Study Explains How Magic Mushrooms Induce a Dream-Like State

A magic mushroom trip is similar to dreaming, find researchers.

Drugs like Lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD and magic mushrooms have a psychedelic effect on the mind and alter sense of time, experiences and thinking processes. Though these compounds do not cause addiction, prolonged usage and overdose leads to brain damage and reactions like anxiety, paranoia and delusions.  Experts from the Goethe University investigated the effects of psilocybin, a main psychedelic component in magic mushrooms by looking at the records of brain scans of 15 patients who used the drug. Some of them were placed on a placebo and using blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) signal the study monitored their overall brain activity.

The imaging scans of volunteers given psilocybin intravenously revealed an increased activation in areas related to emotional thinking and other connecting parts like hippocampus and anterior cingulated. These responses occur when people are dreaming. In addition, it was observed that the drug stimulated brain networks associated with acute sense of self-consciousness and intellectual thinking.

"People often describe taking psilocybin as producing a dreamlike state and our findings have, for the first time, provided a physical representation for the experience in the brain," said Robin Carhart-Harris, co-author and scientist from the department of medicine at the Imperial College London's, reports Reuters News.

"I was fascinated to see similarities between the pattern of brain activity in a psychedelic state and the pattern of brain activity during dream sleep, especially as both involve the primitive areas of the brain linked to emotions and memory," he adds.

Magic mushrooms were widely used in ancient times during religious ceremonies. The sculptures found in the excavation sites in Central and South America suggest that spiritual leaders took these drugs, which made them hallucinate about conversing with gods and spirits.

 This is the first study to note the drug efficacy in elevating creative thinking and the authors believe these can be used to treat patients with depression by altering their pessimistic mindset about life.

"A good way to understand how the brain works is to perturb the system in a marked and novel way. Psychedelic drugs do precisely this and so are powerful tools for exploring what happens in the brain when consciousness is profoundly altered," said Enzo Tagliazucchi, study author and researcher at the Goethe University in Germany, reports the Health Day News.

More information is available online in the journal Human Brain Mapping.