The 3 big things in Spirit Tech this week:

An MIT review argues that consciousness depends less on which receptors a drug hits than on whether the brain's waves stay organized.

The argument starts with anesthesia, the cleanest case we have of consciousness switching off. The drugs that do it work in completely different ways, on different receptors and different cells, and they all end in the same place. Brain waves, the rhythms of electrical activity that sweep across patches of cortex a few millimeters to a few centimeters wide and that an EEG headset reads, slow down and fall out of step with each other. The connections between individual neurons are left untouched. What breaks is the coordination between them, and the person is gone.

Earl Miller and colleagues at MIT's Picower Institute build a theory on that observation, published as a review in the Journal of Neuroscience. Connections store what you know. Waves decide what is live right now, and the slowest of them travel across wide stretches of cortex, working like traffic control over the faster, more detailed activity underneath. Consciousness, on this account, is what happens when those traveling patterns pull the whole cortex into a single coordinated state, rather than a set of regions each running its own program. The paper brings no new data to a field that already holds more theories of consciousness than experiments to decide between them. What it may bring is a different focal point for builders of measurement tools. Not how much alpha brain waves were produced in the last minute, but whether the cortex is holding together as one system, across regions and over time.

Under psilocybin it became easier, not harder, to tell what a person was doing from their brain activity alone, and the easier it was, the deeper the experience they reported.

For a decade the standard account of a psychedelic brain has been disorder. Connectivity loosens, rhythms fall out of sync, and the experience is described as a journey inward, which is why the protocol is a blindfold, a playlist and eyes closed. Monash University's Turner Institute put that account to a direct test. They scanned 62 participants who had never taken a psychedelic through four conditions - resting, following an audio-guided meditation, listening to music, and watching a film, once at baseline and once on psilocybin. Rather than averaging each scan into a single connectivity map, which is what most studies do, they tracked how activity moved through time, then trained a classifier to work out which of the four the person was in from the brain data alone.

If the plant medicine scrambles the brain, that guess should get harder. Instead it got easier, and it was easiest in those who reported the most profound experiences and the largest shift in outlook the next day. Three of the four conditions ran with eyes closed, so this is not the medicine amplifying what you see. The networks that normally keep inner experience and outside input apart had merged, and what filled that space was whatever held the person's attention. None of it appeared in the time-averaged measures the field has been relying on. The study also tested preparation. Half the group had completed an eight-week mindfulness course beforehand, with no detectable group-level effect, and the authors note that reports of meditation and psychedelics amplifying each other come from experienced practitioners in retreat settings. Whether the gap is the amount of training or the kind is now a real question.

The safety record psilocybin built inside clinical trials has now held up in a public program, three weeks before the FDA opens a hearing on who should be qualified to guide a session.

An OHSU-led team followed 346 participants who booked psilocybin sessions at 24 licensed Oregon service centers, paying hundreds to thousands of dollars for a single session. Only about half arrived with moderate to severe depression, so these are wellness seekers rather than patients, which is who Oregon's non-medical model was built for and what makes this the first real look at psilocybin as the public uses it. A month afterwards, 91.5% said they had benefited and 64.9% ranked the session among the ten most meaningful experiences of their lives. By three months, symptoms of depression, anxiety and PTSD had fallen, though with no control group and no blinding those drops cannot be separated from expectation, from the support around the session, or from people who were improving anyway. Harm was rare. Lead author Todd Korthuis said safety "was very similar to what we've seen with psychedelics in clinical settings", which is what the study set out to test, since nobody knew whether results from tightly controlled trials would survive contact with a public program. More than 20,000 adults have now been through the program since it opened in 2023, none of them needing a prescription or a diagnosis.

This comes as the FDA is set to hold its first public hearing on the therapeutic future of psychedelics on September 14, seeking input on how providers should be trained and credentialed, how patients are kept safe, how access should work, and how real-world outcome data should be standardized. Oregon has a candidate answer to the latter, since the team built a standardized schedule of check-ins and has already carried it into Colorado, allowing state to state outcome comparisons.

Company Spotlights

• Nordic Flow: Nordic Flow is a mindfulness and wellness app offering daily breathwork, meditation, movement, and cold plunging in a single platform.
• Moonbird: Handheld haptic breathing device for stress relief and better sleep.

Explore our Spirit Tech Organizations directory, a living map of 470+ orgs we track and update weekly.

New Jobs This Week

• Marketing Lead, Europe @ Thatgamecompany: Build Sky: Children of the Light's EMEA marketing from scratch - regional strategy, agency partners, and campaigns across social, creators, events, and paid media. Remote (Europe) · $80k - $151k .
• Head of Conversion @ Gaia: Optimize the funnel from first engagement to paid membership - rapid experiments across product, marketing, data, and tech - for the Nasdaq-listed conscious-living streaming platform (8,000+ titles). Louisville, CO · $150k – $250k.
• Senior Brand & Marketing Lead @ Nowatch: Own brand and marketing for the awareness wearable that tracks stress and allostatic load with no subscriptions and no addictive-design patterns. Amsterdam (hybrid) · €70k – €110k.

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