Music is a central component of psychedelic settings, yet little experimental work has examined how psilocybin and musical composition influence music-evoked emotional responses in healthy volunteers. This exploratory, double-blind, placebo-controlled study assessed these effects during the plateau phase of psilocybin and the corresponding time window in placebo sessions following oral...
Background: Psilocybin’s therapeutic potential is neurophysiologically characterized by acute alpha power reductions and increased entropy. However, the systematic time-course of these changes from administration through the 24-hour sub-acute phase remains poorly characterized. Methods: In a double-blind, placebo-controlled, crossover trial ( N = 20, 10 females), healthy participants received a...
Abstract Psilocybin and other serotonergic psychedelics show therapeutic promise for psychiatric disorders, yet objective neural correlates linking the acute psychedelic state to persisting psychological outcomes remain limited. Electroencephalography (EEG) microstate analysis characterizes the rapid spatiotemporal organization of large-scale brain activity, offering a millisecond-resolution...
Background: Although psychedelics have regained attention as potential treatment tools for various mental disorders, little research has examined their impact on temporal perception. Aims: This double-blinded placebo-controlled study aimed to investigate changes in temporal perception under psilocybin, both through performance during the Temporal Bisection Task (TBT) and through subjective...
Individual variability in psilocybin response is a major challenge for psychedelic-assisted therapy, with structural brain features potentially serving as predictive biomarkers. (Lewis et al. Biomedicines 8(2):34 2020) reported that rostral anterior cingulate cortex thickness predicted emotional experiences under psilocybin, suggesting cortical morphometry as a marker of psychedelic...
Abstract Rationale: Individual variability in psilocybin response is a major challenge for psychedelic-assisted therapy, with structural brain features potentially serving as predictive biomarkers. Lewis et al. (2020) reported that rostral anterior cingulate cortex thickness predicted emotional experiences under psilocybin, suggesting cortical morphometry as a marker of psychedelic...
Research on psychedelic drugs, such as psilocybin, LSD or DMT, is a burgeoning field, with an increasing number of studies showing their promise in treatment of mental disorders as well as examining their mechanism of action. Determining their effect on the brain is crucial from clinical standpoint, but also offers highly promising avenues of advancement in basic neuroscience—functional...
In animal models, ketamine, a non-competitive N-methyl-D-aspartate (NMDA) antagonist, induces schizophrenia-like symptoms, such as positive and negative symptoms, as well as cognitive deficits. In the present study, we evaluated the behavioral responses and the number of EODs (electric organ discharges) of the weakly electric fish Gnathonemus petersii using the novel object recognition task...
Introduction Psilocybin is one of the most extensively studied psychedelic drugs with a broad therapeutic potential. Despite the fact that its psychoactivity is mainly attributed to the agonism at 5-HT 2A receptors, it has high binding affinity also to 5-HT 2C and 5-HT 1A receptors and indirectly modulates the dopaminergic system. Psilocybin and its active metabolite psilocin, as well as other...
The present study aimed to examine a weakly electric fish Gnathonemus petersii (G. petersii) as a candidate model organism of glutamatergic theory of schizophrenia. The idea of G. petersii elevating the modeling of schizophrenia symptoms is based on the fish's electrolocation and electrocommunication abilities. Fish were exposed to the NMDA antagonist ketamine in two distinct series differing...
Psilocybin is a classical serotoninergic psychedelic that induces cognitive disruptions similar to psychosis. Gamma activity is affected in psychosis and is tightly related to cognitive processing. The 40 Hz auditory steady-state responses (ASSR) are frequently used as indicators to test the ability to generate gamma activity. Based on previous literature, we studied the impact of psilocybin on...
Addressing global mental health is a major 21st-century challenge. Current treatments have recognized limitations; in this context, new ones that are prophylactic and effective across diagnostic boundaries would represent a major advance. The view that there exists a core of transdiagnostic overlap between psychiatric disorders has re-emerged in recent years, and evidence that psychedelic...
