Presented By: Michigan Psychedelic Center
Psychedelics and Large-Scale Brain Networks
This talk is part of the Michigan Psychedelic Center's 2026 Seminar Series: Psychedelics — From Cells to Society. Learn more about the series at https://michiganpsychedelic.med.umich.edu/education-events/.
About the Talk:
Psychedelic compounds profoundly alter conscious experience, producing changes in perception, cognition, and self-awareness while typically preserving wakefulness. In recent years, human neuroimaging studies have revealed that these experiential effects are accompanied by robust alterations in large-scale brain network organization. However, a unifying framework for understanding how psychedelic drugs reshape brain-wide communication remains an open challenge.
In this talk, Rui Dai, PhD, will present converging evidence from functional MRI studies across classical and non-classical psychedelics, as well as comparisons with sleep and anesthesia, to show that psychedelic states are characterized by increased integration across large-scale brain networks alongside heightened interaction complexity. These effects are most prominent along cortical hierarchies spanning unimodal sensory regions to transmodal association networks, suggesting a systematic reconfiguration of global information flow rather than isolated regional changes.
By contrasting psychedelic states with unconscious or diminished-consciousness states, this work highlights large-scale network integration as a core neural feature supporting conscious experience. Together, these findings position psychedelics as powerful tools for probing fundamental principles of brain-wide communication and the neural basis of consciousness.
About the Presenter:
Rui Dai, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Her research uses human noninvasive neuroimaging to investigate the neural basis of consciousness across spatial scales, with earlier work focusing on the neural representation of conscious content during task performance and more recent work examining how local and large-scale brain dynamics reconfigure across altered states of consciousness, including psychedelic, sleep, and anesthetic states.
About the Talk:
Psychedelic compounds profoundly alter conscious experience, producing changes in perception, cognition, and self-awareness while typically preserving wakefulness. In recent years, human neuroimaging studies have revealed that these experiential effects are accompanied by robust alterations in large-scale brain network organization. However, a unifying framework for understanding how psychedelic drugs reshape brain-wide communication remains an open challenge.
In this talk, Rui Dai, PhD, will present converging evidence from functional MRI studies across classical and non-classical psychedelics, as well as comparisons with sleep and anesthesia, to show that psychedelic states are characterized by increased integration across large-scale brain networks alongside heightened interaction complexity. These effects are most prominent along cortical hierarchies spanning unimodal sensory regions to transmodal association networks, suggesting a systematic reconfiguration of global information flow rather than isolated regional changes.
By contrasting psychedelic states with unconscious or diminished-consciousness states, this work highlights large-scale network integration as a core neural feature supporting conscious experience. Together, these findings position psychedelics as powerful tools for probing fundamental principles of brain-wide communication and the neural basis of consciousness.
About the Presenter:
Rui Dai, PhD, is a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Anesthesiology at the University of Michigan Medical School. Her research uses human noninvasive neuroimaging to investigate the neural basis of consciousness across spatial scales, with earlier work focusing on the neural representation of conscious content during task performance and more recent work examining how local and large-scale brain dynamics reconfigure across altered states of consciousness, including psychedelic, sleep, and anesthetic states.
Related Links
Explore Similar Events
-
Loading Similar Events...
