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...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
July 1, 2026
Bruno Moses, Manoj K. Doss, Enzo Tagliazucchi
1 citation
Serotonergic psychedelics induce profound alterations in consciousness, giving rise to an altered state commonly referred to as the psychedelic state. The entropic brain hypothesis proposes that brain entropy (i.e., the degree of uncertainty in the distribution of brain states) is elevated during the psychedelic state, as well as in other states characterized by an expanded breadth of...
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...
SSRN Electronic Journal
2026
Jakub Vohryzek, Elvira Garcia Guzman, Morten L. Kringelbach et al.
1 citation
Despite divergent behavioral and phenomenological profiles, both psychedelic states and reduced states of consciousness have been associated with a flattening of the brain's functional hierarchy. To address this apparent paradox, we developed a more specific definition of hierarchy based on the proximity of the brain to thermodynamic equilibrium and then applied it to investigate the changes to...
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...
PLoS Computational Biology
October 28, 2025
Fernando Lehue, Carlos Coronel-Oliveros, Vicente Medel et al.
1 citation
Sleep onset is characterized by a departure from arousal, and can be separated into well-differentiated stages: NREM (which encompasses three substages: N1, N2 and N3) and REM (Rapid Eye Movement). Awake brain dynamics are maintained by various wake-promoting mechanisms, particularly the neuromodulators Acetylcholine (ACh) and Noradrenaline (NA), whose levels naturally decrease during the...
Brain Topography
September 5, 2025
Toedt Inken, Gesine Hermann, Enzo Tagliazucchi et al.
Different levels of reduced consciousness characterise human sleep stages at the behavioural level. On electroencephalography (EEG), the identification of sleep stages predominantly relies on localised oscillatory power within distinct frequency bands. Several theoretical frameworks converge on the central significance of long-range information sharing in maintaining consciousness, which...
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...
Psychology of Consciousness Theory Research and Practice
June 12, 2025
Etzel Cardeña, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Katja Valli et al.
11 citations
This article presents a taxonomy of altered states of consciousness, primarily based on their central phenomenological features. Following taxonomic principles and a modified Delphi methodology, a multidisciplinary, international group identified eight distinct phenomenological/behavioral states (some with subcategories): proto and transitional, delirium, minimal to no awareness, experiential...
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...
Open Science Framework
2025
Federico Cavanna, Enzo Tagliazucchi
This project investigates the acute effects of psilocybin on probabilistic reinforcement learning in healthy adults. Using a double blind, randomized, within-subject, placebo-controlled design, we will analyze behavioral data and Event-Related Potentials (ERPs) from EEG recordings to understand how psychedelics modulate neural mechanisms of reward processing and decision-making.
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...
Communications Biology
September 30, 2024
Pablo Castro, Andrea I. Luppi, Enzo Tagliazucchi et al.
21 citations
Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging evolves through a repertoire of functional connectivity patterns which might reflect ongoing cognition, as well as the contents of conscious awareness. We investigated whether the dynamic exploration of these states can provide robust and generalizable markers for the state of consciousness in human participants, across loss of consciousness...
Communications Biology
September 19, 2024
Iván Mindlin, Rubén Herzog, Laouen Belloli et al.
18 citations
Disorders of consciousness (DoC) represent a challenging and complex group of neurological conditions characterised by profound disturbances in consciousness. The current range of treatments for DoC is limited. This has sparked growing interest in developing new treatments, including the use of psychedelic drugs. Nevertheless, clinical investigations and the mechanisms behind them are...
Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991)
August 1, 2024
Evan Lewis-Healey, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Andrés Canales-Johnson et al.
27 citations
Breathwork is an understudied school of practices involving intentional respiratory modulation to induce an altered state of consciousness (ASC). We simultaneously investigate the phenomenological and neural dynamics of breathwork by combining Temporal Experience Tracing, a quantitative methodology that preserves the temporal dynamics of subjective experience, with low-density portable EEG...
J Affect Disord
February 27, 2024
Debora Copa, David Erritzøe, Bruna Giribaldi et al.
31 citations
BackgroundPsilocybin is a serotonergic psychedelic drug under assessment as a potential therapy for treatment-resistant and major depression. Heterogeneous treatment responses raise interest in predicting the outcome from baseline data.MethodsA machine learning pipeline was implemented to investigate baseline resting-state functional connectivity measured with functional magnetic resonance...
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...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
December 29, 2023
Iván Mindlin, Rubén Herzog, Laouen Belloli et al.
7 citations
preprint
Disorders of consciousness (DoC) are a challenging and complex group of neurological conditions characterised by absent or impaired awareness. The current range of therapeutic options for DoC patients is limited, offering few non-invasive pharmacological alternatives. This situation has sprung a growing interest in the development of novel treatments, such as the proposal to study the efficacy...
June 4, 2023
Timo Torsten Schmidt, Cyril Costines, Enzo Tagliazucchi et al.
2 citations
preprint
The Altered Xperience Project (AXP) is an ongoing research project that takes the form of an open citizen science initiative. Its main goal is to systematically collect and consolidate data on the subjective experiences induced by various consciousness-manipulating techniques (CMTs). These include both psychoactive substances as well as non-pharmacological manoeuvres that induce altered states...
Scientific Reports
April 17, 2023
Rubén Herzog, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas et al.
51 citations
Psychedelic drugs, including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and other agonists of the serotonin 2A receptor (5HT2A-R), induce drastic changes in subjective experience, and provide a unique opportunity to study the neurobiological basis of consciousness. One of the most notable neurophysiological signatures of psychedelics, increased entropy in spontaneous neural activity, is thought to be of...