Psilocybin enhances insightfulness in meditation: a perspective on the global topology of brain imaging during meditation

Introduction

Berit and colleagues situate their work at the intersection of two rapidly expanding literatures: meditation neuroscience and psychedelic research. Earlier studies have documented overlapping phenomenology and some shared neurophysiological signatures between meditation and classical serotonergic psychedelics (e.g. changes in self-consciousness, reduced default mode network activity, altered functional connectivity and increased markers of plasticity). However, most prior work has used conventional measures such as functional connectivity, resting‑state networks, signal variability and entropy. The authors identify a gap: more holistic, geometry‑aware approaches that capture the global spatiotemporal organisation of whole‑brain activity during different meditation styles and under psychedelic influence have not been widely applied to these states. This study applies a topological data analysis (TDA) method based on the Mapper algorithm to fMRI collected before and after a five‑day psilocybin‑assisted meditation retreat in experienced meditators. The authors aim to characterise the ‘‘topological landscape’’ of meditative brain states (focused attention, open monitoring, resting state), test whether psilocybin modulates that landscape, and relate topological descriptors (for example optimal transport distances and graph centrality measures) to subjective reports from an altered‑states questionnaire. They hypothesise that psilocybin will alter the organisation of meditative brain states (consistent with increased informational richness) and that topological measures will relate to experiential dimensions such as meta‑awareness, insightfulness and positive derealization.