bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
November 7, 2024
Lorenzo Pasquini, Jakub Vohryzek, Anira Escrichs et al.
4 citations
preprint
Abstract Psilocybin has been shown to induce fast and sustained improvements in mental well-being across various populations, yet its long-term mechanisms of action are not fully understood. Initial evidence suggests that longitudinal functional and structural brain changes implicate fronto-striatal-thalamic (FST) circuitry, a broad system involved in goal-directed behavior and motivational...
Nature Mental Health
August 5, 2024
Gustavo Deco, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Samuel Johnson et al.
39 citations
Abstract Effective interventions for neuropsychiatric disorders may work by rebalancing the brain’s functional hierarchical organization. Here we directly investigated the effects of two different serotonergic pharmacological interventions on functional brain hierarchy in major depressive disorder in a two-arm double-blind phase II randomized controlled trial comparing psilocybin therapy (22...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
June 25, 2024
Milan Van Maldegem, Jakub Vohryzek, Selen Atasoy et al.
2 citations
preprint
Abstract Ketamine is classified as a dissociative anaesthetic that, in sub-anaesthetic doses, can produce an altered state of consciousness characterised by dissociative symptoms, visual and auditory hallucinations, and perceptual distortions. Given the anaesthetic-like and psychedelic-like nature of this compound, it is expected to have different effects on brain dynamics in anaesthetic doses...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
May 31, 2024
Jakub Vohryzek, Selen Atasoy, Gustavo Deco et al.
8 citations
preprint
Exploring the intricate relationship between brain's structure and function, and how this affects subjective experience is a fundamental pursuit in neuroscience. Psychedelic substances offer a unique insight into the influences of specific neurotransmitter systems on perception, cognition and consciousness. Specifically, their impact on brain function propagates across the structural...
National Science Review
May 1, 2024
Jakub Vohryzek, Joana Cabral, Christopher Timmermann et al.
13 citations
The human brain is a complex system, whose activity exhibits flexible and continuous reorganization across space and time. The decomposition of whole-brain recordings into harmonic modes has revealed a repertoire of gradient-like activity patterns associated with distinct brain functions. However, the way these activity patterns are expressed over time with their changes in various brain states...
ACS Chemical Neuroscience
February 7, 2024
Pedro A. M. Mediano, Fernando E. Rosas, Christopher Timmermann et al.
60 citations
Recent findings have shown that psychedelics reliably enhance brain entropy (understood as neural signal diversity), and this effect has been associated with both acute and long-term psychological outcomes, such as personality changes. These findings are particularly intriguing, given that a decrease of brain entropy is a robust indicator of loss of consciousness (e.g., from wakefulness to...
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...
Brain Communications
2024
Jakub Vohryzek, Joana Cabral, Louis-David Lord et al.
33 citations
Psilocybin therapy for depression has started to show promise, yet the underlying causal mechanisms are not currently known. Here, we leveraged the differential outcome in responders and non-responders to psilocybin (10 and 25 mg, 7 days apart) therapy for depression-to gain new insights into regions and networks implicated in the restoration of healthy brain dynamics. We used large-scale brain...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
November 20, 2023
Katarina Jerotic, Peter Vuust, Morten L. Kringelbach
19 citations
Abstract Music and psychedelics have been intertwined throughout the existence of Homo sapiens , from the early shamanic rituals of the Americas and Africa to the modern use of psychedelic‐assisted therapy for a variety of mental health conditions. Across such settings, music has been highly prized for its ability to guide the psychedelic experience. Here, we examine the interplay between music...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
November 17, 2023
Selen Atasoy, Anira Escrichs, Eloise Stark et al.
6 citations
preprint
ABSTRACT Meditation is an ancient practice that is shown to yield benefits for cognition, emotion regulation and human flourishing. In the last two decades, there has been a surge of interest in extracting the neural correlates of meditation, in particular of mindfulness meditation. Yet, these efforts have been mostly limited to the analysis of certain regions or networks of interest and a...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
November 9, 2023
Fernando E. Rosas, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Christopher Timmermann et al.
14 citations
preprint
A growing body of work shows that autonomic signals provide a privileged evidence-stream to capture various aspects of subjective and neural states. This work investigates the potential for autonomic markers to track the effects of psychedelics — potent psychoactive drugs with important scientific and clinical value. For this purpose, we introduce a novel Bayesian framework to estimate the...
bioRxiv
August 21, 2023
Jakub Vohryzek, Joana Cabral, Christopher Timmermann et al.
