Psychedelics Volume 1: Issue 4

EDITORIAL

From compulsive behaviors to psychedelic therapeutics: When mice and man speak the same circuit language 1

Julio Licinio and Ma-Li Wong

INNOVATORS & IDEAS: RISING STAR

Erin Mauney: Psychedelics as modulators of the gut-brain interaction 4

Erin E. Mauney

INNOVATORS & IDEAS: RESEARCH LEADER

Claire Foldi: Unravelling the neurobiology of eating disorders to inform effective treatments 7

Claire J. Foldi

PERSPECTIVE

Psychedelics and time: Exploring altered temporal perception and its implications for consciousness, neuroscience, and therapy 11

Pu Jiang, Cong Lin and Xiaohui Wang

THOUGHT LEADERS INVITED REVIEW

Psilocybin's effects on obsessive-compulsive behaviors: A systematic

Dr. Erin E. Mauney serves as Assistant Professor of Pediatrics (Gastroenterology) at Tufts University while maintaining a research appointment at Massachusetts General Hospital. With dual board certification, including obesity medicine, she integrates clinical expertise with innovative research at the intersection of gut-brain disorders and psychedelic medicine. Dr. Mauney's groundbreaking work explores how psilocybin modulates interoception in treatment-resistant IBS, the first study of its kind in gastroenterology. In this Genomic Press Interview, she articulates how early-life trauma becomes somatically encoded and how psychedelic-assisted therapy creates pathways for emotional release and functional improvement. Her patient-centered approach combines neuroimaging, qualitative analysis, and clinical outcomes to develop scalable therapeutic options that challenge the artificial mind-body divide in contemporary medicine. Dr. Mauney's research represents a paradigm shift in understanding how psychedelics may transform treatment for the significant population of patients who remain unresponsive to conventional therapies.

Dr Claire J. Foldi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Physiology at Monash University, where she leads a multidisciplinary research program investigating the brain circuits that drive anorexia nervosa and other eating disorders. Her work bridges preclinical neuroscience with translational relevance, offering critical insight into the biological mechanisms that underlie psychiatric illness. She is a founding member of the executive of the Australian Eating Disorders Research & Translation Centre (AEDRTC). This role requires extensive collaboration and knowledge exchange with clinicians, service providers, and individuals with lived experience. These positions ensure that her research is both scientifically rigorous and socially relevant. With eating disorders affecting millions and remaining among the most fatal yet poorly understood mental illnesses, Dr Foldi's research addresses a pressing gap: how disruptions in brain pathways involved in reward, self-control, and decision-making contribute to the persistence of disordered eating. Her lab uses advanced neural recording and manipulation tools to map these circuits and explore how novel therapeutics, including psychedelics, may modulate them. Widely recognized for her rigorous yet exploratory approach, Dr. Foldi actively integrates techniques and perspectives from adjacent fields to push the boundaries of eating disorders research. In this Genomics Press interview, she reflects on her unexpected path into the field and how early experimental observations, combined with the rising interest in psychedelic medicine, have positioned her as a leading voice in a new generation of research at the intersection of metabolism, neurobiology, and psychiatry.

Psychedelics including psilocybin, dimethyltryptamine, and lysergic acid diethylamide are known to disrupt the normal flow of time perception, for example, producing time dilation, compression, and loss of time. These temporal anomalies provide interesting clues about how the brain processes time, what consciousness is, and what produces the sense of self. This opinion article discusses the neural mechanisms of time perception altered by psychedelics by integrating emerging research findings in cognitive neuroscience and subjective effects. We suggest that the psychedelic-induced time warp can offer a new approach to studying brain correlates of the perception of the passage of time and conscious perception of time, and may have potential therapeutic value in psychiatric disorders in which altered perception of time is core, such as posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety. Through examining these time changes, we discuss the potential of psychedelics in shaping transformative cognitive-affective states and their relevance for clinical applications.

Brain-gut-microbiota interactions in sleep disorders

Zhe Wang,

Tingting Wu,

Juan Li,

Tangsheng Lu,

Yifan Yu,

Zichun Guan,

Guohao Yuan,

Zhaoyan Lv,

Yiming Shan,

Wei Yan,

Xiaoxing Liu,

Michael V. Vitiello,

Qingqing Yin,

Jie Sun, and

Lin Lu

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Table of Contents

From compulsive behaviors to psychedelic therapeutics: When mice and man speak the same circuit language

Introduction: The inability to stop

Erin Mauney: Psychedelics as modulators of the gut-brain interaction

Claire Foldi: Unravelling the neurobiology of eating disorders to inform effective treatments

Psychedelics and time: Exploring altered temporal perception and its implications for consciousness, neuroscience, and therapy

Psilocybin's effects on obsessive-compulsive behaviors: A systematic review of preclinical and clinical evidence

Cover-to-Cover

Table of Contents

Table of Contents

Cover-to-Cover

Brain-gut-microbiota interactions in sleep disorders

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Counting the uncountable: The critical quest to quantify psychedelic medicine's reach

Bernard Lerer: Pre-clinical, translational and clinical research focused on the use of psychedelic drugs and their derivatives to treat psychiatric disorders

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Katarina Leão: Links between the auditory and limbic systems, with a focus on the effects of unconventional novel treatment options, such as psychedelics and cannabis extract