Overview
- An international team published in Nature Medicine pooled 11 resting-state fMRI datasets across five countries, covering 267 participants and more than 500 scans.
- Across drugs, the brain showed weaker connections within its usual networks and stronger links between higher-order association areas and visual or sensorimotor systems.
- Deep-brain regions including the thalamus, caudate, putamen, and the cerebellum displayed stronger coupling with sensorimotor networks under psychedelics.
- Psilocybin and LSD produced the most consistent patterns across sites, while DMT and ayahuasca showed larger or more unusual effects with greater uncertainty.
- A uniform preprocessing pipeline and Bayesian hierarchical models yielded a probabilistic map that helps reconcile past mixed findings and offers a benchmark for future studies and regulators.