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Peter J. Hellyer

8 papers in the library · 3,114 citations · publishing 2014-2025

Papers

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Naturalistic use of psychedelics is associated with longitudinal improvements in anxiety and depression during global crisis times.

Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) June 18, 2025 Maria Bălăeţ, William Trender, Annalaura Lerede et al. 2 citations

Mental health implications of COVID-19 drug use patterns are still unclear. We used data-driven clustering in a large citizen science cohort recruited agnostically to an interest in drug-use to categorise people according to common patterns of drug use and analysed their mental health symptoms (GAD-7 and PHQ-9 items), from recruitment prior to COVID-19 restrictions in 2020 (N = 242,260) to...

Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging

UNC Libraries April 22, 2020 Peter J. Hellyer, Luke T. J. Williams, Ben Sessa et al. 1 citation

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), the prototypical “psychedelic,” may be unique among psychoactive substances. In the decades that followed its discovery, the magnitude of its effect on science, the arts, and society was unprecedented. LSD produces profound, sometimes life-changing experiences in microgram doses, making it a particularly powerful scientific tool. Here we sought to examine its...

Conflicting emergences. Weak vs. strong emergence for the modelling of brain function.

Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews April 1, 2019 Federico Turkheimer, Peter J. Hellyer, Angie A. Kehagia et al.

The concept of "emergence" has become commonplace in the modelling of complex systems, both natural and man-made; a functional property" emerges" from a system when it cannot be readily explained by the properties of the system's sub-units. A bewildering array of adaptive and sophisticated behaviours can be observed from large ensembles of elementary agents such as ant colonies, bird flocks or...

From homeostasis to behavior: Balanced activity in an exploration of embodied dynamic environmental-neural interaction

PLoS Computational Biology August 24, 2017 Peter J. Hellyer, Claudia Clopath, Angie A. Kehagia et al. 21 citations

In recent years, there have been many computational simulations of spontaneous neural dynamics. Here, we describe a simple model of spontaneous neural dynamics that controls an agent moving in a simple virtual environment. These dynamics generate interesting brain-environment feedback interactions that rapidly destabilize neural and behavioral dynamics demonstrating the need for homeostatic...

Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging.

Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A April 11, 2016 Robin Carhart-Harris, Suresh Muthukumaraswamy, Leor Roseman et al. 887 citations

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is the prototypical psychedelic drug, but its effects on the human brain have never been studied before with modern neuroimaging. Here, three complementary neuroimaging techniques: arterial spin labeling (ASL), blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) measures, and magnetoencephalography (MEG), implemented during resting state conditions, revealed marked changes in...

Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks

Journal of The Royal Society Interface October 29, 2014 Giovanni Petri, Paul Expert, Federico Turkheimer et al. 689 citations

Networks, as efficient representations of complex systems, have appealed to scientists for a long time and now permeate many areas of science, including neuroimaging (Bullmore and Sporns 2009 Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 10 , 186–198. ( doi:10.1038/nrn2618 )). Traditionally, the structure of complex networks has been studied through their statistical properties and metrics concerned with node and link...

The Control of Global Brain Dynamics: Opposing Actions of Frontoparietal Control and Default Mode Networks on Attention

Journal of Neuroscience January 8, 2014 Peter J. Hellyer, Murray Shanahan, Gregory Scott et al. 225 citations

Understanding how dynamic changes in brain activity control behavior is a major challenge of cognitive neuroscience. Here, we consider the brain as a complex dynamic system and define two measures of brain dynamics: the synchrony of brain activity, measured by the spatial coherence of the BOLD signal across regions of the brain; and metastability, which we define as the extent to which...

The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs

Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014 Robin Carhart-Harris, Robert Leech, Peter J. Hellyer et al. 1,289 citations

Entropy is a dimensionless quantity that is used for measuring uncertainty about the state of a system but it can also imply physical qualities, where high entropy is synonymous with high disorder. Entropy is applied here in the context of states of consciousness and their associated neurodynamics, with a particular focus on the psychedelic state. The psychedelic state is considered an exemplar...