Magic Mushrooms may Trigger Creative Insights Within Brain

While psychedelic drugs do leave one in a dream-like state, they are also beneficial to the brain as they could facilitate creative insight, a new study published in the journal Human Brain Mapping reveals. The study was conducted by researchers at Goethe University in Germany who mapped the brains of 15 volunteers who were injected with the drug psilocybin.

The researchers took out functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans of the volunteers and found that while the scans were similar to those of a person dreaming, activities in regions of brain associated with emotions were more pronounced while those linked with high-level thinking such as analysis and planning were found to be disorganized and unsynchronized.

“People often describe taking psilocybin as producing a dream-like state and our findings have, for the first time, provided a physical representation for the experience in the brain. There may be something in the loosening of the mind that occurs both in dreaming and in the psychedelic state that could be useful in terms of facilitating creative insight”, Imperial College London’s Robin Carhart-Harris, who also worked on the study, said.



Source-Medindia