Half of the participants ranked their session among the most meaningful experiences of their lives, and 24 ranked it in their personal top five. Stolkier and his colleagues began analyzing data from their brain scan to find out why.
Blurred borders
By measuring overall functional connectivity (the influence that each part of the cortex exerts on the rest), the team found that when participants had their eyes closed, sensory regions lost influence while associative regions gained. “It seems that the brain’s ability to construct reality, or imagination, or our associations, our beliefs, our self-esteem, these faculties dominated the sensory areas more,” Stoliker says, emphasizing that the interpretation is hypothetical. “This could help explain why people have meaningful and complex imagery experiences, why they have mystical experiences with images that relate to them personally.”
Another observation made by the team was that the connections In each brain network weakened, the connections between strengthened networks. Brain modularity, a parameter that describes how neurons stay sorted into specialized teams, was studied in all four parts of the experimental sequence.
Additionally, researchers have found that, when sober, the activity of a brain with its eyes closed is very different from that of a brain watching a movie. Under psilocybin, this difference almost evaporated. In the visual network, the gap between eyes-open and eyes-closed connectivity decreased by 85%. The results of the EEG session independently confirmed this, with alpha band activity (normally a marker of visual input to the brain) reduced by almost half.
“When someone takes a psychedelic and is able to close their eyes and see complex images, there seems to be less of a boundary between the internal and external world than we usually experience,” says Stoliker.
Regardless of these details, the results fairly closely replicated the chaos in the brain that many researchers claimed was caused by psychedelics. That chaos transformed into order, however, when the team processed their data in a slightly unorthodox way.
Hidden order
Scientists typically perform two averaging procedures in a standard brain imaging study. The first is the average over time. An eight-minute brain scan includes a few hundred successive images of the entire brain. To understand how two specific regions work together, researchers typically average all of these images down to a single number describing how closely the activity of the two regions matched over the entire eight minutes.
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