Frontiers in Human Neuroscience
July 22, 2026
Carla Pallavicini, Lorena Llobenes, Federico Cavanna et al.
Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic known to alter subjective experience and induce lasting psychological changes, including increased cognitive flexibility and reduced rigid self-related beliefs. Contextual factors, including preparatory mental states, are thought to play a key role in shaping these effects. Compassion imagery, which engages care-affiliative motivational systems, may represent...
bioRxiv
May 4, 2026
Tomás Ariel D’amelio, Tomás Gil Garbagnoli, Jerónimo Rodríguez Cuello et al.
ABSTRACT Serotonergic psychedelics induce altered states of consciousness characterised by profound changes in emotional experience. Although psychedelics modulate autonomic arousal, sympathetic engagement during their affective effects remains poorly characterised. We recorded cardiac, electrodermal, and respiratory activity in 19 participants following inhalation of 20 or 40 mg of freebase...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
April 22, 2026
Nicolás Bruno, Federico Cavanna, Federico Zamberlán et al.
preprint
Spontaneous thoughts constitute most of everyday inner experience, yet long-standing methodological challenges obscure a thorough exploration of their content and neurophysiological underpinnings. Traditional approaches relying on thought probes impose strict constraints on phenomenological reports, whereas online verbal reports disrupt the natural flow of experience while interfering neural...
Apollo (University of Cambridge)
January 16, 2026
Evan Lewis-Healey, Carla Pallavicini, Federico Cavanna et al.
N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a fast-acting psychedelic drug that induces a radical reorganization of conscious contents and brain dynamics. However, our understanding of how brain dynamics support psychedelic-induced conscious states remains unclear. We therefore present a repeated-measures dose-dependent study of the subjective and neural dynamics induced through DMT under naturalistic...
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience
December 30, 2025
Evan Lewis-Healey, Carla Pallavicini, Federico Cavanna et al.
4 citations
N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a fast-acting psychedelic drug that induces a radical reorganization of conscious contents and brain dynamics. However, our understanding of how brain dynamics support psychedelic-induced conscious states remains unclear. We therefore present a repeated-measures dose-dependent study of the subjective and neural dynamics induced through DMT under naturalistic...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
December 27, 2025
Yayla A Ilksoy, Alethia de la Fuente, Jacobo Sitt et al.
Abstract It has been proposed that both conscious and unconscious perception are associated with a feedforward sweep of oscillatory activity in the gamma band (>40 Hz), while conscious perception also requires recurrent feedback via beta band ($\sim$20 Hz) oscillations. To investigate the causal relationship between these oscillations and (un)conscious visual perception, we assessed the effect...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
December 22, 2025
Carla Pallavicini, Lorena Llobenes, Federico Cavanna et al.
Abstract Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic drug known to alter subjective experience and elicit long-term psychological changes, enhancing cognitive flexibility and reducing rigid self-related beliefs. Combined with compassion motivational primes that involve generating mental representations of compassion, it may increase the potential for activating the care-affiliative motivational...
Sci Rep
July 9, 2025
Stephanie Müller, Federico Cavanna, Laura De la Fuente et al.
3 citations
Serotonergic psychedelics are remarkable for their capacity to induce variable yet reproducible modifications to human consciousness. The acute effects of these compounds include perceptual alterations, predominantly in the visual domain, yet these alterations have been mostly documented only by subjective reports. We used eye-tracking to quantify the effects of low vs. high doses of psilocybin...
Communications Biology
March 11, 2025
Juan Ignacio Piccinini, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carla Pallavicini et al.
6 citations
The transition towards the brain state induced by psychedelic drugs is frequently neglected in favor of a static description of their acute effects. We use a time-dependent whole-brain model to reproduce large-scale brain dynamics measured with fMRI from 15 volunteers under 20 mg intravenous N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a short-acting psychedelic. To capture its transient effects, we...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2025
Stephanie Müller, Federico Cavanna, Laura Alethia de la Fuente et al.
1 citation
Abstract Psychedelic compounds significantly reshape conscious perception, yet the implications of these alterations for complex visual-guided behaviors remain poorly understood. We investigated how psilocybin modulates visual salience processing during natural scene perception. Twenty-three participants completed eye-tracking tasks under self-blinded low and high doses of psilocybin, in a...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 19, 2024
Evan Lewis-Healey, Carla Pallavicini, Federico Cavanna et al.
1 citation
preprint
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a fast-acting psychedelic drug that induces a radical reorganisation of conscious contents and brain dynamics. However, our understanding of how brain dynamics support psychedelic-induced conscious states remains unclear. We therefore present a repeated-measures dose-dependent study of the subjective and neural dynamics induced through DMT under naturalistic...
bioRxiv
January 29, 2024
Juan Ignacio Piccinini, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carla Pallavicini et al.
preprint
Abstract The transition towards the brain state induced by psychedelic drugs is frequently neglected in favor of a static description of their acute effects. We used a time-dependent whole-brain model to reproduce large-scale brain dynamics measured with fMRI from 15 volunteers under 20 mg intravenous N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a short-acting psychedelic. To capture its transient effects, we...
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
March 28, 2023
Christopher Timmermann, Leor Roseman, Sharad Haridas et al.
