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Psilocybin generates psychedelic experience by disrupting brain network

People who consume psilocybin-containing “magic mushrooms” typically undergo a surreal experience in which their sense of space, time and self is distorted.

Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have now explained how it may work: psilocybin temporarily scrambles the brain’s “default mode network,” a critical network of brain areas involved in introspective thinking, such as daydreaming and remembering.

Therapies

This finding suggests psilocybin-based therapies for mental illnesses such as depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The study, published July 17 in the journal Nature, creates a road map that other scientists can follow to evaluate the effects of psychoactive drugs on brain function—potentially accelerating drug development efforts for any number of psychiatric illnesses, say the researchers.

Visualizing the impact of psilocybin

In an experiment, the researchers found a way to visualize the impact of psilocybin on individual participants’ neural communication pathways that connect different brain regions and to correlate changes in these networks with subjective experiences.

They found that psilocybin caused profound and widespread—yet not permanent—changes to the brain’s functional networks. It desynchronized the “default mode network,” an interconnected set of brain areas that are ordinarily simultaneously active when the brain is not working on anything in particular.

After falling out of sync, the network re-established itself when the acute effects of the drug wore off, but small differences from pre-psilocybin scans persisted for weeks, making the brain more flexible and potentially more able to come into a healthier state.

Rating feelings of transcendence, connectedness and awe

The brains of people on psilocybin look more similar to each other than to their untripping selves—what people say about losing their sense of self during a trip.

During the experience, participants were asked to rate their feelings of transcendence, connectedness and awe using the validated Mystical Experience Questionnaire. The magnitude of the changes to the functional networks tracked with the intensity of each participant’s subjective experience.

The researchers also said they were able to get very precise data on the effects of the drug in each individual—a step toward precision clinical trials.

Citation: Siegel JS, Subramanian S, Perry D, Kay BP, Gordon EM, Laumann TO, Reneau TR, Metcalf NV, Chacko RV, Gratton C, Horan C, Krimmel SR, Shimony JS, Schweiger JA, Wong DF, Bender DA, Scheidter KM, Whiting FI, Padawer-Curry JA, Shinohara RT, Chen Y, Moser J, Yacoub E, Nelson SM,  Vizioli L, Fair DA, Lenze EJ, Carhart-Harris R, Raison CL, Raichle ME, Snyder AZ, Nicol GE, Dosenbach NUF. Psilocybin desynchronizes the human brain. Nature. July 17, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07624-5 (open-access)

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State of the Future 20.0

The Millennium Project has announced State of the Future 20.0, a 500-page, extensive overview of future Issues and opportunities, compiled by The Millennium Project.

The book provides a “broad, detailed, and readable look at the issues and opportunities on the future of humanity, and what we should know today to avoid the worst and achieve the best for the future of civilization.”

The Millennium Project, a global participatory think-tank, distilled research reports and insights from hundreds of futurists and related experts around the world, along with 70 of its own futures research reports and an Executive Summary on the prospects for civilization.

In State of the Future Index 2035, the book integrates 29 variables to show if the future is getting better or worse, and where we are winning and losing.

The future of AGI

Notably, the book distills insights from 55 of the world’s leading AGI experts on 22 questions on the future of AGI. Drawing on these insights, it identifies 40 national and international regulations and five governance models that are assessed by an international 299-member panel.

It also covers “Governing the Transition from Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)” and distills insights from 55 of the world’s leading AGI experts on 22 questions on the future of AGI.

Drawing on these insights, the report identifies 40 national and international regulations and five governance models assessed by an international 299-member panel.

In “Beneficial AGI Competition,” the book discusses the world of 2045, its issues and opportunities, offering a scenario about a day in 2045 and how AGI could greatly improve life on that day.

In “Robots 2050,” the book illustrates the future possibilities of AI robots in governments, in daily life, in bed, in the oceans, and in space.

According to the Millennium Project, “the State of the Future 20.0 is one of the largest, broadest, most detailed publications on future issues and possibilities written. It covers what the globally-minded citizen should know about the future and decision-making today.”

More in State of the Future 20.0 — Executive Summary. The book is available as a PDF download.

Full disclosure: Amara Angelica is an advisor to the Millennium Project.

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Apple Vision Pro evaluated in operating room

Minimally invasive surgeons at UC San Diego Health are the first in the nation to evaluate the potential use of spatial computing apps on Apple Vision Pro in the operating room.

