Overview
- The Nature Communications study, published Tuesday, reports that a 25 mg psilocybin dose in 28 first‑time users raised brain “entropy” during the trip and this increase tracked with greater psychological insight the next day.
- Researchers used a within‑person design with a 1 mg control session followed a month later by 25 mg, recording EEG during dosing and taking MRI and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) scans before dosing and one month after.
- Participants reported higher well‑being two and four weeks after the high dose, and they performed better on a test of cognitive flexibility one month later.
- DTI one month post‑dose showed reduced water movement along tracts linking the prefrontal cortex to midbrain regions, a pattern the team interprets as denser wiring, though outside experts caution the meaning and long‑term impact remain unclear.
- The work is exploratory and small, the compound came from Compass Pathways and some authors have industry ties, and calls for larger, longer, patient trials come as a recent executive order and FDA fast‑track reviews expand psychedelic research capacity.