{"slug": "what-a-blissful-psychedelic-trip-looks-like-inside-the-brain", "title": "What a Blissful Psychedelic Trip Looks Like Inside the Brain", "summary": "A study published in Nature, led by Devon Stoliker from Monash School of Psychological Sciences, found that individual brain patterns during psychedelic trips show hidden order rather than the chaos seen in group averages. Using machine learning on fMRI scans of 62 healthy adults who took magic mushrooms, the researchers discovered that the quality of the trip—whether blissful or anxious—correlates with specific neural organization, influenced by personality traits and context. The findings could help tailor psychedelic therapies to individuals.", "body_md": "Magic mushrooms and other psychedelics profoundly disturb human perception and consciousness. The everyday world dissolves into an extraordinary dreamscape of patterns, color, and light, your emotional axis tilts, and you lose your sense of separation from a world beyond the self. Many studies of what this looks like in the brain have found that structural network connections are scrambled, order breaks down, and chaos rules.\n\nBut now, a team of Australian researchers has found that this signature of chaos that emerges in imaging may be a function of averages—and that individual level patterns look very different. Using machine learning to identify hidden statistical anomalies, they found that at the single person level, the shape of the psychedelic experience is governed by certain personality traits, such as openness to experience and absorption, as well as elements of context, such as what kind of activity the person is engaged in while tripping. The scientists are hopeful that the finding could help make psychedelic therapies more tailored to individuals.\n\nThe [findings](http://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10910-z), published in *Nature*, are the result of one of the largest imaging studies of psychedelics in history. Led by Devon Stoliker from the Monash School of Psychological Sciences in Australia, the team recruited 62 healthy adults who were psychedelic virgins: They’d never before taken a hallucinogen. The scientists gave them magic mushrooms, scanned their brains using fMRI after 80 minutes, when they were at the height of their trips, instructed them to engage in one of four activities (resting, listening to music, watching a movie, or meditating) and followed up the next day to see what if any psychological or neurological changes had taken effect.\n\nThe scans of people who reported total ego dissolution and bliss looked very different from those of people who experienced intense anxiety and confusion. The good trips produced order. The bad trips did not. And the kind of order that emerged during these good trips differed according to what the person was doing when they were high.\n\nI spoke to Stoliker about ego dissolution, what factors shape whether someone will have a good psychedelic trip, and what face blindness can tell us about the nature of consciousness.\n\n**Read more: “ Psilocybin Lifted Her Burden”**\n\n**You uncovered hidden order in the brains of people who took psychedelics. Why was this a surprise?**\n\nPrevious psychedelic research found *disorder*. The brain has different regions that activate at the same time, and the co-activation of these regions forms networks. We already understood that psychedelics break down these networks: It reduces within network connectivity and increases between network connectivity. This is what’s called disorder, at least when we’re looking at fMRI. It’s also been labeled asynchrony.\n\nWe found the same thing using conventional analyses. But conventional analyses often remove the time signal, collapsing the entire timespan into a single value. We used machine learning to find patterns in the data. When we did that, we were able to integrate the time signal, which allowed us to see at the individual level rather than at a group average level that there was an organization that emerged that was dependent on the quality of the participant’s experience.\n\n**What did this order look like?**\n\nWe would say that the underlying organization seemed to be dependent on the subjective quality of experience. Regardless of context, over time, the activity in two networks became more similar: the default mode network, which is related to sense of self, and the visual network, which is very much related to the external world. But in subtle ways, these similarities tracked the different contexts the patients were in: listening to music, meditating, resting, watching a movie.\n\n**What does that tell you?**\n\nIt suggests that the brain’s biological response is coordinating with specific stimuli from the environment, which means that the context isn’t just background under psychedelics. It’s actually very important. The brain is essentially tracking what’s happening and aligning with that. It also makes sense with the subjective experience reported by participants: They generally felt much more continuity between themselves and the environment around them, as well as what they were experiencing. There was much less separation between the self and the world.\n\n**Psychedelic researchers have been talking about the importance of set and setting to the therapeutic experience for a while now. What does this finding add to that idea?