Year: 2022
Type: article
Abstract: Psychedelic drugs show promise as safe and effective treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders, yet their mechanisms of action are not fully understood. A fundamental hypothesis is that psychedelics work by dose-dependently changing the functional hierarchy of brain dynamics, but it is unclear whether different psychedelics act similarly. Here, we investigated the changes in the brain's functional hierarchy associated with two different psychedelics (LSD and psilocybin). Using a novel turbulence framework, we were able to determine the vorticity, that is, the local level of synchronization, that allowed us to extend the standard global time-based measure of metastability to become a local-based measure of both space and time. This framework produced detailed signatures of turbulence-based hierarchical change for each psychedelic drug, revealing consistent and discriminate effects on a higher level network, that is, the default mode network. Overall, our findings directly support a prior hypothesis that psychedelics modulate (i.e., "compress") the functional hierarchy and provide a quantification of these changes for two different psychedelics. Implications for therapeutic applications of psychedelics are discussed.
Source: Network Neuroscience
DOI: 10.1162/netn_a_00250
Institutions: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Adolfo Ibáñez University, University of Oxford, Imperial College London, University of Cambridge, The Alan Turing Institute, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, University of California, San Francisco, Trinity College Dublin, University of San Andrés, Global Brain Health Institute, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Institució Catalana de Recerca i Estudis Avançats, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Monash University, Aarhus University
Language: English
Subfield: Clinical Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $1,750
OpenAlex ID: W4223566727