New paper – Validating and Creating a Short-Form of the Persisting Effects Questionnaire: A Measure of Positive and Negative Outcomes from Psychedelic Experiences The Persisting Effects Questionnaire (PEQ) is a measure of self-reported positive and negative effects from psychedelic experiences. While commonly used, the PEQ has never been formally validated, and is time-intensive and complex for both participants and researchers. Using a multi-study approach, CPCR researchers created and validated the Persisting Effects Questionnaire – Short Form (PEQ-SF), a scale that is more easily understood and reduces burden for study teams and participants. Read the paper here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.…

An extraordinary @Nature paper has just landed from the lab of @Sergiu_P_Pasca at @Stanford - led by Konstantin Kaganovsky. They have found a way to create "xenocortical mice" which have ~92% of their cortex occupied by a cortical organoid derived from human stem cells. This human-derived cortical graft integrates deeply with the host nervous system, supporting organised neural activity and behaviour. This study is a milestone in synthetic biology and chimera research. It has the potential to generate multiple medical breakthroughs by providing an enhanced biological model of human brain tissue that allows behavioural as well as neural and genetic assays. The Stanford team have been exceptionally thorough and proactive in addressing ethical concerns that comes from this frontier work. But their pioneering work nonetheless raises many open questions: are the xenocortical mice conscious? Do they have any human-like properties of consciousness or cognition? @NitaFarahany and I will be addressing some of these questions in a forthcoming commentary - where we'll also offer an ethically-informed roadmap to guide this important research as it progresses. In this context, "pacing the frontier" really does make sense 😉 Read the Stanford @nature paper here, and buckle up. It's wild. nature.com/articles/s41586-0…

WAH-PAH! This morning, boogie boarder Ethan explained the high surf conditions on the OC coast to @JSarkissian.

New dataset out in Data in Brief 🧠 We're releasing an open, test-retest neuroimaging dataset built for directly comparing single-echo vs. multi-echo fMRI, head-to-head, in the same people. 🔗 sciencedirect.com/science/ar…

Brain synergy is a balance between neurons transmitting signals between each other and neurons not communicating at all; a balance of integration and segregation. What's fascinating about human brain is that evolutionary, it only grew in places that had the most synergy, and those places are not random. Meaning, you can't just enlarge a chimp's brain and get a human brain. This synergy might be key to deciphering both consciousness and cognition.

Once-charming, US mountain escape has transformed into 'nasty, crazy, and scary' city trib.al/jpSrLJ6

🍄 Our second installment of sypres.io, a living systematic review and meta-analysis on MDMA for PTSD is now live on medRxiv. Here's what we found and how we built upon our open science infrastructure to support it 🧵 medrxiv.org/content/10.64898…