The study is investigating whether spatial computing technology can enhance the surgical experience. Using an app that can stream a video feed from other devices, Apple Vision Pro can display the patient’s medical imaging, vital signs and the surgical camera view in real-time to guide decision-making while the surgeon operates in a more ergonomic position.

Relieving painful hours of standing

Surgeons may stand in surgery for 30 minutes to more than 12 hours, depending on the complexity of the procedure. The length of the surgery and concurrent use of multiple technologies mounted from floor and ceiling can take a negative toll on the surgeon’s body, especially the neck and shoulders, the researchers say.

During the study, surgeons using Apple Vision Pro also have access to a simultaneous set-up of traditional operating room monitors and displays.

A spatial computing platform also allows for infinite digital space to display imaging and potentially an overall streamlined workflow.

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Millions of depressed Americans could benefit from psilocybin therapy

More than half of patients in the U.S. treated for depression may be eligible for psilocybin-assisted therapy if the FDA approves, according to researchers at Emory University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison and UC Berkeley.

The researchers determined that between 56% and 62% of patients currently receiving treatment for depression—5.1 to 5.6 million individuals—could qualify for psilocybin therapy, if approved.

Citation: Syed F. Rab, Charles L. Raison, and Elliot Marseille. An Estimate of the Number of People with Clinical Depression Eligible for Psilocybin-Assisted Therapy in the United States. 24 September 2024. Psychedelics (Genomic Press, New York) (open-access)

Thumbnail image credit: A. Angelica, DALL E

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AI detects chronic high blood pressure in people’s voice recordings

Researchers at Klick Labs have unveiled a cutting-edge, non-invasive technique that can predict chronic high blood pressure (hypertension) with a high degree of accuracy using just a person’s voice.

Published in the peer-reviewed journal IEEE Access, the findings may hold potential for advancing the early detection of chronic high blood pressure and showcase a novel way to harness vocal biomarkers for better health outcomes.

The study’s 245 participants were asked to record their voices by speaking into a mobile app developed by the Klick scientists, which detected high blood pressure with accuracies up to 84 percent for females and 77 percent for males.

Hidden sonic clues

The app uses machine learning to analyze hundreds of vocal biomarkers that are indiscernible to the human ear, including pitch variability, patterns of speech energy distribution, and sharpness of sound changes (spectral contrast).

“By leveraging various classifiers and establishing gender-based predictive models, we discovered a more accessible way to detect hypertension, which we hope will lead to earlier intervention for this widespread global health issue,” said Klick scientists in a statement.

Klick Labs is collaborating with hospitals, academic institutions, and public health authorities worldwide.

Citation: B. Taghibeyglou, J. M. Kaufman and Y. Fossat, “Machine Learning-Enabled Hypertension Screening Through Acoustical Speech Analysis: Model Development and Validation,” in IEEE Access, vol. 12, pp. 123621-123629, 2024. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10669945 (open-access)

Thumbnail image credit: A. Angelica, DALL E

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New free app monitors blood pressure

University of Pittsburgh researchers have developed an app that detects blood pressure using only your smartphone.

They harnessed tools already built into most smartphones, like motion-sensing accelerometers, front cameras, and touch sensors to build an Android smartphone app to measure an individual’s pulse pressure. 

You will simply raise your hand while holding the smartphone to make a measurement, as described in the journal Scientific Reports.

How it works

“Because of gravity, there’s a hydrostatic pressure change in your thumb when you raise your hands up above your heart, and using the phone’s accelerometer, you’re able to convert that into the relative change in pressure,” senior author Anand Chandrasekhar of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science said in a statement.

The app actually calculates pulse pressure, the difference between your upper (systolic) and lower (diastolic) numbers. Pulse pressure isn’t typically used in cardiovascular disease monitoring, but the study revealed its significance as a metric for detecting hypertension.

Goal: Accessible hypertension management worldwide

Systolic hypertension, or high blood pressure, affects more than 4 billion adults worldwide and is the leading modifiable risk factor for cardiovascular disease, the top cause of death globally. This app could bring blood pressure monitoring software to any smartphone owner, enabling consistent self-monitoring and easy sharing of results with healthcare providers. This innovation is especially promising for managing hypertension, which can often be lowered through lifestyle changes such as reducing salt intake, quitting smoking and exercising regularly. 

