Psychedelics and anesthetics create mirror image patterns in the brain
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For something so familiar to human experience, consciousness is still a mystery. Each day, people cycle through wakefulness and sleep, from a higher level of consciousness to a lower one. What's more, some people alter their conscious experience with drugs such as psychedelics or have unconsciousness induced by anesthesia.
Researchers have investigated these altered states of awareness in an attempt to understand how consciousness is organized within the brain.
Opposite patterns in the brain
A new Michigan Medicine-led study takes a data-driven approach and, for the first time, reveals that psychedelics and anesthetics create "mirror-image" patterns of large-scale brain organization, with opposite network features. The findings are published in the journal Cell Reports.
The team, led by Rui Dai, Ph.D., and Zirui Huang, Ph.D., of the Department of Anesthesiology and Center for Consciousness Science at Michigan Medicine, analyzed functional MRI data from study participants who were administered psychedelic compounds—LSD, psilocybin and nitrous oxide—and compared them with brain MRI readouts from participants in a sleeping state or under sedation with propofol.
"In previous literature, each individual drug's influence on brain connectivity was analyzed separately," said Dai. "To our knowledge, no one has systematically assessed these two drug classes to compare network organization with waking consciousness."
Connectivity rises and falls
Specifically, the team observed that psychedelics increased functional connectivity (how closely two brain regions work together), while sleep and anesthesia reduced it.
The same pattern held for topological integration, meaning how easily information travels across the brain, and for interaction complexity, or the number of different patterns of brain interaction that can be observed.
"Overall, these results mean that during psychedelic states, the brain becomes more globally connected, more efficient in communication and more dynamic, while anesthetic states are the opposite," said Dai.
Furthermore, their results offer a reliable way to differentiate conscious states using data.
A clue to consciousness
The neural mechanism of consciousness is a longstanding scientific question, Huang added. He is director of the Center for Consciousness Science at the University of Michigan Medical School.
"We analyze it using drugs because we know they will affect consciousness in some way, but we don't know how. The mirror-image effect discovered by this study suggests that the integration, efficiency and complexity of brain activity may be fundamental to consciousness."
Publication details
Rui Dai et al, Opposite network patterns of integration-segregation in psychedelic and sedated states of consciousness, Cell Reports (2026). DOI: 10.1016/j.celrep.2026.117830
Journal information: Cell Reports
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AnesthesiologyNeurology Provided by University of Michigan Who's behind this story?
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