How Psychedelic Mushrooms Can Free the Mind
The following first appeared on Reset.me:
Researchers studying the effects of psilocybin on the brain have found that the naturally occurring psychedelic compound frees the mind to make new connections by sprouting new links across previously disconnected regions. This may explain why people experience effects such as “seeing” numbers as colors after taking magic mushrooms, which contain the mind-altering compound.
The study, which was published by the Journal of the Royal Society, concluded that post-psilocybin “the homological structure of the brain’s functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change.”
Yahoo Finance reports: “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.”