Adeel Razi

Our new paper in @Nature is now out.

Psychedelics don’t simply disorder the brain. Using fMRI, EEG and AI in 62 psychedelic-naive adults, we found hidden, context-sensitive organisation beneath the apparent chaos -- strongest in people reporting more positive, profound experiences and a reduced sense of separation from the world.

The paper: nature.com/articles/s4158…

Huge congratulations to @dpsyc42 who led from the front, @novelli_leo and @MKhajehnejad were exceptional in performing highly sophisticated and complex data analyses and thanks the whole @ConnectPsi team and collaborators.

Our explainer: theconversation.com/new-research-s…

Data descriptor: nature.com/articles/s4159…

ML model (TAVRNN): nature.com/articles/s4200…

Fully open-access dataset: openneuro.org/datasets/ds006…

Code for processing and cleaning data: github.com/razilab/psicon…

@matthewdgreaves Tmarin Barta, @ManaBiabani, @SidChop, @anilkseth, @RCarhartHarris, @FredBarrettPhD, @KatrinPreller, @gary_egan

@turnerinstitute @MonashPsych, @Monash_FMNHS, @MonashUni @CIFAR_News

Like many academics, my inbox is inundated with emails from prospective applicants who want to join our lab. Almost all of these emails have a summary of one of our papers, a very confident sounding proposal for future research, and highly professional tone. I’m receiving about ten such emails, seven days a week. Same monotonous style of writing, devoid of a human touch. No human can respond to them at any rate.

If I was getting a single such email even once in 3 months two years ago, I would have made a lot of effort to get them on board. I now only do a cursory read and archive them.

If you are ‘genuinely’ interested in our work, please read a paper (not necessarily ours) and share what you learnt, imperfect but uniquely yours. You will get a guaranteed response, may be delayed, but surely.

Research Highlight in Nature Neuroscience on our Nature paper:

Embeddedness under psilocybin.

“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.”

nature.com/articles/s4159…

Thank you @ettah for the very nice piece!

Research Highlight section in Nature Reviews Neuroscience (@NatRevNeurosci) covered our recent Nature paper.

"Temporal structure tunes the psychedelic experience"

Read it here: nature.com/articles/s4158…

"The entropic reorganization of functional brain networks under the psychedelic psilocybin occurs acutely, but how brain activity organization during the psychedelic state relates to subjective experience and the lasting psychological change that can follow remains unresolved. Stoliker et al. now demonstrate that psilocybin-induced brain activity contains latent temporal structure that improves its alignment with environmental context and covaries with the subjective quality of the psychedelic experience."

A big thank you to Jake Rogers for the excellent coverage!

A fascinating @nature study published today introduces “developmental xenocortication”.

nature.com/articles/s4158…

I was pleased to provide expert commentary on the work for The Australian (@australian), link to the coverage in the first comment).

It is an ambitious approach in which human cortical organoids are transplanted into mice in which much of the endogenous cortex has been genetically depleted. They show extended large-scale integration of human brain tissue in the mouse host. They then recorded brain-wide activity of human brain cells in a living mouse. This is a very elegant and ambitious study with profound implications for understanding human brain development and disease.

The proposed system creates an unusual experimental platform for studying biological intelligence. It will help disentangle what properties of human cortical organisation are intrinsic to the human brain from what is imposed by the developmental phase and surrounding mouse host brain circuitry.

However, we should be cautious here: the functional integration of human-derived brain cells is not a proxy for its functional equivalence. The grafted human brain tissue lacks features of mature human brain tissue. And the recorded behaviour emerges from the interactions of the human cortex and the remaining mouse subcortex.

The limitation of the technique is that it is difficult to know whether the grafted human brain cells are necessary or sufficient for a particular observed behaviour. This means while the engineered niche in the mouse brain that makes grafting of human tissue possible is the main advance, it also becomes its most important limitation when studying extrapolation to normal human brain development.

Nevertheless, the proposed platform is particularly useful for studying developmental injury and neurodevelopmental diseases, like ADHD and autism, and also testing interventions across integrated human brain tissue.

However, I would be very cautious not to describe this as a “human brain in a mouse”, but rather a hybrid brain system containing developing human brain cells within an overwhelmingly mouse brain. This new hybrid system is also simply not enough to call it to have human-like cognition or consciousness.

The ethical concerns will increase with the increased maturity and scale of these grafting methods, and with the extent of the functional integration of human tissue in a non-human host.

To me here the most interesting question is: what happens to human brain computation when human brain cells develop and learn within a mouse world?