Neural Mechanisms of Psychedelic Subjective and Therapeutic Effects

The thesis reviews and explores the neural mechanisms altered by serotonergic psychedelics. Psychedelics are a class of substances that can induce powerful alterations to consciousness and have demonstrated therapeutic efficacy across a range of disorders. Using resting-state MRI data collected from healthy adults under psychedelic substances, the analysis method dynamic causal modelling was applied to measure the effective (directed) connectivity changes across large-scale networks and regions of the brain associated with perception altered by psychedelics. The analyses and review elucidate the neural mechanisms and neurophenomenology underlying psychedelic subjective and therapeutic effects.