**\n\nIt reinforces it. It also gives it a biological basis. We were never able to understand why set and setting were so important with this level of clarity. Prior studies found a discrimination between when an individual had their eyes open or their eyes closed, so there was a stark contrast in the levels or the degree of stimuli. We were able to replicate that using our conventional analysis. But when we used machine learning to integrate the time signal in different individuals, it really let us see how the brain is tracking these different contexts.\n\n**Does the fact that psychedelics make the inner and outer worlds less distinct tell us anything about the nature of everyday consciousness?**\n\nI’d like to think it does, but it remains a bit of a hypothesis. We could say that as much as the brain is responsible for constructing our sense of self, our identity, who you are now, and who I am now talking, it’s also responsible for constructing our sense of the outside world. An example I like to use is prosopagnosia, a condition that can be developmental or caused by a brain injury, that stops an individual from being able to process or recognize faces. We typically imagine that faces are an objective fact of reality. They’re just something that belongs in the external world, and it doesn’t rely on brain connectivity. But that one example—and there are many, many others—demonstrates that the brain is actively constructing both the inner world and the outside world.\n\nWhat I’d like to suggest, and our evidence somewhat supports this, is that everything from neurons to networks play a significant role in the delineation between the sense of self and the outside world that we experience. And it seems that psychedelics temporarily dissolve that and reduce that sense of separation, which for some people can potentially be the link to positive psychological changes. When an individual experiences this dissolution of the boundary between self and world, they report positive psychological changes the next day in our study.\n\nAlso, individuals reported a greater sense of connection to nature. This is another common finding that you’d hear anecdotally, where somebody has a psychedelic experience and they just feel more in touch with nature, potentially less separate from the world around them. I hypothesize that some of our existential distress in life is related to this sense of separation that psychedelics can temporarily dissolve, and that temporary dissolving may lead to lasting psychological changes. I use the term psychological changes specifically because we were working with a healthy adult population. You could call it therapeutic if it was a patient population.\n\n**Did you just measure psychological changes the next day, or did you measure longer term?**\n\nWe measured the day after. We have a lot of data, so we haven’t fully exhausted the analysis of all of it. We went with the most efficient pipeline at this stage, so it remains an open question how enduring the changes are. But I can say, at least from experience, it’s on an individual level. For some individuals, that experience will be life-changing. It’ll affect them years later. For others, it may have a more temporary influence. It’s really different from one individual to the next, which is also why this research is moving away from averaging the group and starting to understand what are the factors that precipitate organization in the brain or the optimal psychedelic experience—these transformative effects, and what factors lead to how well sustained positive psychological changes are.\n\n**What have you learned so far?**\n\nThe assumption might be that people take psilocybin and then this organization naturally comes about, but that’s not what we saw. We only see this order in the brain when there’s a certain quality of experience: When their experience is blissful and unitive, with boundaries between self and world dissolving. When they were instead having only a visual or sensory hallucinatory experience, we see it evolve a little bit. When they reported anxiety or impaired control and cognition, essentially feeling confused and bewildered, we didn’t see this kind of order evolve at all. It’s almost like when they’re having an organized experience in their mind, you see this organization in the brain. That was one of the most fascinating things to be able to track.\n\n**What other factors predicted whether someone would have this kind of blissful, boundary-dissolving experience?**\n\nThat’s an open area of research that we want to approach now. What was it about their prior mindset? When we talk about the importance of mindset, one factor is their mood on the day of psilocybin administration. But another factor is their personality, perhaps their beliefs, maybe even their music preferences. A whole bunch of different factors could help us predict whether this organization evolves.\n\nAt this early stage, I could say that it’s certainly going to help if somebody is feeling relatively calm. There’s other literature that suggests absorption in experience—which means how easily somebody can sit in an empty room and feel entertained versus feeling absolutely bored—may predict this kind of engaged experience on psilocybin. But this is still an early area of research that we need to explore more, and we also need to see how well it tracks this organization in the brain that we found.\n\n**Read more: “ The Bad Trip Detective”**\n\n**Is absorption a dimension of personality that’s considered fixed or something that changes over a person’s lifetime?