Watching new connections grow in a living brain
What they did
Researchers gave mice a single dose of psilocybin and used repeated microscope imaging to watch individual connection points on nerve cells in the frontal cortex over time.
What they found
This animal study found roughly 10 percent increases in the size and density of dendritic spines within twenty-four hours, and the newly formed connections were still present a month later.
Worth knowing
This was done in mice. Growing connections in a mouse cortex is not the same as improving anyone's mood, and no human study has directly measured this. It is the origin of a claim that gets repeated as though it were clinical.
Shao et al. Psilocybin induces rapid and persistent growth of dendritic spines in frontal cortex in vivo. Neuron, 2021.
Read the sourceKeep reading
brain networksPsilocybin disrupted brain communication far more than a stimulantbrain networksBrains became less compartmentalised, and moods lifted with themdefault mode networkActivity went down, not upThis is where the word neuroplasticity comes from in psilocybin marketing. Worth reading the actual studies, because most of them were done in mice.
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