7 citations
preprint
Abstract The human brain is a complex system, whose activity exhibits flexible and continuous reorganisation across space and time. The decomposition of whole-brain recordings into harmonic modes has revealed a repertoire of gradient-like activity patterns associated with distinct brain functions. However, the way these activity patterns are expressed over time with their changes in various...
Interface Focus
April 14, 2023
Elvira G-Guzmán, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Jakub Vohryzek et al.
34 citations
Life is a constant battle against equilibrium. From the cellular level to the macroscopic scale, living organisms as dissipative systems require the violation of their detailed balance, i.e. metabolic enzymatic reactions, in order to survive. We present a framework based on temporal asymmetry as a measure of non-equilibrium. By means of statistical physics, it was discovered that temporal...
PLoS Computational Biology
February 1, 2023
Giulio Ruffini, Giada Damiani, Diego Lozano-Soldevilla et al.
28 citations
A topic of growing interest in computational neuroscience is the discovery of fundamental principles underlying global dynamics and the self-organization of the brain. In particular, the notion that the brain operates near criticality has gained considerable support, and recent work has shown that the dynamics of different brain states may be modeled by pairwise maximum entropy Ising models at...
Communications Biology
January 28, 2023
Andrea I. Luppi, Jakub Vohryzek, Morten L. Kringelbach et al.
98 citations
A central question in neuroscience is how consciousness arises from the dynamic interplay of brain structure and function. Here we decompose functional MRI signals from pathological and pharmacologically-induced perturbations of consciousness into distributed patterns of structure-function dependence across scales: the harmonic modes of the human structural connectome. We show that...
Network Neuroscience
December 23, 2022
Gustavo Deco, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Laura De la Fuente et al.
43 citations
A promising idea in human cognitive neuroscience is that the default mode network (DMN) is responsible for coordinating the recruitment and scheduling of networks for computing and solving task-specific cognitive problems. This is supported by evidence showing that the physical and functional distance of DMN regions is maximally removed from sensorimotor regions containing environment-driven...
Nature Communications
October 3, 2022
S Parker Singleton, Andrea I. Luppi, Robin Carhart-Harris et al.
156 citations
Psychedelics including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin temporarily alter subjective experience through their neurochemical effects. Serotonin 2a (5-HT2a) receptor agonism by these compounds is associated with more diverse (entropic) brain activity. We postulate that this increase in entropy may arise in part from a flattening of the brain's control energy landscape, which can be...
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...
Research Square
September 20, 2022
Jakub Vohryzek, Joana Cabral, Louis-David Lord et al.
10 citations
Abstract Psilocybin therapy for depression has started to show promise, yet the underlying causal mechanisms are not currently known. Here we leveraged the differential outcome in responders and non-responders to psilocybin (10mg and 25mg, 7 days apart) therapy for depression - to gain new insights into regions and networks implicated in the restoration of healthy brain dynamics. We used...
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews
July 1, 2022
Drummond E-Wen Mcculloch, Gitte Moos Knudsen, Frederick Streeter Barrett et al.
14 citations
Clinical research into serotonergic psychedelics is expanding rapidly, showing promising efficacy across myriad disorders. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a commonly used strategy to identify psychedelic-induced changes in neural pathways in clinical and healthy populations. Here we, a large group of psychedelic imaging researchers, review the 42 research...
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...
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences
May 23, 2022
Jakub Vohryzek, Joana Cabral, Peter Vuust et al.
62 citations
In order to survive in a complex environment, the human brain relies on the ability to flexibly adapt ongoing behaviour according to intrinsic and extrinsic signals. This capability has been linked to specific whole-brain activity patterns whose relative stability (order) allows for consistent functioning, supported by sufficient intrinsic instability needed for optimal adaptability. The...
Network Neuroscience
2022
Josephine Cruzat, Yonatan Sanz Perl, Anira Escrichs et al.
28 citations
Abstract Psychedelic drugs show promise as safe and effective treatments for neuropsychiatric disorders, yet their mechanisms of action are not fully understood. A fundamental hypothesis is that psychedelics work by dose-dependently changing the functional hierarchy of brain dynamics, but it is unclear whether different psychedelics act similarly. Here, we investigated the changes in the...
bioRxiv Preprint Server
September 2, 2021
Laura De la Fuente, Federico Zamberlán, Hernan Bocaccio et al.
preprint
Even though the fundamental laws of physics are the same when the direction of time is inverted, dissipative systems evolve in the preferred temporal direction indicated by the thermodynamic arrow of time. The fundamental nature of this temporal asymmetry led us to hypothesize its presence in the neural activity evoked by conscious perception of the physical world, and thus its covariance with...
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...