‘Magic mushrooms’ achieve their psychedelic effects by temporarily scrambling a brain network involved in introspective thinking like daydreaming and remembering, a new study reports.

Brain scans of people who took psilocybin — the psychedelic found in ‘shrooms — revealed that the substance causes profound and widespread temporary changes to the brain’s default mode network.

These findings, published in Nature, provide an explanation for psilocybin’s mind-bending effects and could lay the groundwork for better understanding how the drug might be used to treat psychiatric disorders, researchers said.

“There’s a massive effect initially, and when it’s gone, a pinpoint effect remains,” said study co-author and neurologist Associate Professor Nico Dosenbach from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri.