The work, published in Nature Medicine on 6 April1, identified a 'signature' pattern of brain activity associated with taking five psychedelics, including psilocybin, LSD and ayahuasca. It combines data from 11 brain-imaging studies, which in turn include more than 500 brain scans of 267 people. 'The most surprising finding is that, despite the discrepancies in the pharmacology and the pharmaco-physiological properties of these drugs, there is a common denominator of how they affect the human brain,' says study co-author Danilo Bzdok, a neuroscientist and AI researcher at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. 'This puts a question mark on how we're even categorizing them.' The analysis is 'the largest study of its kind so far', says Shan Siddiqi, a psychiatric neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Massachusetts. Most neuroimaging studies of psychedelic drugs have recruited a limited number of participants, he says. 'This is a first step towards correcting that...
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