Inhaling a high dose of vaporized synthetic 5-MeO-DMT radically reorganizes low-frequency brain oscillations, making them heterogeneous, viscous, and nonrecurring, and halting their typical forward and backward travel across the cortex. This reorganization also causes broadband neural activity to become more stable and low-dimensional, with increased energy barriers for rapid global shifts. These findings, based on EEG data from 29 healthy individuals, provide a detailed account of how the drug sculpts human brain dynamics and reveal atypical cortical slow-wave behaviors relevant to neuroscientific models of serotonergic psychedelics.
A high dose of the psychedelic drug 5-MeO-DMT radically reorganizes low-frequency brain activity in 29 healthy individuals. Inhaling 12 mg of vaporized synthetic 5-MeO-DMT caused neural activity flows to become incoherent, heterogeneous, viscous, fleeting, and nonrecurring, ceasing typical traveling waves across the cortex. This reorganization led to slower, more stable, low-dimensional broadband activity with increased energy barriers to rapid global shifts. The findings provide the first detailed empirical account of how 5-MeO-DMT alters human brain dynamics, revealing novel cortical slow wave behaviors.
Jhana meditation produces states of self-reinforcing bliss that may be useful in clinical and scientific settings, but research has been limited by scarce data and few expert practitioners. To address this, the authors release the largest open-access dataset of electroencephalographic and physiological recordings from expert Jhana meditators, comprising over 100 hours of data from 26 subjects across three retreats. The dataset includes example analysis code. This resource aims to enable broader collaboration and advance understanding of internally generated altered states of consciousness.