Neuroscience
January 22, 2026
Guilherme Lodetti, Gislaine Zilli Réus, Eduardo Pacheco Rico
Pharmacotherapy for MDD is commonly prescribed to patients, yet fewer than half achieve remission. Moreover, many patients exhibit intolerant responses to pharmacological treatment, highlighting the need to explore new forms of therapy. The present work provides a narrative review of classic psychedelics as an alternative to MDD treatment. In addition, mechanisms by which psychedelics exert...
ACS Chemical Neuroscience
January 21, 2026
Miguel Salfiti, Marios Kyriazis, Georgios Mikellides
2 citations
This review aims to evaluate the pharmacological properties, mechanistic selectivity, and early clinical development of zalsupindole, highlighting its potential as a next-generation psychiatric therapeutic. This review was conducted using a structured literature search strategy across PubMed, Google Scholar, ClinicalTrials.gov, and the official Web sites of regulatory bodies and pharmaceutical...
Nan fang yi ke da xue xue bao = Journal of Southern Medical University
January 20, 2026
Ke Xia, Tianming Gao
Depression is a complex and globally prevalent mental disorder, for which conventional antidepressant medications face limitations such as delayed onset and insufficient efficacy. Classic psychedelics, most notably psilocybin, have recently emerged as promising candidates for treatment of depression and demonstrated rapid, robust, and sustained antidepressant effects in controlled clinical...
Annals of Neurosciences
January 19, 2026
Gyaneshwar Singh, Saleema Js, Krishna Dwivedi et al.
Background: Electroencephalography (EEG) studies consistently associate alpha-band oscillations with relaxation, internalized attention, and sensory disengagement during meditation. However, limited evidence exists on how Heartfulness Meditation (HM), particularly its unique transmission phases, modulates alpha activity across different experience levels. Purpose: This study investigated...
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
January 19, 2026
Ngo Cheung
1 citation
preprint
Background: Major depressive disorder involves impaired neural plasticity, yet antidepressants targeting glutamatergic (ketamine), monoaminergic (SSRIs), and GABAergic (neurosteroids) pathways differ markedly in onset speed, durability, and risk of treatment-emergent mania—particularly in bipolar contexts. Clinical comparisons are confounded by heterogeneity; computational models enable...
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
January 13, 2026
Iván Mindlin, Carlos Coronel-Oliveros, Jacobo Sitt et al.
preprint
A main characteristic of biological systems is their capacity to dynamically adapt to environmental changes. In the brain, synaptic plasticity enables the strengthening or weakening of connections between neurons, allowing neural circuits to adapt based on experience, learning, and environmental changes. Yet, it is homeostatically regulated such that it avoids excessive proliferation of...
Neuron
January 7, 2026
Jinsu Lee, Michael A. Wheeler
The lifetime prevalence of mood disorders such as major depressive disorder (MDD) is thought to approach up to 50% of the world's population. Traditionally, research into the mechanisms of these disorders has focused on neurotransmission, but emerging evidence highlights neuroimmune interactions-the molecular signaling between immune and brain cells-as key regulators of brain plasticity,...
Journal of Psychopharmacology
January 6, 2026
Connor J. Maltby, Adam K. Klein, Enya Paschen et al.
3 citations
Background: Psilocybin has shown rapid and sustained antidepressant effects in patients with major depressive disorder, yet the neurobiological mechanisms underlying these outcomes remain unclear. Aims: This study aimed to bridge clinical and preclinical findings by investigating the relationships between 5-HT 2A receptor occupancy (RO) achieved after administration of psilocybin and its...
Frontiers in Psychology
2026
Kaiyu Qiu, Zixiu Jiang, Ke Jiang et al.
Synaesthesia is commonly defined as an involuntary and consistent phenomenon in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive domain elicits an additional experience in another domain. Yet definitions derived from perceptual psychology, neuroscience, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, and artistic practice often speak past one another. This article proposes a boundary-preserving conceptual...
