Psychedelics exert their effects primarily through the serotonergic system. Like the endogenous neuromodulator, the drugs bind to many serotonin receptor subtypes. However, their receptor selectivity profiles and spatiotemporal patterns of action differ from those of serotonin and vary across compounds. In this review, we summarize studies that have established roles for serotonin in three...
The brain continuously integrates information from the external environment (exteroception) and the internal bodily milieu (interoception). However, how the balance between these two processing streams shifts across vigilance states with differing levels of environmental responsiveness remains poorly understood. Here, we examined neural responses to external auditory and internal cardiac...
Information continuously flows between regions of the human brain, forming patterns that shift across states of consciousness, cognitive modes, and neuropsychiatric conditions. While functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) reveals large-scale activity changes over seconds, the electrophysiological dynamics governing sub-second reconfiguration remain poorly understood. Here, relative phase...
Current BiologyApril 20, 2026Nikhil Bhatla, Kathryn Cheong, Sho Takahashi et al.
The phenomenon of blindsight provides a unique opportunity to uncover brain areas important for conscious vision. Patients with blindsight lose the conscious experience of seeing while still being able to detect and locate visual stimuli. Blindsight occurs after damage to the primary visual cortex (V1). Rodents are likewise able to detect and locate visual stimuli after damage to V1, though...
Current BiologyJanuary 5, 2026Hakan Kucukdereli, Amelia M Douglass
Small amounts of stress are thought to have beneficial effects. A new study reports a mechanism by which the psychedelic drug, psilocybin, causes acute release of stress hormones, despite its known long-term anti-anxiety effects.
Following decades of prohibition, psychedelic drugs have reemerged as promising therapeutics for stress-related conditions, including depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Still, their impact on stress-related brain regions and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis remains unclear. This work explores the acute effects of psilocybin on the primary regulators of the HPA axis:...
In the search for neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs), prominent theories disagree about the role of sensory versus widespread fronto-parietal brain activity. Research on auditory awareness has been widely neglected, and disentangling NCCs from correlates of task-related post-perceptual processes (e.g., report) is an ongoing challenge. In the present study, we addressed these issues using...
Our own body is the constant accompaniment of our waking mental life, and the seat of all our sensory experience and responses. Unsurprisingly, therefore, the body is a key component in individual self-consciousness, in addition to other, psychological components such as autobiographical memory and explicit self-construal. The experiences that we have of and through our body are a good way to...
Current BiologyJune 9, 2025Davide Albertini, Maria Del Vecchio, Ivana Sartori et al.9 citations
Distilling the neural correlates of consciousness (NCCs) in humans is challenging due to limitations in the spatiotemporal resolution of recording techniques and confounds related to pre- and post-perceptual processes. In this study, we leveraged the detailed insights provided by human intracortical recordings to elucidate how somatosensory responses to simple tactile stimuli vary across...
Several species of fungi, collectively known as 'psychedelic fungi', produce a range of psychoactive substances, such as psilocybin, ibotenic acid, muscimol and lysergic acid amides. These substances interact with neurotransmitter receptors in the human brain to induce profound psychological effects. These substances are found across multiple fungal phyla, in the mushroom-forming genera...
Current BiologyMay 5, 2025Pavlos I Topalidis, Gianpaolo Demarchi, Lisa Reisinger et al.1 citation
Imagine listening to a familiar song on the radio. As the melody unfolds, you often anticipate the following note or beat before it plays. This ability reflects the brain's capacity to extract statistical regularities from sensory input and predict future sensory events. It is considered automatic, requiring little to no conscious effort or attention.1,2,3,4,5 But to what extent is this...
Current BiologyApril 21, 2025Jovin R Jacobs, Adam D Douglass
A hallmark of depression is a tendency to become passive when faced with overwhelming challenges. A recent study models this phenomenon in zebrafish and discovers a novel mechanism by which the antidepressant drug ketamine promotes long-term improvements in behavioral persistence.
