Nineteen Milligrams of Psilocybin and a Test of the Brain-Chaos Story
For about a decade, the mainstream understanding has been that psychedelics cause chaos in the brain. A recent experiment put that description to a direct test: researchers gathered 62 people who had never taken a psychedelic before, gave them 19 milligrams of psilocybin, the compound found in certain fungi, then used AI to compare their drugged and sober brain scans. Ars Technica's summary of what emerged: not exactly chaos.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
Chaos was always a weak explanation: it tells you the activity got messier without explaining why a session can end in insight or clarity.
“Not exactly chaos” is a modest result, though. Ruling out pure randomness doesn't show that whatever structure remains has anything to do with the experience a person reports.
Fair — but the bar should be symmetrical. If the chaos framing can't account for why a trip produces insight, it shouldn't get to be the default description of the data either.