Citation: Landry, C., Dhamotharan, V., Freithaler, M., Hauspurg, A., Muldoon, M. F., Shroff, S. G., Chandrasekhar, A., & Mukkamala, R. (2024). A smartphone application toward detection of systolic hypertension in underserved populations. Scientific Reports, 14(1), 1-12. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-024-65269-w (open-access)

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UN General Assembly President Requested to Convene Special Session on Future Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

The Millennium Project, in collaboration with the World Academy of Art and Science and the World Futures Study Federation, sent an open letter today to the incoming President of the UN General Assembly, His Excellency Mr. Philémon Yang, regarding the development, security, and governance of future forms of AI called artificial general intelligence (AGI).

This open letter, signed by 230 political, business, and academic leaders in artificial intelligence and futures research, warns that within the coming decade, “many versions of unregulated AGI could be released on the Internet. Without national licensing systems and UN coordination, humanity could lose control of AGI, which can rewrite its own code, getting smarter and smarter, moment-by-moment and evolving into an Artificial Super Intelligence far beyond our control or understanding.”

Calls for UN convention on AI

The letter calls for a UN resolution to create a committee of the willing to draft a UN Convention on AI with two sections, one on Artificial Narrow Intelligence (ANI) and one on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), which could “lead to the creation of a specialized agency for the governance and safe development of artificial Intelligence in all its forms.”

‘Most difficult problem humanity has ever faced‘

In a recent international study on regulations and global governance structures for the transition to AGI (to be published in the State of the Future 20.0 next week), a multi-stakeholder, hybrid (AI and human) governance system was rated the most likely to ensure that current and future AI development aligns with human rights and well-being.

“Governing the transition to AGI could be the most complex, difficult management problem humanity has ever faced,” says Jerome Glenn, CEO of the Millennium Project. According to Stuart Russell, a leading AI expert at the University of California, Berkeley, “failure to solve [AGI management] before proceeding to create AGI systems would be a fatal mistake for human civilization. No entity has the right to make that mistake.”

Full disclosure: writer Amara Angelica is an advisor to the Millennium Project.

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‘Nuclear clock’ could revolutionize time measurement

Scientists at JILA (a joint institute of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the University of Colorado Boulder), have designed a nuclear clock, a novel type of timekeeping device that uses signals from the core, or nucleus, of an atom—unlike atomic clocks, which measure time by tuning laser light to frequencies that cause electrons to jump between energy levels.

Nuclear clocks could be much more accurate than current atomic clocks, which provide official international time and play major roles in technologies such as GPS. That means even more precise navigation systems (with or without GPS), faster internet speeds, more reliable network connections, and more secure digital communications.

Radicalizing physics

Nuclear clocks could also improve tests of fundamental theories for how the universe works, help detect dark matter, or verify if the constants of nature are truly constant—allowing for verification of theories in particle physics without the need for large-scale particle accelerator facilities. 

While this isn’t a functioning nuclear clock yet, it’s a crucial step towards creating such a clock that could be both portable and highly stable.

The research is described in the Sept. 4 issue of the journal Nature as a cover story. 

Citation: Chuankun Zhang, Tian Ooi, Jacob S. Higgins, Jack F. Doyle, Lars von der Wense, Kjeld Beeks, Adrian Leitner, Georgy Kazakov, Peng Li, Peter G. Thirolf, Thorsten Schumm and, Jun Ye. Frequency ratio of the 229mTh nuclear isomeric transition and the 87Sr atomic clock. Nature. Published online Sept 4, 2024. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07839-6  

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How to make skin invisible—major breakthrough

Researchers have developed a new way to see organs within a body by rendering overlying tissues transparent to visible light.

The counterintuitive process—a topical application of food-safe dye—was reversible in tests with animal subjects, and may ultimately apply to a wide range of medical diagnostics, from locating injuries to monitoring digestive disorders and identifying cancers.

Stanford University researchers published the research in the Sept. 6, 2024 issue of Science.  

Many uses

″Looking forward, this technology could make veins more visible for the drawing of blood, make laser-based tattoo removal more straightforward, or assist in the early detection and treatment of cancers,″ said Stanford University assistant professor of materials science and engineering Guosong Hong, a U.S. National Science Foundation CAREER grantee who helped lead this work, in a statement.

″For example, certain therapies use lasers to eliminate cancerous and precancerous cells, but are limited to areas near the skin’s surface. This technique may be able to improve that light penetration.″  

How it works

To master the new technique, the researchers developed a way to predict how light interacts with dyed biological tissues. This involves both light scattering and refraction, where light changes speed and bends as it travels from one material into another.

Light scattering is the reason we cannot see through our body: Fats, fluids within cells, proteins, and other materials each have a different refractive index, a property that dictates how much an incoming light wave will bend.

