So how does it work? Once swallowed, psilocybin converts to psilocin, which latches onto a serotonin receptor that sits thickly across the cortex and, in effect, turns down a brain circuit called the default-mode network. Think of that network as the brain’s self-absorbed narrator, the running inner monologue that, in depression, gets stuck on one bleak loop and will not switch off. Quiet the narrator and the experience can be strange and overwhelming. People describe the edges of the self softening, emotions arriving with unusual force, old griefs surfacing to be looked at squarely, a sense of connection to other people and the world that the illness had shut down. Inside the skull, regions that normally keep to themselves start comparing notes, and a single dose appears to set off a burst of rewiring that outlasts the drug, the kind no daily pill produces
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