**\n\nI can say with relative confidence that absorption is close to a stable trait, but it’s one you might be able to adjust through a program of mindfulness. Meditation and mindfulness are subjects we did explore in this study, but it was a relatively short course. Participants were assigned to it. And when we looked at those results, we averaged them at the group level. That was just practical for us at this stage. Some individuals really did benefit from the mindfulness course. On average, though, it didn’t make a difference between the somewhat 30 participants who went through the mindfulness course and the 30 who didn’t. It didn’t seem like that short course made a difference above and beyond what psilocybin by itself was capable of doing to their psychological well-being.\n\nAside from absorption, other personality traits also help predict the depth of subjective experience. One of them is openness. Certainly personality traits do have some predictive value. We could measure these things and start to have a better picture of what kind of subjective experience somebody is likely to have.\n\n**I was surprised to learn that this was the world’s largest brain-imaging study of the acute effects of psilocybin, especially given that the sample size was just 62 people.**\n\nPart of that is because running a psychedelic imaging study requires a lot of resources. For each of our participants, there’s a lot of screening, a little bit of preparation. Then it’s a fairly intensive session when somebody comes in to have the psilocybin. They’ll be with us on the administration day for eight to 10 hours, and we have to do that for each participant. Psychedelic studies have typically had less than 30 participants. We’re the largest—and not even just for psilocybin, but for any psychedelic, at least which has been published today. We have approximately double the sample size.\n\nThere are other psychedelics which are more fast-acting, like DMT, which lasts 15 to 20 minutes, and they will have an edge in providing the next largest sample size. But they also have a very different kind of psychological experience. Psilocybin is the one that’s been explored with the most depth, and it’s also the one that’s been used in palliative care, for example.\n\n**You were measuring the so-called “acute” effects of psilocybin. What does acute mean in this context?**\n\nIt means that we did the imaging while they were actually under the influence of the psychedelic. It’s a whole different nature of study. Most studies measure the day before and the day after the psychedelic experience. Another thing that makes our study somewhat interesting is our participants had no prior psychedelic experience. That’s a rare feature, partially because it’s a little bit safer for participants in an imaging study if you know they’ve already had a psychedelic experience, because we’re gonna be putting them inside the scanner. But with our participants, they had no prior psychedelic experience. One hour after they took the psilocybin, which is when the effects are typically taking hold for most individuals, we had them go into the MRI.\n\n**How might your findings help to shape psychedelic therapies?**\n\nHaving an individual measure of the psychedelic state is quite unique in the literature, and it opens up a pathway toward personalized treatment: figuring out who is responding under what conditions and whether their treatment could be adapted. At some stage, we’d like to be able to take these methods or some adaptation of them and be able to use them on a baseline scan before the psilocybin to help us predict from the brain whether somebody is going to respond to the psychedelic. Right now, in clinical practice, we have no real way to estimate this other than some of the psychological measures that I had mentioned. That means that when you give somebody a standardized dose, which is what’s happening in practice right now, you don’t know the degree of response that they’ll have. If we have more information, we might know that this treatment isn’t optimal for you or that we need to increase the dose.\n\nAnother aspect here is researchers could use our approach to test optimal therapeutic settings and see what the patient or participant is experiencing or doing and how that influences the outcomes. A personalized care approach is definitely a trajectory that we can take from our findings down the line.\n\n*Enjoying *[Nautilus](https://nautil.us/)*? Subscribe to our free *[ newsletter](https://nautil.us/newsletter/?_sp=c43011db-6fcf-42f2-a38c-e033b87a4a1d.1759265717430).\n\n*Lead image: Marina Zlochin / Adobe Stock*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-a-blissful-psychedelic-trip-looks-like-inside-the-brain", "canonical_source": "https://nautil.us/what-a-blissful-psychedelic-trip-looks-like-inside-the-brain-1283982/", "published_at": "2026-08-19 15:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-19 15:11:38.199242+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["machine-learning", "neural-networks", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Devon Stoliker", "Monash School of Psychological Sciences", "Nature"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-a-blissful-psychedelic-trip-looks-like-inside-the-brain", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-a-blissful-psychedelic-trip-looks-like-inside-the-brain.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-a-blissful-psychedelic-trip-looks-like-inside-the-brain.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/what-a-blissful-psychedelic-trip-looks-like-inside-the-brain.jsonld"}}