In most tissues, those materials are closely compacted together, so the varied refractive indices cause light to scatter as it passes through. It is the scattering effect that our eyes interpret as opaque, colored biological materials.

The researchers realized if they wanted to make biological material transparent, they had to find a way to match the different refractive indices so light could travel through unimpeded.

The researchers realized that dyes are the most effective at absorbing light, but can also be highly effective at directing light uniformly through a wide range of refractive indices.

They found that molecules of tartrazine (a food dye more commonly known as FD & C Yellow 5), when dissolved into water and absorbed into tissues, are perfectly structured to match refractive indices and prevent light from scattering, resulting in transparency.

The researchers gently rubbed a temporary tartrazine solution on mice. They applied the solution to the scalp, rendering the skin transparent to reveal blood vessels crisscrossing the brain and to the abdomen, which faded within minutes to show contractions of the intestine and movements caused by heartbeats and breathing.

The technique resolved features at the scale of microns (millionth of a meter) and enhanced microscope observations. The tartrazine did not appear to have long-term effects, and any excess was excreted in waste within 48 hours.

The researchers suspect that injecting the dye should lead to even deeper views within organisms, with implications for both biology and medicine.

Old formulas yield new window into medicine

Supported by a range of federal and private grants, the project began as an investigation into how microwave radiation interacts with biological tissues.

In exploring optics textbooks from the 1970s and 1980s, the researchers found two key concepts: mathematical equations called Kramers-Kronig relations and a phenomenon called Lorentz oscillation, where electrons and atoms resonate within molecules as photons pass through.

Well studied for more than a century, yet not applied to medicine in this way, the tools proved ideal for predicting how a given dye can raise the refractive index of biological fluids to perfectly match surrounding fats and proteins.

They realized that the same modifications that make materials transparent to microwaves could be tailored to impact the visible spectrum, with potential applications in medicine.

One tool that proved critical was a decades-old ellipsometer, a tool familiar to semiconductor manufacturing, not biology. In a possible first for medicine, the researchers realized it was also perfect to predict the optical properties of their target dyes.

With methods grounded in fundamental physics, the researchers hope their approach will launch a new field of study: matching dyes to biological tissues based on optical properties, potentially leading to a wide range of medical applications.

This research was supported by the U.S.. National Science Foundation, the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research, the U.S. Army Long Term Health Education and Training program, and a range of private foundations and institutions.

Warning by researchers: The technique described above has not been tested on humans. Dyes may be harmful.  Always exercise caution with dyes and do not consume directly, apply to people or animals, or otherwise misuse.

Citation: Ou, Z., Duh, S., Rommelfanger, N. J., C. Keck, C. H., Jiang, S., BrinsonJr, K., Zhao, S., Schmidt, E. L., Wu, X., Yang, F., Cai, B., Cui, H., Qi, W., Wu, S., Tantry, A., Roth, R., Ding, J., Chen, X., Kaltschmidt, J. A., . . . Hong, G. (2024). Achieving optical transparency in live animals with absorbing molecules. Science. https://doi.org/adm6869 (open-access)

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How stressed are you right now?

Current cortisol detectors have poor stability, caused by different and fluctuating conditions, such as changing pH and temperature on the silver layer; and the presence of other hormones such as progesterone, testosterone, and corticosterone.

A way-better cortisol detector

So researchers in China and the UK have now developed a new, improved detector that can accurately measure levels of cortisol—a key stress biomarker—in the blood. The solution uses iridium oxide nanoparticles to cover the detector’s conventional silver layer. This improves the stability, sensitivity and reproducibility of a cortisol detection device at a concentration 3,000 times lower than the normal range of cortisol.

The study, by researchers at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, People’s Republic of China and Abertay University, United Kingdom, was published August 30, 2024 in the open-access journal Talanta, published by Elsevier.

Another recent stress-detection approach, using machine-learning with wearable sensors: Machine-learning Approach for Stress Detection Using Wearable Sensors.

So what are your stress-detector (and fixer) methods? Please share below!

Citations:

Ji, T., Ye, W., Xiao, W., Dawson, G., Dong, Q., & Gwenin, C. (2024). Iridium oxide-modified reference screen-printed electrodes for point-of-care portable electrochemical cortisol detection. Talanta, 280, 126776. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S003991402401155X?via%3Dihub (open-access)

Abd Al-Alim, M., Mubarak, R., M. Salem, N., & Sadek, I. (2024). A machine-learning approach for stress detection using wearable sensors in free-living environments. Computers in Biology and Medicine, 179, 108918. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compbiomed.2024.108918 (open-access)

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