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Sofie L. Valk

6 papers in the library · 65 citations · publishing 2018-2026

Papers

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Whole-brain drug distribution profiles of psychedelic drugs provide insights into rapid antidepressant action

bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) April 7, 2026 Benjamin Hänisch, Tobias Kaufmann, Sofie L. Valk

Recent studies pioneered the use of classic hallucinogens as Rapid-Acting Antidepressants (RAAD). To further understand the link between their neuromodulatory and antidepressant effects, we combine pharmacodynamic profiles of four classic hallucinogens and the anaesthetic Ketamine with receptor density distributions from both Positron Emission Tomography (PET) and layer-resoluted...

ENIGMA-Meditation: Worldwide Consortium for Neuroscientific Investigations of Meditation Practices.

Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging April 1, 2025 Saampras Ganesan, Fernando A Barrios, Ishaan Batta et al. 6 citations

Meditation is a family of ancient and contemporary contemplative mind-body practices that can modulate psychological processes, awareness, and mental states. Over the last 40 years, clinical science has manualized meditation practices and designed various meditation interventions that have shown therapeutic efficacy for disorders including depression, pain, addiction, and anxiety. Over the past...

Serum BDNF Increase After 9-Month Contemplative Mental Training Is Associated With Decreased Cortisol Secretion and Increased Dentate Gyrus Volume: Evidence From a Randomized Clinical Trial.

Biological Psychiatry Global Open Science March 1, 2025 Lara M.c. Puhlmann, Pascal Vrtička, Roman Linz et al.

In this study, we investigated whether mindfulness- and meditation-based mental training that improves stress regulation can upregulate BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), an important promoter of hippocampal neuroplasticity, and examined cortisol reduction as a mediating pathway. In a randomized clinical trial, 332 healthy adults were randomly assigned to one of the 3 training cohorts or...

The architecture of the human default mode network explored through cytoarchitecture, wiring and signal flow

Nature Neuroscience January 28, 2025 Casey Paquola, Margaret Garber, Stefan Frässle et al. 58 citations

The default mode network (DMN) is implicated in many aspects of complex thought and behavior. Here, we leverage postmortem histology and in vivo neuroimaging to characterize the anatomy of the DMN to better understand its role in information processing and cortical communication. Our results show that the DMN is cytoarchitecturally heterogenous, containing cytoarchitectural types that are...

Local activity alterations in autism spectrum disorder correlate with neurotransmitter properties and ketamine induced brain changes.

medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences October 21, 2024 Pascal Grumbach, Jan Kasper, Joerg F. Hipp et al. 1 citation preprint

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a neurodevelopmental condition associated with altered resting-state brain function. An increased excitation-inhibition (E/I) ratio is discussed as a potential pathomechanism but in-vivo evidence of disturbed neurotransmission underlying these functional alterations remains scarce. We compared rs-fMRI local activity (LCOR) between ASD (N=405, N=395) and...

Change in emotional self-concept following socio-cognitive training relates to structural plasticity of the prefrontal cortex.

Brain and Behavior April 1, 2018 Anna-Lena Lumma, Sofie L. Valk, Anne Böckler et al.

Self-referential processing is a key component of the emotional self-concept. Previous studies have shown that emotional self-referential processing is related to structure and function of cortical midline areas such as medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), and that it can be altered on a behavioral level by specific mental training practices. However, it remains unknown how behavioral...