Behavioural brain research
January 1, 2013
Jonathan Cachat, Evan J Kyzar, Christopher Collins et al.
112 citations
Ibogaine, a psychoactive compound from the iboga plant, alters multiple behaviors in adult zebrafish. At doses of 10 and 20 mg/L, it reversed the natural diving response, causing initial top swimming followed by bottom dwelling, and reduced the innate preference for dark environments. It did not change overall locomotion or wall-hugging behavior but altered spatial exploration, promoted mirror interaction, disrupted group cohesion, and induced color changes from melanophore aggregation. Brain c-fos expression and whole-body cortisol levels remained unchanged. These results demonstrate ibogaine's complex pharmacological profile and support the use of zebrafish for studying hallucinogenic drug effects.
Psychopathology
August 18, 2025
Evan J Kyzar, George H Denfield, Jasper Feyaerts et al.
1 citation
Integrating methods from phenomenology can strengthen the application of dynamical systems theory (DST) in psychopathology research. Phenomenological psychopathology improves DST-based investigations by specifying core symptoms more precisely through a focus on subjective experiences and by deepening theoretical understanding of how symptoms evolve in severity over time. Using clinical high risk for psychosis as a test case, the article demonstrates the utility of combining phenomenologically informed theory and DST, examining the ipseity-disturbance model of psychosis development. The authors offer a vision for broader integration of DST and phenomenological research methods to better understand and predict psychiatric disorders and transitions in mental health states.
Psychopathology
January 1, 2024
George H Denfield, Evan J Kyzar
1 citation
Subjective experience is central to mental illness but has been neglected in empirical psychopathology. A framework called the Nested States Model (NSM) describes the dynamic structure of experience as a system of nested states that influence each other across hierarchical layers. The NSM provides a scheme for characterizing patterns of experience in psychopathological processes, aiding clinical practice and research. It advances three aims: centering clinical formulations on subjective experience, organizing findings from clinical-phenomenological research to build broader models, and aligning perspectives on experience with brain dynamics to bridge phenomenological and neurophysiological work.