LSD puts brain in state we've not seen before

摘要

Psychedelic drugs really do change the state of the brain, it seems, creating a different kind of consciousness. "We see an increase in the diversity of signals from the brain," says Anil Seth at the University of Sussex, UK. 'The brain is more complex in its activity." Seth and his team discovered this by reanalysing data collected by researchers at Imperial College London. Robin Carhart-Harris and his colleagues had monitored brain activity in 19 volunteers on ketamine, 15 who had taken LSD, and 14 under the influence of psilocybin, a compound in magic mushrooms. Carhart-Harris's team compared the magnetic fields produced by the volunteers' neurons when they took a drug and when they had a placebo.