A new study whose findings were published in the Scientific Reports journal has revealed that psilocybin weakens the negative beliefs that an individual has and promotes well-being by ramping up neural entropy. These findings open additional possibilities for ways in which psychedelic therapy can be used in mental health care.
The researchers started by tweaking the REBUS model, which says that psychedelics exert a temporal relaxation of the hierarchical organization in the brain. During this window, flexible thinking can take place. The research team made an extension to this REBUS model by introducing the REBAS model that posits that psilocybin goes beyond exerting a temporary relaxation of hierarchical organization in the brain and triggers lasting changes to the maladaptive beliefs that an individual may have.
The study sought to examine how psilocybin impacted neural entropy, well-being and belief confidence in the study subjects. 11 individuals that had never used psychedelics were recruited for the study. This group included four women, and the average age of the participants was 42 years.
These subjects received two doses of psilocybin which were administered four weeks apart. The first dose was 1mg while the second was 25mg of psilocybin. Belief confidence was recorded before, during and 4 weeks post-administration of the psychedelic. Subjective unity experiences were also tracked at the same intervals while well-being was also measured. The measurements captured included EEG readings, REB-Q scores, WEMWBS scores, and Bayesian hypothesis testing, which is a superior statistical analysis method in comparison to traditional alternatives.
The researchers found that the participants exhibited reductions in negative self beliefs 4 weeks after receiving the 25mg dose of psilocybin. Positive self-belief confidence also increased 4 weeks after the higher psychedelic dose. No such changes were observed after administering the 1mg dose, which suggests that the effects of psilocybin are dose-dependent.
The researchers also found a strong link between neural entropy and reductions in the negative self-beliefs of the study participants. The changes in neural entropy suggest that psilocybin helps to weaken entrenched beliefs while also allowing new beliefs to be formed. This shows that for psychedelic therapy to work, neurobiological mechanisms and subjective mechanisms need to operate in tandem.
The authors point out that the research had some limitations, such as the small sample size. Further studies are needed to examine whether the effects observed can be replicated in larger sample sizes so that the findings can be generalized. The team also used healthy participants, which raises questions as to whether their findings can be replicated in subjects with clinical diagnoses of mental health conditions like depression.
Additional insights into how exactly psychedelics like psilocybin deliver therapeutic effects could come from the R&D programs of entities like Mind Medicine Inc. (NASDAQ: MNMD) (NEO: MMED) (DE: MMQ).
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