2026
Irina Dell'Orto
preprint
Background: Psilocybin-assisted therapy (PAT) has demonstrated rapid and substantial antidepressant effects in phase 2 RCTs (Davis et al., 2021; Carhart-Harris et al., 2021), and phase 3 trials are now active (Usona uAspire, NCT06308653). However, three critical gaps remain unresolved in 2025: (1) the durability of effects beyond 12 months has not been established in a controlled design; (2)...
2026
Abigail E. Calder
A growing number of studies suggest that serotonergic psychedelics, including lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), can rapidly and lastingly stimulate various aspects of neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity is the nervous system’s fundamental ability to reorganize itself in order to adapt to its environment, and it involves both changes in brain structure and changes in how the brain functions. It is...
International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis
2026
Eleonora Malloggi, Enrica L Santarcangelo
High hypnotizability predicts greater similarity between the cortical correlates of actual and imagined action (functional equivalence, FE). The study investigated whether motor imagery (MI) training (MIT) improves subjective experience, chronometric indices, and the EEG correlates of MI (like physical training), and whether absorption, imagery abilities, and interoceptive sensibility influence...
Open Mind
2026
Alexi Mary Theofanous
preprint
Recent research into psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy has largely emphasised pharmacological mechanism such as neuroplasticity and symptom reduction, with less attention to the relational processes through which therapeutic change is supported and integrated. Given that such experiences are central to therapeutic change, this introduces a significant limitation: variability in therapist...
Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology
2026
Lihua Yang, Shuang Wu, Jiale Liu et al.
Drug addiction is a complex, chronic, and relapsing neurological disorder characterized by persistent neuroadaptation and a substantial public health burden. Because of its simple nervous system, genetic tractability, short life cycle, transparent body, and quantifiable behavioral phenotypes, C. elegans (Caenorhabditis elegans) has become a useful complementary model for studying selected...
Neuroscience of Consciousness
2026
Vikas O'Reilly-Shah, Alessandro Maria Selvitella, Aaron Schurger
The unfolding argument in the neuroscience of consciousness posits that causal structure cannot account for consciousness because any recurrent neural network (RNN) can be "unfolded" into a functionally equivalent feedforward neural network (FNN) with identical input-output behavior. Subsequent debate has focused on dynamical properties and philosophy of science critiques. We examine a boundary...
SSRN Electronic Journal
2026
Dennis Parker Kelley, Gabriel Sturm, Katy Venable et al.
preprint
Serotonergic psychedelics produce therapeutic effects in clinical trials of diverse neuropsychiatric disorders, and preclinical models of inflammatory, cardiometabolic, and neuropsychiatric diseases. These effects appear largely mediated by the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor (5-HT2AR). How could psychedelics elicit transdiagnostic therapeutic effects through a single receptor across tissues as...
Frontiers in Pharmacology
2026
Patricio Sáez-briones, Amanda Silva-Rodríguez, Michelle Morales-Vidal et al.
In humans, empathy is expressed through various prosocial behaviours between individuals that may be enhanced after intake of the synthetic entactogen MDMA (3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, "Ecstasy") as the behavioural expression of the so-called entactogenic syndrome. Rodents may also exhibit empathy-like behaviours, such as social interaction and helping behaviour. In this regard, while...
Frontiers in Neuroscience
2026
Marcos Lago, Mariana Cerveira, Joe Xavier Simonet
1 citation
Advanced Alzheimer's disease (AD) is generally regarded as a stage of irreversible functional decline. Psilocybin is known to transiently alter large-scale brain network dynamics and to induce plasticity-related mechanisms in preclinical models, yet clinical data in advanced dementia remain lacking. We report the case of an octogenarian Japanese-American woman with a 10-year history of...
OPUS FAU - Online publication system of Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
2026
Aneta Petrušková
INTRODUCTION: Sertonergic psychedelics LSD, psilocin and DMT, have been shown to hold a great potential for treatment of various neuropsychiatric conditions, such as major depressive disorder, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety. Effects of these substances on neuronal activity and plasticity have been demonstrated, however, better understanding of their mechanism of action is crucial for...