26/08/2026
In a fascinating new paper, researchers challenge a common description of the psychedelic state as one of “disorder” in the brain.
Sixty-two people with no previous psychedelic experience underwent fMRI and EEG scans before and after taking psilocybin, while resting, meditating, listening to music and watching a film.
Using machine learning to track how brain activity unfolded moment to moment, the researchers found that what looks like randomness in conventional averaged measures is in fact organised: under psilocybin, brain activity reorganised into structured patterns closely shaped by what the person was doing and experiencing at the time. Networks that normally keep internal thought and external sensory input separate began to merge, and this merging was strongest in people who reported feeling continuous with their surroundings rather than separate from them, a state the authors call “embeddedness.”
The stronger that experience, the greater both the reorganisation in the brain and the shifts in the person’s outlook the next day, which the researchers suggest may help explain how the psychedelic experience itself, and the setting it takes place in, translates into lasting change. This was a healthy sample given a single dose with no blinded placebo, so it does more to illuminate mechanism rather than treatment, but it offers a richer picture of how the psychedelic state is organised in the brain.
📑 Psychedelics align brain activity with context – Stoliker et al., 2026
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-026-10910-z
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10910-z
