Effects of classic psychedelic drugs on turbulent signatures in brain dynamics

Josephine Cruzat*, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Anira Escrichs, Jakub Vohryzek, Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, Andrea I. Luppi, Agustin Ibañez, David Nutt, Robin Carhart-Harris, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Gustavo Deco, Morten L. Kringelbach*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal/Conference contribution in journal/Contribution to newspaperJournal articleResearchpeer-review

14 Citations (Scopus)

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.

Original languageEnglish
JournalNetwork Neuroscience
Volume6
Issue4
Pages (from-to)1104-1124
Number of pages21
ISSN2472-1751
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Oct 2022

Keywords

  • LSD
  • Psilocybin
  • Psychedelics
  • Turbulence

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