In 2016, the Beckley/Imperial Psychedelic Research Programme released the world’s first images of the human brain under the influence of lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD, at the Royal Academy in London, revealing some of the key mechanisms behind its profound consciousness-altering effects. 

Now, six years after those landmark findings, the Foundation has announced the formation of a new collaboration with King‘s College London, which will investigate the brain changes that occur during the so-called ‘mystical’ experience – a profound sense of connection or unity that can occur following ingestion of high doses of psychedelic compounds as well as during religious experiences, meditation, and other practices. Importantly, this experience has been shown to be positively associated with the therapeutic benefits brought about by psychedelic-assisted therapy. In the first clinical study of psilocybin-assisted therapy for treatment-resistant depression, carried out in collaboration between the Beckley Foundation and Imperial College London, it was found that patients who underwent the most profound mystical experiences also demonstrated the greatest subsequent improvement in their depression scores. As a result, a better understanding of the nature of this experience is essential in order to fully understand the mechanism of action underlying psychedelic therapies.

Professor Rob Leech

Robert Leech is a professor in the Department of Neuroimaging at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience at King’s College London. His research has focused on developing and applying innovative neuroimaging and behavioural methodologies to better understand the relationship between brain and behaviour. His work is inherently multidisciplinary, integrating neuroscience and psychology with computer science, and collaborating with cognitive psychologists, computer scientists, statisticians, bioengineers, physicists, and neuropharmacologists. He played an essential role in the production of the ground-breaking results on the neuroimaging studies of the Beckley/ Imperial Psychedelic Research Programme.

Professor Karl Friston

Karl John Friston FRS, FMedSci, FRSB, is a British neuroscientist at University College London and the world’s leading authority on brain imaging. He pioneered and developed the single most powerful technique for analysing the results of brain imaging studies to unravel the patterns of cortical activity and the relationship of different cortical areas to one another. Currently, over 90% of papers published in brain imaging use his method (SPM or Statistical Parametric Mapping). He has also had a profound influence on numerous fields with his ‘Free Energy Principle’, a theoretical framework for understanding the behaviour of sentient minds and other systems. No other thinker has had such a major influence as Friston on the development of human brain studies in the past 25 years.