Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks

As a proof of principle, we apply these tools to compare resting-state functional brain activity in 15 healthy volunteers after intravenous infusion of placebo and psilocybin—the main psychoactive component of magic mushrooms. The results show that the homological structure of the brain's functional patterns undergoes a dramatic change post-psilocybin, characterized by the appearance of many transient structures of low stability and of a small number of persistent ones that are not observed in the case of placebo.

It is here that the importance of the insight given by the homological scaffolds in the persistent homology procedure becomes apparent. A simple reading of this result would be that the effect of psilocybin is to relax the constraints on brain function, ascribing cognition a more flexible quality, but when looking at the edge level, the picture becomes more complex. The analysis of the homological scaffolds reveals the existence of a set of edges that are predominant in terms of their persistence although they are statistically part of the same number of cycles in the two conditions (figure 5). In other words, these functional connections support cycles that are especially stable and are only present in the psychedelic state. This further implies that the brain does not simply become a random system after psilocybin injection, but instead retains some organizational features, albeit different from the normal state, as suggested by the first part of the analysis. Further work is required to identify the exact functional significance of these edges.