The serotonergic psychedelic N,N-dipropyltryptamine alters information-processing dynamics in in vitro cortical neural circuits.

Most of the recent work in psychedelic neuroscience has been done using noninvasive neuroimaging, with data recorded from the brains of adult volunteers under the influence of a variety of drugs. While these data provide holistic insights into the effects of psychedelics on whole-brain dynamics, the effects of psychedelics on the mesoscale dynamics of neuronal circuits remain much less explored. Here, we report the effects of the serotonergic psychedelic N,N-diproptyltryptamine (DPT) on information-processing dynamics in a sample of in vitro organotypic cultures of cortical tissue from postnatal rats. Three hours of spontaneous activity were recorded: an hour of predrug control, an hour of exposure to 10-μM DPT solution, and a final hour of washout, once again under control conditions. We found that DPT reversibly alters information dynamics in multiple ways: First, the DPT condition was associated with a higher entropy of spontaneous firing activity and reduced the amount of time information was stored in individual neurons. Second, DPT also reduced the reversibility of neural activity, increasing the entropy produced and suggesting a drive away from equilibrium. Third, DPT altered the structure of neuronal circuits, decreasing the overall information flow coming into each neuron, but increasing the number of weak connections, creating a dynamic that combines elements of integration and disintegration. Finally, DPT decreased the higher order statistical synergy present in sets of three neurons. Collectively, these results paint a complex picture of how psychedelics regulate information processing in mesoscale neuronal networks in cortical tissue. Implications for existing hypotheses of psychedelic action, such as the entropic brain hypothesis, are discussed.