Psilocybin’s acute and persistent brain effects: a precision imaging drug trial
Scientific Data – June 05, 2025
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
A compelling drug trial investigated psilocybin, a powerful hallucinogen, as a potential medicine for psychiatric conditions. Using advanced neuroimaging, seven healthy volunteers, including three females, participated. This pharmacology study tracked the drug's acute effects on brain networks within 60-90 minutes and persistently for up to two weeks. This neuroscience and psychology dataset, a significant contribution to psychedelics and drug studies, provides rich information on how psilocybin influences brain function, offering insights into its therapeutic potential.
Abstract
Psilocybin (PSIL) is a psychedelic drug and a promising experimental therapeutic for many psychiatric conditions. Precision functional mapping (PFM) combines densely repeated resting state fMRI sampling and individual-specific network mapping to improve signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and effect size in brain imaging research. We present a randomized cross-over study in which PFM was used to characterize acute and persistent effects of psilocybin or methylphenidate (MTP) on brain networks. Seven healthy volunteers (mean age 34.1 years, SD = 9.8; n = 3 females, n = 6 Caucasians) underwent (1) extensive baseline imaging, (2) imaging beginning 60-90 minutes after drug exposure, and (3) longitudinal imaging for up to two weeks after drug exposure. Four individuals also participated in an open-label PSIL replication protocol over 6 months later. This dataset includes resting state (using advanced high-resolution multi-echo fMRI), task fMRI, structural, and diffusion basis spectral imaging as well as assessments of subjective experience. We are releasing this unique dataset as a resource for neuroscientists to study the acute and persistent effects of PSIL and MTP on brain networks.