The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
November 24, 2025
Mona Irrmischer, Marco Aqil, Lisa Luan et al.
Psychedelics profoundly alter subjective experience and brain dynamics. Brain oscillations express signatures of near-critical dynamics, relevant for healthy function. Alterations in the proximity to criticality have been suggested to underlie the experiential and neurological effects of psychedelics. Here, we investigate the effects of a psychedelic substance (DMT) on the criticality of brain...
Nature Communications
November 21, 2025
Marco Aqil, Gilles De Hollander, Nina Vreugdenhil et al.
1 citation
Psilocybin alters perception and brain dynamics. Here, we investigate the effects of psilocybin using psychophysics, ultra-high field functional MRI, and computational modeling. We find that psilocybin alters contextual perception in the Ebbinghaus illusion, as well as contextual modulation in cortical responses to visual stimuli. We propose a computational model capable of capturing and...
Neurosci Conscious
October 18, 2025
Hugh McGovern, Marco Aqil, Selen Atasoy et al.
4 citations
This article presents a neuroscientific interpretation of Carl Jung's theory of archetypes and their experience in altered states of consciousness. We begin by rehearsing the Free Energy Principle and Predictive Processing as foundational frameworks that subserve and inform the thesis that follows. The following sections examine three aspects of archetypes: the affective core rooted in...
bioRxiv
February 8, 2025
Mona Irrmischer, Marco Aqil, Lisa Luan et al.
4 citations
preprint
ABSTRACT Psychedelics profoundly alter subjective experience and brain dynamics. Brain oscillations express signatures of near-critical dynamics, relevant for healthy function. Alterations in the proximity to criticality have been suggested to underlie the experiential and neurological effects of psychedelics. Here, we investigate the effects of a psychedelic substance (DMT) on the criticality...
October 16, 2024
Marco Aqil
A goal of cognitive neuroscience is to provide accounts of brain functions in terms of information processing. Vision has long been used as a beachhead for such approaches: information-processing principles first identified in the visual system, such as receptive fields and divisive normalization, have later been observed in a variety of other sensory and cognitive domains. Here, we formulated...
Neuropharmacology
February 1, 2023
Marco Aqil, Leor Roseman
59 citations
Psychedelics are undergoing a major resurgence of scientific and clinical interest. While multiple theories and frameworks have been proposed, there is yet no universal agreement on the mechanisms underlying the complex effects of psychedelics on subjective experience and brain dynamics, nor their therapeutic benefits. Despite being prominent in psychedelic phenomenology and distinct from those...