Frontiers in Neuroscience
February 2, 2024
Antea D’Andrea, Pierpaolo Croce, Jordan O’Byrne et al.
13 citations
Theravada Buddhist monks with extensive meditation experience underwent magnetoencephalography during focused attention meditation, open monitoring meditation, and resting states. Brain microstate coverage and occurrence differed between meditation and rest and between the two meditation styles. The Hurst exponent, a measure of long-range memory in brain dynamics, was lower during both meditation conditions than during rest. Lempel-Ziv complexity, which quantifies signal complexity, increased progressively from rest to focused attention meditation to open monitoring meditation. These changes in brain criticality indices suggest that meditation shifts brain dynamics toward a more critical state, paralleling changes in cognitive state.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
January 29, 2026
Venkatesh Subramani, Timothy Nest, Annalisa Pascarella et al.
1 citation
LSD alters brain activity by increasing alpha and beta brain-wave frequencies while genuinely reducing oscillatory power, with these effects showing distinct cortical patterns. The drug also flattens the aperiodic 1/f spectral slope and increases neural signal fractality and complexity, particularly in sensory, language, emotion, and imagery-related networks, while sparing motor cortex. Machine learning identified peak-frequency shifts, aperiodic parameters, and complexity measures as key discriminators of the psychedelic state. Music did not amplify these neural signatures and showed a trend toward attenuation. These findings provide a comprehensive account of how LSD reorganizes large-scale human brain dynamics.
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
March 5, 2026
Venkatesh Subramani, Annalisa Pascarella, Jérémy Brunel et al.
Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) loosens the brain's usual alignment between anatomical structure and neural activity in a frequency-dependent way. Low-frequency brain waves (theta, alpha, beta) become less constrained by the structural connectome, indicating a global relaxation of large-scale dynamics. High-frequency gamma activity shows selective reorganization rather than uniform disruption. Greater gamma-band decoupling within core default-mode network regions predicts the intensity of ego dissolution across individuals. LSD does not cause indiscriminate disintegration but drives system-specific rebalancing: visual and attentional systems decouple while auditory networks strengthen coupling. These findings suggest psychedelic states emerge from frequency-dependent relaxation of structural constraints, with default-mode reorganization as a neural correlate of ego dissolution.