Increased Entropic Brain Dynamics during DeepDream-Induced Altered Perceptual Phenomenology.

Antonino Greco,Giuseppe Gallitto,Marco D'Alessandro,Clara Rastelli

doi:10.3390/e23070839

Abstract

In recent years, the use of psychedelic drugs to study brain dynamics has flourished due to the unique opportunity they offer to investigate the neural mechanisms of conscious perception. Unfortunately, there are many difficulties to conduct experiments on pharmacologically-induced hallucinations, especially regarding ethical and legal issues. In addition, it is difficult to isolate the neural effects of psychedelic states from other physiological effects elicited by the drug ingestion. Here, we used the DeepDream algorithm to create visual stimuli that mimic the perception of hallucinatory states. Participants were first exposed to a regular video, followed by its modified version, while recording electroencephalography (EEG). Results showed that the frontal region’s activity was characterized by a higher entropy and lower complexity during the modified video, with respect to the regular one, at different time scales. Moreover, we found an increased undirected connectivity and a greater level of entropy in functional connectivity networks elicited by the modified video. These findings suggest that DeepDream and psychedelic drugs induced similar altered brain patterns and demonstrate the potential of adopting this method to study altered perceptual phenomenology in neuroimaging research.

Highlights

Published: 30 June 2021In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the use of psychedelics drugs (e.g., LSD, psilocybin) to understand the neural dynamics of conscious perception, in the neuroscientific community
multiscale permutation entropy (MPE) analysis revealed the same pattern of multiscale weighted permutation entropy (MWPE), with higher entropy over frontal regions along the time scale range 6–16 in DeepDream condition (DD) with respect to original condition (OR) (Figure S1A–C; p = 0.033, dmean = 0.59, dmax = 0.63), the effect size was reduced with respect to the MWPE analysis
We investigated the brain dynamics related to artificially-induced altered perception

Summary

Introduction

Published: 30 June 2021In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the use of psychedelics drugs (e.g., LSD, psilocybin) to understand the neural dynamics of conscious perception, in the neuroscientific community. Roseman et al [5] and Barnett et al [13] reported an increased functional connectivity triggered by the ingestion of psychedelic drugs that could in principle lead to an increase in the entropy of the brain dynamics. These findings led to the recent conceptualization of the entropic brain hypothesis [3], which explains the altered states of consciousness induced by psychedelics in terms of higher entropy of the brain’s activity and functional connectivity. The use of psychedelic substances in scientific investigations is Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations

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