Tuesday, 15 September 2026
Psilocybin and AI
This week, instead of presenting a detailed description of one recent article about the brain as I usually do, I’m going to give you short descrptions of three related articles, along with the links so that you can dig deeper into the articles themselves if you like.
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The first article appeared in the May 5, 2026 issue of the journal Nature Communication under the title “Human brain changes after first psilocybin use”. But the report on this study in a major Quebec newspaper was headlined somewhat differently: “A single dose of psilocybin alters the human brain”. In other words, as is so typical of the mass media, this newspaper used loaded wording to perpetuate negative stereotypes about psychoactive substances, instead of helping its readers to understand them better. I’m not saying it’s a great idea to introduce random molecules into the 86 billion neurons making up the delicately balanced networks of the human brain. But studies of psilocybin have been going on for quite some time (the psilocybin moleculehas even inspired a theory of consciousness), and researchers and clinicians are taking a growing interest in its supervised use to address a wide variety of psychological problems. As the newspaper article itself stated, citing psychiatrist Nicolas Garel:
It is thought that these experiences […] that result in altered states of consciousness may lead to different ways of thinking and of perceiving things, and that this increased psychological flexibility might have therapeutic effects on symptoms of depression and anxiety.
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While the study described above was conducted with a relatively small number of patients (28), the Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute has used AI to conduct the world’s largest study on the effects of psychedelic drugs on human brain circuit function. Here is how this institute described this study in a press release dated April 7, 2026:
In the world’s largest study to date on the effects of psychedelic drugs on human brain circuit function, our international team used artificial intelligence to analyze data from over 500 individual brain scanning sessions (10 times more than in earlier studies). As reported in our article in the journal Nature Medicine, we discovered that psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, MT and ayahuasca all act in a similar fashion: they flatten functional processing hierarchies and enable isolated areas of the brain to communicate.
This study is just one is just one of many examples of how artificial intelligence can now be used in scientific research. Another is the success achieved in using AI to solve the “protein-folding
problem”. (On the other hand, there are also numerous articles on the issue and risks of excessive dependence on AI.)
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The last article that I want to mention today is actually a blog post by retired researcher Deric Bownds, in which he reproduces the results that he obtained when he asked the well known generative
AI program ChatGPT to summarize the main points in the introduction to the book What is Intelligence by Blaise Agüera y Arcas. If one can judge from this summary, this book makes some very sweeping claims to account for all aspects of intelligence, and its assertion that computation is the substrate for intelligence in all life forms left me somewhat perplexed. Moreover, though this book starts by acknowledging the existence of free will, it also seems to suggest that both free will and consciousness can be readily explained as matters of computation! But this book does also seem to adhere to the fascinating thesis of life-mind continuity, for which it uses the term “intelligence”.
Mental Disorders, The Emergence of Consciousness | Comments Closed
