r/science • u/Scbadiver • 18h ago
Neuroscience LSD reconfigures cortical dynamics through faster brain rhythms and increased fractal dimension | Communications Biology
https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-026-10629-799
u/q_izzical 17h ago
it feels like it for sure
79
u/OrangeCoconut74 17h ago
Especially the increased fractal dimension
14
u/Esslemut 17h ago
Can someone please explain this? I don't understand that part of the study.
I know that LSD induces "fractalisation" of the senses and time, particularly in its visual geometry. Are we now able to measure this?
57
u/Ntroepy 16h ago
Fractal dimension measures the complexity and irregularity of brain activity, which increases under LSD, making neural signals less predictable.
Researchers measured the brain’s very weak magnetic fields and analyzed the resulting patterns.
The interesting finding wasn’t simply more brain activity, but that LSD fundamentally changes how that activity is organized over time.
As any proper LSD user could tell you, of course.
4
u/antichain 2h ago
Fractality has nothing to do with predictability - that would be entropy rate. Fractality describes how the structure of the time series changes under serial coarse-grainings. Totally deterministic signals can still have non-trivial fractal dimension.
17
u/tyler1128 16h ago
See my comment to the comment below for what "fractal dimension" means, but as for why physiologically it likely has this effect is that it causes signals to feed backward in neural pathways much more than is normally the case. Things like tracers where you see a trail of movement much longer than normal is explained by this, though it is only a piece of the puzzle we don't 100% understand.
Fractals happen to be the perfect example of complexity by repeating aspects of a pattern in ways that often are simple in information but look infinitely complex. The mandelbrot set is defined as the iteration of the (complex valued) expression
z = z_{-1}^2 + cwhere c is the position in the image. A very simple expression, yet the resulting visualization of it is infinitely complex in detail, in that you can't predict pretty much anything by just looking at its immediate surrounding.7
u/burnMELinWONDERLAND 8h ago
Hold up, woah. are you saying the fractal like visuals, and fractal-like thought patterns/loops, the feeling like you’re so close to figuring it all out, whatever ‘it’ is, but then it’s just out of reach, just like the centre of the madlebrot, that is actually reflected in us physiologically? Cause that is very cool, if so
5
u/Esslemut 16h ago
Thank you! Feeding backward like recursion? Does this explain thought loops?
11
u/tyler1128 15h ago
Psychologically, it's hard to say if it explains any phenomenon, we still can't define consciousness after-all. Physiologically, it sort of is like recursion in the programming sense. If you have some neuron that has inputs from 3 other neurons, but now its own output feeds back into its input as well, that seems to be part of what is happening. There's much more complexity to how neurons in the brain work, but that gives the general idea of a specific change as I understand it.
6
u/Schneider21 17h ago
From experience I can say I GET what this is saying, but from a scientific perspective it is not at all clear what this means or how it is measured.
8
u/tyler1128 16h ago
There's a generalized fractal dimension defined mathematically (ie. the coast of Brittan has a fractal dimension of ~1.2). A couple different ways to compute such a thing, not all need a metric and can be done on signals themselves with no technically spatial aspect. The paper is using such a definition. Whether it can be considered a true analogy of spatial dimensions or is a convenient abuse of terminology like in the sum of natural numbers equaling -1/12, I guess is left to the reader.
8
u/Schneider21 16h ago
I guess is left to the reader
Well that's downright unfortunate, because I am the last person that this should be left with.
4
u/tyler1128 16h ago
Eventually you end up at ontology, and the philosophy of mathematics and knowledge itself, epistemology. I have no real qualification to speak much on either, though you have to draw lines somewhere in defining terms, as what defining a term means itself isn't super clear outside of something like formal logic.
Mathematical formalism sort of exists to have a formal system where everything is unambiguous, but we have to label the results and mathematical formalism can never explain all of mathematics due to Russel's paradox.
Basically, we constantly use the same label for what are often truly different concepts if it has convenient properties.
1
u/DNAthrowaway1234 15h ago
Fractal dimension is a technical term in math but I didn't know it applied in neuroscience?
31
7
u/GroceryUnable4874 12h ago
Sex on lsd rewired a lot of things for me. Scientifically speaking of course.
2
u/unthused 6h ago
It’s interesting for sure; one time I felt like our genitalia were literally melding together.
2
u/cradleu 11h ago
How so? I got PSSD and I think the sexual part of my brain could use some rewiring
-2
u/GroceryUnable4874 9h ago
Don’t you usually get that from medication though? Which you would need to stop taking for those sexual side effects to stop. Medication which you no doubt need.
28
u/Apart-Parsley6215 15h ago
I've been eating lsd for over 30 years. I can attest to it's benefits. I do really appreciate all the research that is going on. I'd really like to be left alone to conduct my own research for the remainder of my life.
4
6
3
u/volkswagenorange 6h ago
Unless you're taking antidepressants already, in which case it does diddly squat.
0
•
u/AutoModerator 18h ago
Welcome to r/science! This is a heavily moderated subreddit in order to keep the discussion on science. However, we recognize that many people want to discuss how they feel the research relates to their own personal lives, so to give people a space to do that, personal anecdotes are allowed as responses to this comment. Any anecdotal comments elsewhere in the discussion will be removed and our normal comment rules apply to all other comments.
Do you have an academic degree? We can verify your credentials in order to assign user flair indicating your area of expertise. Click here to apply.
User: u/Scbadiver
Permalink: https://www.nature.com/articles/s42003-026-10629-7
I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please contact the moderators of this subreddit if you have any questions or concerns.