Evan Lewis-Healey

New today in @Nature: your visual cortex contains touch-based body maps. bit.ly/VisualBodyMaps
Your brain transforms what you see into first-person, body-referenced codes: A previously unknown bridge between vision and touch.

A landmark mechanistic study on the visual computational changes under psilocybin. I did my masters internship in Tomas's lab so it's wonderful to see such elegant computational psychedelic neuroscience. Congrats to Marco and co. 🧠🎉🍄

YouTube video by ESI Frankfurt Evan Lewis-Healey, PhD, The psychedelic effects of breathwork on the mind and the brain

Check out my talk from ESI-SyNC on the psychedelic effects of breathwork 🧠🍄👇

ESI-SyNC was fantastic, so do check the rest of the talks out too! 🙏

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOeV...

Check out this cool new study from the lab -- exploring the neural signatures of pure awareness experiences during Transcendental Meditation 🧠

It was a pleasure to present our findings at the Ernst Strungmann Institute in Frankfurt last week - on the psychedelic effects that breathwork can induce 🧠

A genuine joy to speak amongst heavyweights in the field of the neuroscience of altered states of consciousness!

Always a huge amount of work and thought that goes into these papers -- I'm excited to see what ecologically valid paradigms Micah and co. will develop next in the face of these surprising null results!

I think until we start measuring interoception in the wild, close in time to symptoms, we are likely to keep finding this null association. We increasingly think of interoception more as a dynamic, psychophysiological state that is highly subject to contextual manipulation, rather than as a trait.

Ongoing thoughts at rest reflect functional brain organization and behavior Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC)-brain connectivity observed when people rest with no external tasks-predicts individual differences in behavior. Yet, rest is not idle; it involves streams...

New preprint! 🧠

Our mind wanders at rest. By periodically probing ongoing thoughts during resting-state fMRI, we show these thoughts are reflected in brain network dynamics and contribute to pervasive links between functional brain architecture and everyday behavior (1/10).
doi.org/10.1101/2025...

screenshot of the dashboard home page

In partnership with metapsy.org we built an interactive dashboard for exploring the data. Users can:
• Filter studies by characteristics
• Test different analysis parameters
• Test moderators
• Download figures and reports

Dashboard: metapsy.org/sypres/psilo...

SYPRES (Synthesis of Psychedelic Research Studies) logo

🍄 Our new living systematic review and meta-analysis on psilocybin for depression is out. Here's what we found and the open science infrastructure we built to support it 🧪🧵
www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...

I have the pleasure of speaking at ESI-SyNC this year about the neurophenomenology of breathwork and DMT 🧠✨

Do come if you can!

Unfortunately I can't make it, but there in academic spirit at @assc28.bsky.social.

If you're there, do check out our poster on the dose-dependent neurophenomenology of the psychedelic DMT 👇

@trisbek.bsky.social will be there to answer any q's 🧠
P165 Tuesday @12:30-13:30

Hey Maria, thanks for this! I was actually at a workshop with Jeremy and Chris last week! Unfortunately they don't have any funding for postdocs at the moment, but they might do in the future, so will keep my eyes peeled. Funding databases are a good shout though - thanks!

If you know of anything you can get in touch on:

evan (dot) lhealey (at) gmail (dot) com

Thanks in advance for sharing!

I have strong data analysis and coding skills (MATLAB & python), project management skills, and love technical and non-technical writing (evan-lhealey.medium.com).

I would love to stay in the field of psychedelics, but am happy to look at a variety of options, in both academia and industry.

Yesterday I submitted my PhD thesis! 🥂

I'm now awaiting on the viva (17th June) to finalise everything, but am looking for job opportunities following this. If you could share this post far and wide, I'd really appreciate it.

Below is a (very) brief about me.

Our latest paper on DMT phenomenology, led by Pascal Michael, exploring the mis/matches with near-death experiences, showing that while 95% on DMT had at least one NDE feature, many classic NDE features were absent & only a very few had NDE-like trips in any way.

doi.org/10.3389/fpsy...

I was invited to join as Editorial Board Member of a new @elsevierconnect.bsky.social journal

Here's why I #declined an uncompensated role in #AcademicPublishing 🧵🧪🧠📈

Social media use in adolescents with and without mental health conditions - Nature Human Behaviour Using a nationally representative UK sample of adolescents with clinical-level mental health symptoms, this Registered Report examined differences in social media use. The results suggest that adolesc...

After 3 years in the making, our Registered Report is out in @nathumbehav.nature.com!

We analyse nationally representative UK data from 3,340 adolescents (aged 11–19) to examine how social media use differs between those with and without mental health conditions. 🧵

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

How I freed my mind: A quest for meaning and expansion | BPS Michiel van Elk, Associate Professor in Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University, on a journey taking in religion and psychedelics.

How I freed my mind: A quest for meaning and expansion.

Michiel van Elk, Associate Professor in Cognitive Psychology at Leiden University, on a journey taking in religion and psychedelics.

www.bps.org.uk/psychologist...

Our new paper - the first peer-reviewed brain and phenomenological examination of 5-MeO-DMT is out in Neuro of Consciousness.

TLDR: We tested whether ‘the mount Everest’ of psychedelics could induce a complete state of consciousness deconstruction while preserving awareness. 1/n

#neuroskyence

Hey Martha, not to worry - on reflection I would have thought that it might have been due to funny timings with our preprints. You can probably tell that I'm in frustrated thesis writing mode atm 😅 Glad to see it out after all this time and looking forward to seeing much more cool work from you :)

Reposting for later but multi-lab studies are certainly the way forward

Breaking: Johns Hopkins Psychedelic Clergy Study Found to Have Multiple Counts of "Serious Non-Compliance" with Federal Human Subject Protections Unauthorized donor involvement and unauthorized study team members "significantly compromised" human research protection program, per JHU, citing other concerns for participants' rights and welfare.

After blowing the whistle on a psychedelic clergy study over 18 months ago, I recently received this letter from
Johns Hopkins' Office of Human Subjects Research finding multiple counts of "serious non-compliance" with federal human subject protections.

www.psychedeliccandor.org/p/breaking-j...

The 2025 Neuroscience of Pure Awareness Prize has been announced.

The 2025 Computational Phenomenology of Pure Awareness Prize has been announced.

mpe-project.info/the-mpe-proj...

Olaf Blanke and I are pleased to announce the opening of a funded PhD position in cognitive and contemplative neuroscience at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Center entitled "Neurophenomenological Study of Non-Dual Mindfulness Meditation and Its Impact on Self and Agency" Thanks for sharing this ad!

Hey Matt, the positions look very cool! Would you be open to remote applicants? I am based in Brighton and intend to settle here for the foreseeable future.

Thanks in advance!

Psilocybin alters visual contextual computations Psilocybin alters perception and brain dynamics. Contextual computations are ubiquitous in the brain. Here, we investigate the effects of psilocybin using psychophysics, ultra-high field functional MR...

Psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, alters perception and induces hallucinations. In this preprint, we show through visual illusions, fMRI and modeling that psilocybin affects contextual computations, a potentially general mechanism of psychedelics.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

I recently talked for @aliusresearch.org about our neurophenomenological study of the psychedelic DMT.

Check it out below if you're interested in the neuroscience of consciousness and psychedelics!

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2nFk...

Psychedelic-mediated Reversal of General Anesthesia and Restoration of Brain Dynamics in Rat

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...