Psychedelics have shown potential in treating a range of mental health conditions, yet far less is known about their impact on creativity. This study examined three components of creativity-divergent thinking, cognitive reflection, and insight in a large sample (N = 5,905) from the Great British Intelligence Test. We compared performance between individuals with past psychedelic use and those...
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...
The large-scale disruption to peoples’ daily lives during the COVID-19 pandemic provides a context for examining whether use of substances such as psychedelics in a naturalistic (outside of a controlled environment) setting, is associated with better mental wellbeing and resilience relative to those who use other drugs, or who do not use drugs at all. We interrogate data from the Great British...
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...
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...
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...
In recent years, there have been many computational simulations of spontaneous neural dynamics. Here, we explore a model of spontaneous neural dynamics and allow it to control a virtual agent moving in a simple environment. This setup generates interesting brain-environment feedback interactions that rapidly destabilize neural and behavioral dynamics and suggest the need for homeostatic...
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...
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...
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...
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...