than make you see the world in kaleidoscope. Research suggests they may have permanent, positive effects on the human brain.
In fact, a mind-altering compound found in some 200 species of mushroom is already being explored as a potential treatment for depression and anxiety. People who consume these mushrooms, after "trips" that can be a bit scary and unpleasant, report feeling more optimistic, less self-centered, and even happier for months after the fact.
But why do these trips change the way people see the world? According to a study published today in Human Brain Mapping, the mushroom compounds could be unlocking brain states usually only experienced when we dream, changes in activity that could help unlock permanent shifts in perspective.
The study examined brain activity in those who’d received injections of psilocybin, which gives "shrooms" their psychedelic punch. Despite a long history of mushroom use in spiritual practice, scientists have only recently begun to examine the brain activity of those using the compound, and this is the first study to attempt to relate the behavioral effects to biological changes.
After injections, the 15 participants were found to have increased brain function in areas associated with emotion and memory. The effect was strikingly similar to a brain in dream sleep, according to Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a post-doctoral researcher in neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London and co-author of the study.
“You’re seeing these areas getting louder, and more active,” he said. “It’s like someone’s turned up the volume there, in these regions that are considered part of an emotional system in the brain. When you look at a brain during dream sleep, you see the same hyperactive emotion centers.”
In fact, administration of the drug just before or during sleep seemed to promote higher activity levels during Rapid Eye Movement sleep, when dreams occur. An intriguing finding, Carhart-Harris says, given that people tend to describe their experience on psychedelic drugs as being like “a waking dream.” It seems that the brain may literally be slipping into unconscious patterns while the user is awake.
Conversely, the subjects of the study had decreased activity in other parts of the brain—areas associated with high level cognition. “These are the most recent parts of our brain, in an evolutionary sense,” Carhart-Harris said. “And we see them getting quieter and less organized.”
This dampening of one area and amplification of another could explain the “mind-broadening” sensation of psychedelic drugs, he said. Unlike most recreational drugs, psychotropic mushrooms and LSD don’t provide a pleasant, hedonistic reward when they’re consumed. Instead, users take them very occasionally, chasing the strange neurological effects instead of any sort of high.
“Except for some naïve users who go looking for a good time…which, by the way, is not how it plays out,” Carhart-Harris said, “you see people taking them to experience some kind of mental exploration, and to try to understand themselves.”
Our firm sense of self—the habits and experiences that we find integral to our personality—is quieted by these trips. Carhart-Harris believes that the drugs may unlock emotion while “basically killing the ego,” allowing users to be less narrow-minded and let go of negative outlooks.
It’s still not clear why such effects can have more profound long-term effects on the brain than our nightly dreams. But Carhart-Harris hopes to see more of these compounds in modern medicine. “The way we treat psychological illnesses now is to dampen things,” he said. “We dampen anxiety, dampen ones emotional range in the hope of curing depression, taking the sting out of what one feels.”
But some patients seem to benefit from having their emotions “unlocked” instead. “It would really suit the style of psychotherapy where we engage in a patient’s history and hang-ups,” Carhart-Harris said. “Instead of putting a bandage over the exposed wound, we’d be essentially loosening their minds—promoting a permanent change in outlook.”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/07/03/psychedelic-drugs-put-your-brain-in-a-waking-dream-study-finds/?hpid=z6
From Yahoo.com -
How Tripping On Mushrooms Changes The Brain
By Erin Brodwin October 29, 2014 4:45 PM
Tripping on magic mushrooms may
actually free the mind, a new study says. The compounds in the
(illegal) mushrooms change the way the brain works.
New research suggests that psilocybin, the main psychoactive ingredient in magic mushrooms, sprouts new links across previously disconnected brain regions, temporarily altering the brain's entire organizational framework.
These new connections are likely
what allow users to experience things like seeing sounds or hearing
colors. And they could also be responsible for giving magic mushrooms
some of their antidepressant qualities.
When researchers compared the
brains of people who had received IV injections of psilocybin with those
of people given a placebo, they found that the drug changed how
information was carried across the brain. (Subjects received 2
milligrams of psilocybin; the dose and concentration of the chemical in
actual mushrooms — which are eaten, not injected — varies.) Typically,
brain activity follows specific neural networks. But in the people given
psilocybin injections, cross-brain activity seemed more erratic, as if
freed from its normal framework.
When the researchers looked more
closely, however, they noticed that the sparks of activity across the
brains of their drugged volunteers wasn't as chaotic as it seemed.
Instead, the activity formed distinct patterns, or cycles."The brain does not simply become a random system after psilocybin injection," the researchers wrote, "but instead retains some organizational features, albeit different from the normal state."
Picture the information in your
brain being shared across an interconnected and heavily-trafficked
system of highways. In that example, psilocybin isn't removing the
highways. Instead, it's simply building new ones.
These new connections
allow parts of the brain that don't usually talk to one another to
communicate. People who use magic mushrooms and see the number 52 as
glowing bright blue and red, then, don't see it that way because the
drugs have made them crazy. Instead, they associate the number with
colors because the brain region that detects and interprets color has
been chatting it up with the brain region that processes numbers.
This new insight into what
psilocybin does to the brain could help explain years of earlier
findings on psilocybin's psychological effects, including how magic
mushrooms seem to curb symptoms of depression.
In a 2012 study, Imperial College London neuroscientist David Nutt found that in people drugged with psilocybin, brain chatter across traditional areas of the brain was muted,
including in a region thought to play a role in maintaining our sense
of self. In depressed people, Nutt believes, the connections between
brain circuits in this sense-of-self region are too strong. "People who
get into depressive thinking, their brains are overconnected," Nutt told Psychology Today. Negative thoughts and feelings of self-criticism become obsessive and overwhelming.
Loosening those connections and creating new ones, Nutt thinks, could provide intense relief.
Johns Hopkins psychologists came to similar findings when they induced out of body experiences
in a small group of volunteers dosed with psilocybin. Immediately
following their sessions, participants said they felt more open, more
imaginative, and more appreciative of beauty. When the researchers
followed up with the volunteers a year later, nearly two-thirds said the
experience had been one of the most important in their lives; close to
half continued to score higher on a personality test of openness than
they had before taking the drug.
Nick Fernandez, a former cancer patient and psychology graduate
student who took psilocybin as part of a New York University study,
experienced those same feelings of freedom and positivity.
"For the first time in my life, I felt like there was... a force greater than myself," Fernandez told Aeon Magazine.
"Something inside me snapped and I experienced a... shift that made me
realize all my anxieties, defenses, and insecurities weren't something
to worry about."
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/tripping-mushrooms-changes-brain-204500998.html
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