ARI SHAPIRO, HOST:
Now the story of a brain scientist who took a psychedelic drug as part of a research study.
NICO DOSENBACH: I was, like, drifting deeper into weirdness. I didn't know where I was at all. Time stopped, and I was everyone.
SHAPIRO: The drug was psilocybin, the active substance in magic mushrooms. NPR's Jon Hamilton reports on a study that shows precisely how that drug alters the brain.
JON HAMILTON, BYLINE: Dr. Nico Dosenbach of Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has scanned his own brain lots of times in the name of science, but this was the first time he took a mind-bending substance before sliding into the MRI tunnel.
DOSENBACH: It was definitely an awesome experience for a neuroscientist 'cause it's really fascinating how your brain can fall apart. 'Cause, like, how something breaks tells you how something works.
HAMILTON: Dosenbach's trip took him places only a neuroscientist is likely to go.
DOSENBACH: I was inside the brain. And I was riding brain waves, and I was Marc Raichle.
HAMILTON: That's Dr. Marcus Raichle, a heroic figure in the world of neuroscience. Dosenbach was one of seven people in the psilocybin study. Dr. Joshua Siegel, who led the effort, scanned their brains an average of 18 times over three weeks.
JOSHUA SIEGEL: You're bringing in single individuals many times, and that allows you to get a very detailed and precise map of their brain networks.
HAMILTON: The scans showed that psilocybin caused swift and dramatic changes to certain brain networks. Usually, Siegel says, neurons in a network fire at the same time.
SIEGEL: What's going on during psilocybin is that populations of neurons that are normally in synchrony are out of synchrony.
HAMILTON: The brain falls apart, and Siegel says it responds by trying to change and adapt, a process called plasticity.
SIEGEL: Desynchronization probably is a critical clue as to where the plasticity effect of psychedelics are coming from.
HAMILTON: The loss of synchrony was greatest in a brain network that helps form a person's sense of space, time and self. It's called the default mode network, and Siegel says it's critical to a certain kind of memory.
SIEGEL: This is self-referential memory - who am I, what was I doing, when, etc. And in the weeks after psilocybin, that is significantly decreased.
HAMILTON: The study, which appears in the journal Nature, offers a front-row view of how mind-altering drugs work in a human brain, says Dr. Petros Petridis of NYU's Langone Center for Psychedelic Medicine.
PETROS PETRIDIS: For the first time, with a really high degree of detail, we're understanding which networks are changing, how intensely they're changing and then what persists after the experience.
HAMILTON: Petridis, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, says the results hint at how psychedelics might be used to treat people with addiction or depression.
PETRIDIS: There seems to be this time of increased change that could be taken advantage of by therapists.
HAMILTON: So a patient with addiction might be able to rethink their relationship with substances. But Dr. Ginger Nicol, a psychiatrist at Washington University, says the approach has risks. Her husband was in the study and took psilocybin twice.
GINGER NICOL: He had a kind of almost religious experience the first time. The second time, he saw demons.
HAMILTON: Even so, Nicol says psychedelics may offer a way to help people with psychiatric disorders recognize their own capacity to change.
NICOL: It takes years to figure that out in therapy. This gives us a different way of thinking about learning and recovery - and how can we consolidate a new way of thinking about things?
HAMILTON: With a little help from a mind-altering substance.
Jon Hamilton, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MAC MILLER SONG, "THE MILLER FAMILY REUNION") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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