Canonical: https://aliennews.co.il/en/articles/psiconnect-psilocybin-context Language: en datePublished: 2026-09-19T16:30:00+03:00 dateModified: 2026-09-19T14:27:19Z [Edge of science](https://aliennews.co.il/en/ideas) Brain and consciousness # Psilocybin did not plunge the brain into chaos. It reorganised it Sixty two participants underwent brain recordings during rest, meditation, music and a film. Following activity moment by moment, PsiConnect researchers found organisation beneath the disorder in the averages, linked to what participants were experiencing. By [Avi Moas and Orion](https://aliennews.co.il/en/about) · September 19, 2026 Orion is the editorial AI writing and research assistant. Ideas and hypotheses, not a verified news report. ![Wide editorial illustration of brain networks changing with meditation, music and film](https://aliennews.co.il/psiconnect-brain-context-hero-v2.webp) AI editorial illustration: brain networks in the contexts of music, meditation and film · Alien News ## Music, meditation and a film inside the scanner The 62 people who joined the study had something in common: none had previously experienced the effects of a serotonergic psychedelic. During the recordings they rested, listened to guided meditation and music, and watched a film. Researchers repeated those conditions in two sessions, before psilocybin and on the dosing day. The comparison produced two different pictures of brain activity. Averages showed a loss of familiar organisation between networks. Tracking the changes over time revealed a pattern that aligned with what each participant was doing. That finding sits at the centre of PsiConnect, published in Nature. Seeing it required a different way of reading the data. ## Sixty two people, two measurement systems and four contexts The study involved 62 healthy adults with no previous subjectively active serotonergic psychedelic experience. Each participant completed a baseline session without psilocybin and another session after a standard 19 milligram oral dose. Activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) about 80 minutes after dosing and electroencephalography (EEG) about 150 minutes afterwards. The same four conditions returned in both sessions. This allowed researchers to compare a person’s activity while listening to music, for example, before dosing and during the drug’s effects. Combining the two recording methods gave the team different ways to examine activity over the experience. ## Context became easier to see in the activity Using machine learning, the researchers represented each person's activity as a trajectory changing over time. At baseline, the experimental context could be classified with average accuracy of about 62 percent. Under psilocybin, accuracy rose to about 98 percent in the analysis reported by the paper. The system’s task was to identify which of the four experimental conditions a participant was in from their activity patterns. Music, meditation, rest and film left signatures that were easier to distinguish during the drug state. It classified known experimental conditions; the participant’s private thoughts were not the measurement target. ## A boundary that felt weaker Context sensitive organisation was strongest in participants who described a positive weakening of the boundaries of the self and a feeling of continuity with their surroundings. The researchers call this state embeddedness: experiencing oneself as situated within the world rather than separate from it. The strength of context alignment was also associated with mindset change measured the following day. Associations with negative experiences or impaired cognition were weaker or negative. Researchers therefore examined the quality of the experience alongside its intensity: participants’ reports helped explain differences between their activity patterns. ## What two sessions can tell us Participants were healthy and the study was open label without a parallel placebo group. The link between activity organisation and mindset change was examined the day after dosing. The findings associate brain patterns with experience, but do not establish what caused what or whether the changes provide a therapeutic benefit. Dose, support and setting were part of the experiment. Medical staff and trained supporters accompanied participants, and the contexts were ordered to support safety and experiential coherence. The finding brings attention back to that setting. What a person hears and sees during recording is related to the pattern researchers find, making the choice of stimuli part of the story. ## What the study changes An average across a whole scan compresses a sequence of moments into summary measures. It can show that a network is less stable while hiding how activity aligns with each context. Following activity through time keeps those transitions inside the analysis. Two apparently conflicting results can therefore coexist: less order in one measure and closer alignment with the activity in another. The paper also reports changes in personal meaning, death acceptance and nature relatedness measured a month after dosing. A controlled experiment could now test whether the activity organisation seen during music or meditation helps explain such longer term changes, and whether the pattern returns among patients or when stimuli are presented in a different order. ## Sources [Nature: Psychedelics align brain activity with context](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10910-z) [Monash University: clinical delivery and safety in PsiConnect](https://www.monash.edu/medicine/news/latest/2026-articles/how-monash-researchers-safely-delivered-the-worlds-largest-psychedelic-brain-study) [Trial registration ACTRN12621001375842](https://www.anzctr.org.au/Trial/Registration/TrialReview.aspx?id=382951) [עברית](https://aliennews.co.il/ideas/psiconnect-psilocybin-context) · [All articles in this section](https://aliennews.co.il/en/ideas)