Psychedelic drugs are thought to increase neural entropy and disrupt large-scale brain organization. In an article published in Nature, Stoliker, Novelli and colleagues investigated how psilocybin alters brain dynamics across different behavioral contexts using multimodal neuroimaging in 62 psychedelic-naive participants. Participants underwent fMRI and EEG before and after psilocybin administration during a resting state, guided meditation, music listening and movie viewing.
Psilocybin reduced functional modularity and altered functional connectivity across cortical networks, consistent with previous findings. However, using machine learning to look at neural population dynamics, the authors showed that low-dimensional brain-activity trajectories became increasingly organized according to experimental context, particularly in the default-mode and visual networks. Stronger context-specific organization occurred in individuals who reported more intense experiences of unity, bliss and self-dissolution after administration — but did not correlate with anxiety or cognitive impairment — and predicted shifts in mindset the next day.
The authors propose that psilocybin induces a state of ‘embeddedness’, in which neural activity becomes more closely aligned with environmental context and subjective experiences of diminished self–world boundaries emerge. Original references: Nature 656, 936–947 https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10910-z (2026) This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription Receive 12 print issues and online access Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout Nature Neuroscience https://www.nature.com/neuro/ Howells, H. Embeddedness under psilocybin.
Nat Neurosci (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02476-w DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-026-02476-w
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