Allison Parshall writes that psilocybin creates a hidden order amid brain chaos, potentially underlying the psychedelic sense of oneness, with sensory networks less connected to the brain and higher-level networks more integrated.
In a Nature study of 62 healthy adults scanned at rest, meditating, listening to music and watching a movie after dosing, participants reporting strong embeddedness showed more similar brain activity patterns across tasks than those with weaker effects.
The findings suggest the brain actively maintains the self-world boundary that psychedelics temporarily reduce, offering a neurobiological basis for context-dependent experiences.
This study investigates the temporal dynamics of EEG power during breath-watching meditation, a focused-attention practice from the Isha Yoga tradition.
Analyzing 128-channel EEG data from meditation-naïve, novice, and advanced practitioners, researchers found that significant neurophysiological changes—including increased alpha, theta, and beta1 power—begin to emerge approximately 2 to 3 minutes after starting practice, peaking between 7 and 10 minutes.
Advanced meditators showed consistently higher theta and theta-alpha power throughout the session. This suggests that meditation has a rapid response influenced by experience level, implying that even short, digital sessions could provide scalable mental well-being benefits.
This module uses NextBrain, a probabilistic atlas of the human brain, to segment ~300 distinct ROIs per hemisphere on in vivo or ex vivo scans. Segmentation relies on a Bayesian algorithm and is robust against changes in MRI pulse sequence.