This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain On Mushrooms

I remember the ad campaign a few decades ago with the tagline, “This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.” Effective, really. But researchers at King’s College in the United Kingdom have created a visualization of the activity in a normal brain (left) and the activity in the brain of a person who is ‘tripping’ on psilocybin mushrooms.

The researchers used an fMRI, or Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging scan to scan the brains of two groups of participants. That is, participants who received 2 mg of psilocybin, and those given a placebo.

Inside your brain, you have neural pathways that brain activity typically follows. Sort of like information highways in the brain. What was discovered by the researchers at King’s College is that psilocybin actually forms new and different connections inside the brain, and when the drug wore off, things went back to normal.