mind-bending facts about magic mushrooms

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There are two basic types, but about 200 different species.

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Humans and magic mushrooms go back millennia.

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"[A] genuine mushroom cult in Mesoamerican cultures seems to have existed," biologist Harri Nyberg wrote in a 1992 study, "and its beginnings can be traced to remote antiquity." This is partly due to artwork like the "remarkable 'mushroom stones' of the ancient Mayas and mural frescoes found in central Mexico," Nyberg noted, some of which date back more than 2,000 years. The hallucinogenic fungus Psilocybe mexicana, which is native to Central America, was previously known by the Aztec word teonanacatl — often translated as "divine mushroom."

In the Sahara desert, rock art from 7,000 to 9,000 years ago may feature even earlier portrayals of psychedelic fungi. The scenes include human dancers holding mushroom-like objects, in some cases with two parallel lines connecting the objects to the dancers' heads. This is not definitive evidence, but some researchers see it as the earliest hints of people using mind-altering mushrooms.

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Psilocybin seems to briefly reorganize the brain.

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Psilocybin binds to a receptor in the brain for serotonin, and that's thought to cause many of its sensory distortions. Yet along with hallucinations and mood changes, people who take psilocybin often describe an abstract, dreamlike sense of "expanded consciousness." And in recent years, technology like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) has shed light on what this looks like inside the brain.

In a 2014 study, for example, researchers scanned the brains of 15 volunteers after giving them psilocybin. Activity spiked in the brain network linked to emotional thinking, with simultaneous activity in different areas like the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex. (This pattern resembles fMRI scans of people who are dreaming, the researchers noted.) At the same time, activity became less organized in the brain network linked with high-level thinking and the sense of self.

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Psilocybin may cause lasting personality change.

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While brain activity generally returns to normal after psilocybin wears off, the chemical has been shown to have longer-term effects, too. In a 2011 study, researchers measured its effect on five domains of personality — neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness and conscientiousness — and found "significant increases in Openness following a high-dose psilocybin session."

Openness is a psychological term for someone's attitude toward new experiences, and is associated with traits like imagination, creativity and aesthetic appreciation. Not only did openness generally rise during a psilocybin session, but in nearly 60 percent of study participants, it "remained significantly higher than baseline more than 1 year after the session," the researchers wrote.

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