Short- and long-term modulation of rat prefrontal cortical activity following single doses of psilocybin
Molecular Psychiatry August 26, 2025 Ross J. Purple, Rahul Gupta, Christopher W. Thomas et al. 2 citations
After a therapeutically relevant dose of psilocybin, high-frequency oscillations at 100 Hz appear in the infralimbic cortex of rats, lasting about an hour, while overall neuron firing rates and spike-train complexity decrease. These acute effects are stronger when the animal is at rest than during a sustained attention task. Over the following days, power in beta and low-gamma frequencies (20–60 Hz) gradually increases in the infralimbic cortex. The findings point to infralimbic network oscillations as potential markers of psychedelic-induced plasticity that unfold over multiple days, revealing details not easily seen in human brain imaging.