Neural avalanches - or threshold-defined bursts of coordinated activity - are traditionally characterised by scale-free statistics. However the study of their detailed spatiotemporal structure and their recurrence within spontaneous activity has been hindered by the variability of avalanches in duration and spatial extent. To tackle this challenge, we propose the use of flexible alignment: we...
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...
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...
bioRxiv Preprint ServerOctober 31, 2025Tomas Hampejs, David Tomecek, Stanislav Jiricek et al.
preprint
Understanding how spontaneous, rather than experimentally induced, thoughts relate to brain activity remains a major challenge. We combined simultaneous fMRI and EEG recordings with Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) to link momentary, naturally occurring experiences to their neural signatures during rest. Using machine-learning classification of 240 time-locked samples from eight...
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...
Abstract Conscious experience represents one of the most elusive problems of empirical science, namely neuroscience. The main objective of empirical studies of consciousness has been to describe the minimal sets of neural events necessary for a specific neuronal state to become consciously experienced. The current state of the art still does not meet this objective but rather consists of highly...
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...
Self-report studies indicate that cannabis could increase sexual desire in some users. We hypothesized that intoxication increases activation of brain areas responsive to visual erotica, which could be useful in the treatment of hypoactive sexual desire disorder, a condition marked by a lack of sexual desire. The aim of this study is to assess the aphrodisiacal properties of cannabis. We...
The last two decades have witnessed great progress in mapping neural networks associated with task-induced brain activation. More recently, identification of resting state networks (RSN) paved the way to investigate spontaneous task-unrelated brain activity. The cardinal features characterising RSN are low-frequency fluctuations of blood oxygenation level dependent (BOLD) signals synchronised...