Human Brain Mapping
August 21, 2020
Lukasz Smigielski, Michael Kometer, Milan Scheidegger et al.
42 citations
A placebo-controlled, double-blind experiment with 17 participants found that psilocybin, a serotonin receptor agonist, alters self-perception by disrupting the brain's ability to distinguish between self- and other-related stimuli. Participants performed a verbal self-monitoring task while brain activity was recorded. Psilocybin reduced accuracy in identifying whether auditory feedback was their own voice or another's, and it eliminated the typical difference in electrical brain patterns (P300) between self and other stimuli. This effect was linked to changes in the anterior cingulate and insular cortex. The strength of this brain change correlated with feelings of unity and altered meaning. The findings suggest that serotonin signaling modulates how the brain processes self-referential information, offering insight into self-disturbances in mental health conditions.
Brain topography
March 1, 2024
Sarah Diezig, Simone Denzer, Peter Achermann et al.
19 citations
During the transition to sleep, reflective awareness—the ability to recognize experiences as internally generated—breaks down before phenomenal awareness, the basic experience itself, fades. Dream-like experiences, characterized by uncontrolled thinking and perceptual images mistaken as real, are associated with an inverse relationship between cognitive effects and physiological activation in the brain. In 45 healthy young subjects, EEG microstate analysis showed that dream-like experiences correlated with increased presence of a microstate sourced in the superior and middle frontal gyrus and precuneus, and decreased presence of a microstate linked to higher-order visual areas. This suggests disengagement of cognitive control systems mediated by specific inhibitory microstates.
Schizophrenia research
June 2, 2025
Maria Chiara Piani, Martin Jandl, Thomas Koenig et al.
3 citations
Self-disorders, which disrupt the basic sense of being a conscious subject, are central to schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Using 7 Tesla fMRI, 27 patients and 32 healthy controls performed a trait-judgment task probing pre-reflective and reflective self-experience. Greater severity of self-disorders correlated with reduced activity in the rostral posterior cingulate cortex during the pre-reflective component. During reflective self-experience, healthy controls showed bilateral frontopolar cortex activation, while patients engaged the left caudate, right frontopolar cortex, and left language area, suggesting patients rely more on analytical networks and deeper brain structures rather than the interoceptive processes typical of healthy controls.