217 citations
Psychedelics have attracted medical interest, but their effects on human brain function are incompletely understood. In a comprehensive, within-subjects, placebo-controlled design, we acquired multimodal neuroimaging [i.e., EEG-fMRI (electroencephalography-functional MRI)] data to assess the effects of intravenous (IV) N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) on brain function in 20 healthy volunteers....
bioRxiv Preprint Server
September 28, 2022
Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carla Pallavicini, Juan Piccinini et al.
preprint
Brain states are frequently represented using a unidimensional scale measuring the richness of subjective experience (level of consciousness). This description assumes a mapping between the high-dimensional space of whole-brain configurations and the trajectories of brain states associated with changes in consciousness, yet this mapping and its properties remain unknown. We combined whole-brain...
Psychopharmacology
September 1, 2022
Camila Sanz, Federico Cavanna, Stephanie Müller et al.
1 citation
Serotonergic psychedelics are being studied as novel treatments for mental health disorders and as facilitators of improved well-being, mental function, and creativity. Recent studies have found mixed results concerning the effects of low doses of psychedelics ("microdosing") on these domains. However, microdosing is generally investigated using instruments designed to assess larger doses of...
Translational Psychiatry
August 2, 2022
Federico Cavanna, Stephanie Müller, Laura Alethia de la Fuente et al.
130 citations
Abstract The use of low sub-perceptual doses of psychedelics (“microdosing”) has gained popularity in recent years. Although anecdotal reports claim multiple benefits associated with this practice, the lack of placebo-controlled studies severely limits our knowledge of microdosing and its effects. Moreover, research conducted in standard laboratory settings could fail to capture the motivation...
Communications Biology
June 29, 2022
Anira Escrichs, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Carme Uribe et al.
67 citations
Significant advances have been made by identifying the levels of synchrony of the underlying dynamics of a given brain state. This research has demonstrated that non-conscious dynamics tend to be more synchronous than in conscious states, which are more asynchronous. Here we go beyond this dichotomy to demonstrate that different brain states are underpinned by dissociable spatiotemporal...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
December 7, 2021
Federico Cavanna, Stephanie Müller, Laura Alethia de la Fuente et al.
8 citations
preprint
Abstract The use of low sub-hallucinogenic doses of psychedelics (“microdosing”) has gained popularity in recent years. Although anecdotal reports claim multiple benefits associated with this practice, the lack of placebo-controlled studies limits our knowledge of microdosing and its effects. Moreover, research conducted in laboratory settings might fail to capture the motivation of individuals...
Frontiers in Psychiatry
November 5, 2021
Enzo Tagliazucchi, Federico Zamberlán, Federico Cavanna et al.
23 citations
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a classic psychedelic capable of inducing short-lasting but profound changes in consciousness. As with other psychedelics, the experience induced by DMT strongly depends upon contextual factors, yet the neurobiological determinants of this variability remain unknown. The present study investigated changes in neural oscillations elicited by inhaled DMT, and...
Physical review. E
July 28, 2021
Yonatan Sanz Perl, Hernan Bocaccio, Carla Pallavicini et al.
82 citations
The cognitive functions of human and nonhuman primates rely on the dynamic interplay of distributed neural assemblies. As such, it seems unlikely that cognition can be supported by macroscopic brain dynamics at the proximity of equilibrium. We confirmed this hypothesis by investigating electrocorticography data from nonhuman primates undergoing different states of unconsciousness (sleep, and...
Journal of Psychedelic Studies
May 6, 2021
Federico Cavanna, Carla Pallavicini, Virginia Milano et al.
31 citations
Abstract Background and aims The COVID-19 pandemic and its consequences represent a major challenge to the mental health and well-being of the general population. Building on previous work on the potential long-term benefits of psychedelics, we hypothesized that lifetime use of these drugs could be linked to better mental health indicators in the context of the ongoing pandemic. Methods Two...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
March 11, 2021
Enzo Tagliazucchi, Federico Zamberlán, Federico Cavanna et al.
3 citations
preprint
N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a classic psychedelic capable of inducing short-lasting but profound changes in consciousness. As with other psychedelics, the experience induced by DMT strongly depends upon contextual factors, yet the neurobiological determinants of this variability remain unknown. We combined wireless electroencephalography and source imaging to map changes in neural...
J Psychopharmacol
February 10, 2021
Carla Pallavicini, Federico Cavanna, Federico Zamberlán et al.
73 citations
BACKGROUND: N,N-dimethyltryptamine is a short-acting psychedelic tryptamine found naturally in many plants and animals. Few studies to date have addressed the neural and psychological effects of N,N-dimethyltryptamine alone, either administered intravenously or inhaled in freebase form, and none have been conducted in natural settings. AIMS: Our primary aim was to study the acute effects of...
Conscious Cogn
December 8, 2020
Camila Sanz, Carla Pallavicini, Facundo Carrillo et al.
34 citations
Serotonergic psychedelics have been suggested to mirror certain aspects of psychosis, and, more generally, elicit a state of consciousness underpinned by increased entropy of on-going neural activity. We investigated the hypothesis that language produced under the effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) should exhibit increased entropy and reduced semantic coherence. Computational analysis...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
August 20, 2020
Carla Pallavicini, Federico Cavanna, Federico Zamberlán et al.
17 citations
preprint
Abstract Background N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is a short acting psychedelic tryptamine found naturally in many plants and animals. Few studies to date addressed the neural and psychological effects of DMT alone, either administered intravenously or inhaled in freebase form, and none conducted in natural settings. Aims Our primary aim was to study the acute effects of inhaled DMT in natural...