OBJECTIVE: Ketamine has been shown to be effective in treatment of episodes of major depressive disorder (MDD). This controlled study aimed to analyse the predictive and discriminative power of heart rate (HR) and heart rate variability (HRV) for ketamine treatment in MDD. METHODS: In 51 patients, HR and HRV were assessed at baseline before and during ketamine infusion and 24 hours post...
Serotonergic agonist psilocybin is a psychedelic with antidepressant potential. Sleep may interact with psilocybin’s antidepressant properties like other antidepressant drugs via induction of neuroplasticity. The main aim of the study was to evaluate the effect of psilocybin on sleep architecture on the night after psilocybin administration. Regarding the potential antidepressant properties, we...
The rapid antidepressant effect of ketamine has become a breakthrough in the research and treatment of depression. Although predictive and modulating factors of the response to ketamine are broadly studied, little is known about optimal concurrent medication protocols. Concerning gamma-aminobutyric acid neurotransmission being a shared target for both ketamine and benzodiazepines (BZD), we...
BACKGROUND: Cannabis, and specifically one of its active compounds delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol in recreational doses, has a variety of effects on cognitive processes. Most studies employ resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques to assess the stationary effects of cannabis and to-date one report addressed the impact of delta-9-tetrahydrocannabinol on the dynamics of...
Studies of consciousness have traditionally been based mainly upon the perceptual domains of consciousness. However, there is another side of consciousness, represented by various types of intrinsic conscious experiences. Even though intrinsic experiences can represent up to 50 percent of our conscious experiences, they are still largely neglected in conscious studies. We assume there are two...
The elusive relationship between the mental domain and the physical brain, known as the mind-body problem, is still a hot topic of discussion among philosophers and neuroscientists. Rather than solving this problem, our pilot study addresses the question as to whether personality features could influence intuitions of the mind-body problem, or more precisely, whether it is possible to identify...
RationaleDisruption of auditory event-related evoked potentials (ERPs) P300 and mismatch negativity (MMN), electrophysiological markers of attentive and pre-attentive cognitive processing, is repeatedly described in psychosis and schizophrenia. Similar findings were observed in a glutamatergic model of psychosis, but the role of serotonergic 5-HT2A receptors in information processing is less...
Objective: Schizophrenia patients have a higher prevalence of type 2 diabetes mellitus than the general population, and even first-episode, drug-naive (FEDN) patients with schizophrenia have shown a higher prevalence of impaired glucose tolerance (IGT) than the general population.We aimed to investigate the prevalence of abnormal glucose tolerance after glucose loading, and to examine the...
BACKGROUND: The phenomenology of the clinical symptoms indicates that disturbance of the sense of self be a core marker of schizophrenia. AIMS: To compare neural activity related to the self/other-agency judgment in patients with first-episode schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (FES, n = 35) and healthy controls (HC, n = 35). METHOD: A functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) using motor task...
Psilocybin has recently attracted a great deal of attention as a clinical research and therapeutic tool. The aim of this paper is to bridge two major knowledge gaps regarding its behavioural pharmacology – sex differences and the underlying receptor mechanisms. We used psilocin (0.25, 1 and 4 mg/kg), an active metabolite of psilocybin, in two behavioural paradigms – the open-field test and...
In this study we sought to explore patterns of neural activity related to the self/other-agency judgment in patients with first-episode schizophrenia spectrum disorders (FES) and healthy controls (HC). Thirty-five FES patients and 35 age-, gender- and education-matched healthy controls. A task-related functional connectivity analysis with the use of independent component analysis (ICA). ICA...
Psilocybin, a psychoactive alkaloid contained in hallucinogenic mushrooms, is nowadays given a lot of attention in the scientific community as a research tool for modeling psychosis as well as due to its potential therapeutic effects. However, it is also a very popular and frequently abused natural hallucinogen. This review summarizes all the past and recent knowledge on psilocybin. It briefly...
AIMS: This study was designed to evaluate the changes in EEG power spectra and EEG coherence in a ketamine model of psychosis in rats. Analyses of behavioral measurements--locomotion and sensorimotor gating--and the pharmacokinetics of ketamine and norketamine were also conducted. METHODS: Ketamine and norketamine levels in rat sera and brains were analyzed by gas chromatography-mass...