Slowly paced breathing underlies mind-body practices like yoga and meditation. Neuroscience is beginning to unravel the mechanisms underlying breathing and emotions, such as anxiety. Now a circuit from the neocortex to the primordial brainstem has been identified in mice, which modulates breathing and influences anxiety.
Activity in the early visual cortex is thought to tightly couple with conscious experience, including feedback-driven mental imagery. However, in aphantasia (a complete lack of visual imagery), the state of mental imagery, what takes its place, or how any activity relates to qualia remains unknown. This study analyzed univariate (amplitude) and multivariate (decoding)...
The contemporary definition of mental imagery is characterized by two aspects: a sensory representation that resembles, but does not result from, perception, and an associated subjective experience. Neuroimaging demonstrated imagery-related sensory representations in primary visual cortex (V1) that show striking parallels to perception. However, it remains unclear whether these representations...
Current BiologyAugust 19, 2024Vincent Courdavault, Nicolas Papon1 citation
Our knowledge of the biosynthesis of medicinal compounds from plants remains limited. A new study has deciphered the complete metabolic pathway leading to the biosynthesis of the psychedelic mescaline in the cactus peyote, suggesting the development of biotechnological strategies for a sustainable supply of this important plant drug.
There is a renewed interest in psychedelic drugs as potential therapeutic agents for the treatment of psychiatric disorders. In particular, psilocybin has shown promise for the treatment of refractory depression1 and major depressive disorder2, and has also been explored as a treatment for tobacco and alcohol abuse3,4. However, despite suggestive evidence5,6, there has been no systematic study...
Fungi that are edible or fermentative were domesticated through selective cultivation of their desired traits. Domestication is often associated with inbreeding or selfing, which may fix traits other than those under selection, and causes an overall decrease in heterozygosity. A hallucinogenic mushroom, Psilocybe cubensis, was domesticated from its niche in livestock dung for production of...
There is growing interest in the relationship been AI and consciousness. Joseph LeDoux and Jonathan Birch thought it would be a good moment to put some of the big questions in this area to some leading experts. The challenge of addressing the questions they raised was taken up by Kristin Andrews, Nicky Clayton, Nathaniel Daw, Chris Frith, Hakwan Lau, Megan Peters, Susan Schneider, Anil Seth,...
Nightmare disorder (ND) is characterized by dreams with strong negative emotions occurring during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. ND is mainly treated by imagery rehearsal therapy (IRT), where the patients are asked to change the negative story line of their nightmare to a more positive one. We here used targeted memory reactivation (TMR) during REM sleep to strengthen IRT-related memories and...
Psychedelics are compounds that alter consciousness by acting on serotonin receptors in the brain. The term 'psychedelic', from the Greek for mind manifesting, refers to the drugs' subjective effects and was first proposed by Humphry Osmond in 1956. Other terms have been used to emphasize different aspects of the psychological experiences produced by various related compounds, including...
What accounts for feeling deeply asleep? Standard sleep recordings only incompletely reflect subjective aspects of sleep and some individuals with so-called sleep misperception frequently feel awake although sleep recordings indicate clear-cut sleep. To identify the determinants of sleep perception, we performed 787 awakenings in 20 good sleepers and 10 individuals with sleep misperception and...
In the search for the neural correlates of consciousness, it has remained controversial whether prefrontal cortex determines what is consciously experienced or, alternatively, serves only complementary functions, such as introspection or action. Here, we provide converging evidence from computational modeling and two functional magnetic resonance imaging experiments that indicated a key role of...
Dreams take us to a different reality, a hallucinatory world that feels as real as any waking experience. These often-bizarre episodes are emblematic of human sleep but have yet to be adequately explained. Retrospective dream reports are subject to distortion and forgetting, presenting a fundamental challenge for neuroscientific studies of dreaming. Here we show that individuals who are asleep...
The retrospective nature of dream reports represents a challenge to the study of dreams. Two-way, real-time communication between researchers and lucid dreamers immersed in REM sleep offers a new and exciting window into the study of dreams and dreaming.