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Mushrooms Make You Feel Awesome By Turning Off Your Brain

In this week’s psychotropic drug research news, we now kinda know how psychedelic mushrooms work.

In this week’s psychotropic drug research news, we now kinda know how psychedelic mushrooms work. Turns out there’s nothing mind expanding about it. It’s the opposite, actually: psilocybin, the active drug in mushrooms that we know surprisingly little about, dramatically descreases activity over large areas of the brain, particularly areas of the brain that are very connected to other areas. So it decreases connectivity, powers your brain down, and it feels awesome. Coma life must be rad.

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“Psychedelics are thought of as ‘mind-expanding’ drugs, so it has commonly been assumed that they work by increasing brain activity,” says David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College and author of the new study, to Nature. “Surprisingly, we found that psilocybin actually caused activity to decrease in areas that have the densest connections with other areas.” And the more decrease that was found (via MRIs), the stronger the effect of the drug.

The findings also give some hope to psilocybin as a therapeutic drug. From Nature:

Nutt and his colleagues suggest their results could explain some of the therapeutic effects of psilocybin. Depression involves hyperactivity in the mPFC, leading to the pessimistic outlook and pathological brooding characteristic of the condition, so mPFC deactivation could alleviate those symptoms. The researchers also observed reduced blood flow to the hypothalamus, and suggest that this explains anecdotal reports that psychedelics alleviate symptoms of cluster headaches, which are associated with increased hypothalamic activity.

Meanwhile, my own research reveals that mushrooms taken in any quantity cause panic attacks. Sadface.

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Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.