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For about a decade, the mainstream understanding has been that psychedelics cause chaos in the brain. Brain networks—the stable patterns of communication that handle vision, attention, or our sense of self, and more—loosen and start talking to each other all at once. EEG traces get noisier and more complex. “Think of the networks of the brain as highways,” says Devon Stoliker, a neuroscientist at Monash University. “Under psychedelics, these highways break down into many different directions.” In a recent Nature study, Stoliker’s team designed an experiment to test whether these directions are truly chaotic and random. Researchers gathered 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic before, gave them 19 milligrams of psilocybin, a common psychedelic found in certain fungi, and scanned their brains. Then, they used AI to analyze the drugged and sober brain scans. What emerged was not exactly chaos. An uninterrupted trip Stoliker thinks chaos is not a satisfactory explanation for psychedelics’ effect on the brain. “It never really explained why an individual would have a meaningful experience, why they might have insight, why they might experience clarity, and why these might translate into positive psychological changes,” Stoliker says. To investigate if there are other explanations, he and his colleagues designed a study called PsiConnect. Volunteers went through the same four-part sequence twice, once sober and once on psilocybin. The sequence included putting participants in four different settings or contexts: eight minutes of lying at rest, a guided meditation, an 11-minute curated music playlist, and finally six minutes of eyes-open video of clouds moving across a sky. Each participant did all four inside an MRI scanner about 80 minutes after dosing, and again on EEG about 150 minutes after. There were no cognitive tasks researchers routinely go for in brain studies, but there was a purpose behind this omission. “We wanted ecological validity,” Stoliker says. “We wanted to know what the brain was like when somebody was having an authentic, uninterrupted psychedelic experience. If somebody took a psychedelic in a therapeutic setting, you wouldn’t have them completing tasks.” Stoliker also points out that there’s evidence that giving someone a task mid-trip pulls them out of the state—a phenomenon researchers sometimes call grounding. “Once you introduce these sorts of tasks, you’re actually interrupting the very phenomena you are seeking to measure.” And it worked.
document fetched 2026-10-11 02:44 · canonical https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/10/the-psychedelic-brain-looks-like-chaos-underneath-theres-order