Oregon and Colorado psilocybin clients saw 49% drop in depression scores after just one session

Key Findings

⚡ LSD Speeds Up the Brain — and Makes It More Complex

• A magnetoencephalography study found that LSD shifted alpha and beta brain rhythms to higher peak frequencies, reduced oscillatory power, and increased the fractal complexity of neural signals — particularly in sensory, language, and emotion-related networks, while leaving motor cortex largely untouched.
• Machine learning confirmed that these frequency shifts and complexity measures were the clearest markers distinguishing the psychedelic state from placebo. Music did not amplify the neural effects and showed a slight trend toward dampening them.

💉 Ketamine's Reward Effects May Be Narrowly Time-Sensitive

• In a placebo-controlled crossover study of 28 healthy adults, ketamine (0.5 mg/kg IV) produced no detectable changes in reward-related brain activation during a monetary incentive task measured five hours after infusion — even though participants still reported subjective drug effects at that point.
• The finding is consistent with the idea that ketamine's impact on reward circuitry is concentrated in the acute window and may be more pronounced in people with pre-existing reward dysfunction, rather than persisting into the subacute phase.

🧠 DMT and 5-MeO-DMT Are Moving Fastest in Depression Research

• A systematic review of 51 publications found that both N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT are associated with rapid reductions in depressive symptoms, with the inhaled 5-MeO-DMT formulation GH001 meeting its primary endpoint in a Phase 2b treatment-resistant depression trial.
• Both compounds clear the body quickly — acute DMT effects resolve in 20–30 minutes, and sublingual 5-MeO-DMT has a half-life of roughly 28 minutes — which could offer practical scheduling advantages over longer-acting psychedelics. Evidence for PTSD, eating disorders, and substance use remains early-stage.

🐭 Psilocybin Sharpened Aversive Memories in Male Mice

• Male mice given a single oral dose of psilocybin or its analog ethocybin (3 mg/kg each) showed increased freezing behavior — a measure of fear memory — when tested three days later, compared to vehicle-treated controls. The effect appeared in both stressed and non-stressed animals.
• The researchers suggest this memory-enhancing effect could make traumatic or aversive memories more accessible for therapeutic processing in humans — but that interpretation is speculative, and the study is in mice only.

👁️ Persistent Visual Disturbances After Psychedelics Linked to Noisy Sensory Processing

• An online survey and behavioral task study of 186 naturalistic psychedelic users found that people with persisting perceptual abnormalities — visual disturbances that outlast the drug — showed lower visual thresholds, higher rates of perceiving absent stimuli, and reduced sensory discrimination.
• Computational modeling pointed to reduced decision precision as the key variable mediating the relationship between higher doses and more perceptual disturbances — suggesting the visual system becomes biased toward detection rather than simply overweighting prior expectations.

🍄 Wild Mushrooms in China Carry Both Psilocybin and Muscarine

• Researchers describing two new Inocybe mushroom species from northern China found that one contained only psilocybin and psilocin, one contained muscarine alongside psilocybin, and one contained all three toxins simultaneously — with psilocybin concentrations reaching up to 2,758 mg/kg dry weight.
• Muscarine activates the parasympathetic nervous system while psilocybin causes hallucinations, meaning mixed poisoning cases could present with confusing and overlapping symptoms. The presence or absence of preformed psilocin may also affect how quickly hallucinogenic effects begin.