Psychedelics align brain activity with context
- Devon Stoliker
- Leonardo Novelli
- Moein Khajehnejad
- Mana Biabani
- Matthew D. Greaves
- Tamrin Barta
- Martin Williams
- Sidhant Chopra
- Olivier Bazin
- Otto Simonsson
- Richard Chambers
- Frederick S. Barrett
- Gustavo Deco
- Katrin H. Preller
- Robin L. Carhart-Harris
- Anil K. Seth
- Suresh Sundram
- Gary F. Egan
- Adeel Razi
2026-08-19
Psychedelics can profoundly alter consciousness by reorganizing brain connectivity 1,2 , producing acute experiences that shape lasting psychological change 3,4 . Psychedelic dynamics are commonly described as desynchronized or entropically disordered 5,6 , yet the brain organization underlying self-dissolving and boundary-dissolving experiences that participants often report 7 , and how context shapes that organization 8 , remain unresolved. To address this, we acquired the largest single-site psychedelic neuroimaging dataset to date. Sixty-two adults underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and electroencephalography (EEG) during rest and naturalistic stimuli (meditation, music and movie), before and on the day of psilocybin administration (fMRI ~ 80 min post-dose; EEG ~ 150 min post-dose). Half ranked the experience among the most meaningful of their lives 7 . Here, using machine learning to represent the brain dynamics of each individual as low-dimensional trajectories, we show that psilocybin reorganizes brain activity into structured, context-sensitive patterns that co-vary with the quality of subjective experience, revealing a latent order missed by time-averaged measures. Networks that ordinarily segregate internal and external processing integrated, producing cohesive context-aligned trajectories in participants reporting the felt experience of being continuous with, rather than separate from, the environment, a state we refer to as embeddedness. The strength of this context alignment scaled with both the depth of self-dissolving and boundary-dissolving experience and the next-day mindset change. Our findings recast apparent disorder as latent organization aligned with context, linking neurobiology to subjective experience and behavioural change.