The 3 big things in Spirit Tech this week:

A seven-day meditation retreat reproduced psilocybin's signature brain connectivity and mystical experiences, no drug required, in a peer-reviewed UC San Diego study.

The retreat was one of Joe Dispenza's week-long programs; a UC San Diego team put the twenty participants through fMRI and blood work across roughly 33 hours of guided meditation. Their scores on a standard mystical-experience scale rose from 2.37 to 3.02, and brain-network connectivity shifted in the same direction seen in psychedelic sessions. The body changed too: blood drawn after the retreat, dripped onto lab-grown neurons, made them sprout more connections, while the body's own opioids climbed and metabolism and immune signaling moved. Senior author Hemal Patel called it 'fundamentally changing how the brain engages with reality and quantifying these changes biologically.' The weight of the finding is in the drug-free part: these are the connectivity patterns and mystical experiences psilocybin usually produces, reached through meditation alone. What the study cannot yet isolate is which parts of the retreat did the work, whether the effects last, or whether repeating them deepens the change, the questions the team says it will tackle next. It also points to a model for other centers: retreat centers building their own evidence base and credibility by funding studies, sourcing participants and co-writing papers, though an operator studying itself is a promising lead, not proof, until independent, controlled trials replicate it.

Consciousness science's strangest claim, that awareness might persist in a brain with every neuron silent, may finally be testable, a new paper argues.

Integrated Information Theory, a leading account of consciousness, rests on a counterintuitive idea: even neurons that aren't firing still shape what you experience. Pushed to its limit, the theory says consciousness could in principle survive in a brain gone electrically silent, a claim critics had dismissed as impossible to test. Ponce de Leon and Yoshimi, writing in Neuroscience of Consciousness, counter with an experiment aimed at the core of the idea: find neurons that are silent, wired into the brain but not currently firing, remove them, and see whether the person's experience changes. Common sense says taking out a neuron that was not firing anyway should change nothing; the theory says it should still shift what the person feels, because the connection itself counted, and that gap is measurable. That turns a philosophical argument into a test with a real answer: either consciousness is just the brain's live firing, the activity a scanner or headset already picks up, or it also depends on how the brain is wired and what it could do, the silent parts included. For a field that hopes to read the inner life from the outside, the catch is that listening to the active firing is only half the picture: the silent parts show their hand only when you remove them and watch what shifts, the harder, more invasive kind of experiment. Do enough of these experiments and we may generate better models of how brain structure, activity and silence together give rise to conscious experience.

Compass Pathways will complete its FDA psilocybin-therapy submission this quarter, backed by two positive Phase 3 trials and $433 million in cash.

Compass Pathways told investors it should finish its psilocybin submission in Q4 and launch in the first half of 2027. Its two Phase 3 trials in treatment-resistant depression, with more than 1,000 patients, showed benefit within a day that held for about six months. The harder numbers sit underneath: by week six, just 39% of patients in one trial and 25% in the other had a meaningful drop in their depression scores, and the much-quoted '90% prescriber intent' is only a company survey of how many psychiatrists say they would prescribe it, a statement of interest, not orders. The spending outruns the market: a $162.6 million half-year loss against $433 million in cash, with approval still gated on the DEA review a White House order set in motion. Psyence Biomedical, a competitor, is making the opposite bet, taking a stake in the licensed manufacturer PsyLabs to produce pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin, ibogaine, DMT, and mescaline rather than seek an approval of its own. The contrast exposes the industry's basic puzzle: no one can patent psilocybin, a molecule humanity has used for thousands of years, so the value has to be built on something next to the drug rather than the drug itself. Compass is betting on a specific synthetic, crystalline form of it and the FDA approval to sell that as a branded medicine; Psyence is betting on owning the compliant manufacturing every developer will need, which pays off even if any single drug fails. Which moat will win?

Top companies

• Ritual: Wellbeing platform that offers live, interactive group sessions led by experts in science, faith, and culture, covering meditation, breathwork, reflection and more.

Explore our Spirit Tech Organizations directory, a living map of 450+ orgs we track and update weekly.

Top jobs

• Senior Product Manager @ Ingenio: Drive growth on Keen, the flagship of Ingenio's 20+ spiritual and emotional-wellness marketplaces spanning astrology, psychic advice, and life guidance. Hybrid (SF / Fairfax / Indianapolis) · $175k–$200k.
• Postdoctoral Clinical Research Scientist @ Slingshot AI: Design the clinical studies that build the evidence base for Ash, "the first AI designed for mental health." New York (hybrid).
• Project Manager, Strategic Projects @ John Templeton Foundation: Coordinate cross-functional philanthropic Ventures, reporting to the President of a foundation funding big questions on science, spirituality, and human flourishing. Full-time.

Browse the Spirit Tech jobs board for more roles, or to post one at your organization.