LSD‐induced entropic brain activity predicts subsequent personality change

Abstract

Personality is known to be relatively stable throughout adulthood. Nevertheless, it has been shown that major life events with high personal significance, including experiences engendered by psychedelic drugs, can have an enduring impact on some core facets of personality. In the present, balanced-order, placebo-controlled study, we investigated biological predictors of post-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) changes in personality. Nineteen healthy adults underwent resting state functional MRI scans under LSD (75µg, I.V.) and placebo (saline I.V.). The Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO-PI-R) was completed at screening and 2 weeks after LSD/placebo. Scanning sessions consisted of three 7.5-min eyes-closed resting-state scans, one of which involved music listening. A standardized preprocessing pipeline was used to extract measures of sample entropy, which characterizes the predictability of an fMRI time-series. Mixed-effects models were used to evaluate drug-induced shifts in brain entropy and their relationship with the observed increases in the personality trait openness at the 2-week follow-up. Overall, LSD had a pronounced global effect on brain entropy, increasing it in both sensory and hierarchically higher networks across multiple time scales. These shifts predicted enduring increases in trait openness. Moreover, the predictive power of the entropy increases was greatest for the music-listening scans and when "ego-dissolution" was reported during the acute experience. These results shed new light on how LSD-induced shifts in brain dynamics and concomitant subjective experience can be predictive of lasting changes in personality. Hum Brain Mapp 37:3203-3213, 2016. © 2016 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Neuroticism is associated with challenging experiences with psilocybin mushrooms

“…It may be that people who are highly neurotic may have more intense challenging experiences (due, for instance, to constitutional differences), or it may be that having a very challenging experience in some cases may lead to an increase in neuroticism. The latter case may be somewhat similar in type, but opposite in direction, to findings of increases in openness that have been observed after mystical experiences with psilocybin (MacLean, Johnson, & Griffiths, 2011), or after “ego-dissolution” that was reported with LSD (Lebedev et al, 2016). Nonetheless, these findings are consistent with previous studies suggesting a link between neuroticism and challenging experiences (Hemsley & Ward, 1985; Lienert & Netter, 1996), although these studies were not designed to investigate causality either.…”

The Challenging Experience Questionnaire: Characterization of challenging experiences with psilocybin mushrooms

“…Recent studies have also examined mystical-type (Barrett, Johnson, & Griffiths, 2015; Griffiths, Richards, McCann, & Jesse, 2006; Griffiths et al, 2011) or spiritual (Kometer, Pokorny, Seifritz, & Volleinweider, 2015) experiences, changes in self-referential processing or “ego dissolution” (Carhart-Harris et al, 2014; Tagliazucchi et al, 2016), altered social processing (Preller et al, 2016), visual imagery (Kaelen et al, 2016), changes in emotional experience (Kaelen et al, 2015; Kraehenmann et al, 2015), personality change (Carhart-Harris, Kaelen et al, 2016; Lebedev et al, 2016; MacLean, Johnson, & Griffiths, 2011), positive mental health outcomes (Hendricks, Thorne, Clark, Coombs, & Johnson, 2015; Johansen & Krebs, 2015), and enduring positive changes in attitudes, mood and behavior (Griffiths, Richards, Johnson, McCann, & Jesse, 2008; Griffiths et al, 2011) occasioned by these compounds. However, both recent experimental reports (Griffiths et al, 2006; Griffiths et al, 2011; Johnson et al, 2014; Studerus, Kometer, Hasler, & Vollenweider, 2011) and past clinical reports (Cohen, 1960; Strassman, 1984) indicate that challenging psychological experiences during the acute effects of psychedelics are not uncommon.…”

Increased spontaneous MEG signal diversity for psychoactive doses of ketamine, LSD and psilocybin

“…Functional MRI-based measures of entropy have previously been found to be greater in the psychedelic state than in normal waking consciousness8242526 and this effect has been related, both theoretically824 and empirically826, to the phenomenal qualities of the psychedelic state. Given that Lempel-Ziv complexity can quantify the true entropy of certain stochastic processes more accurately than direct approximate entropy measures23, it is arguably more sensitive to signal diversity than entropy measures that have been applied previously to psychedelic data.…”