CWL

Do Psychedelics Expand the Mind by Reducing Brain Activity?

What would you see if you could look inside a hallucinating brain?

New evidence suggests drugs like LSD open the doors of perception by inhibiting parts of the brain

Despite decades of scientific investigation, we still lack a clear understanding of how hallucinogenic drugs such as LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide), mescaline, and psilocybin (the main active ingredient in magic mushrooms) work in the brain.

Modern science has demonstrated that hallucinogens activate receptors for serotonin, one of the brain’s key chemical messengers. Specifically, of the 15 different serotonin receptors, the 2A subtype (5-HT2A), seems to be the one that produces profound alterations of thought and perception. It is uncertain, however, why activation of the 5-HT2A receptor by hallucinogens produces psychedelic effects, but many scientists believe that the effects are linked to increases in brain activity.

Although it is not known why this activation would lead to profound alterations of consciousness, one speculation is that an increase in the spontaneous firing of certain types of brain cells leads to altered sensory and perceptual processing, uncontrolled memory retrieval, and the projection of mental “noise” into the mind’s eye.

The English author Aldous Huxley believed that the brain acts as a “reducing valve” that constrains conscious awareness, with mescaline and other hallucinogens inducing psychedelic effects by inhibiting this filtering mechanism. Huxley based this explanation entirely on his personal experiences with mescaline, which was given to him by Humphrey Osmond, the psychiatrist who coined the term psychedelic. Even though Huxley proposed this idea in 1954, decades before the advent of modern brain science, it turns out that he may have been correct. Although the prevailing view has been that hallucinogens work by activating the brain, rather than by inhibiting it as Huxley proposed, the results of a recent imaging study are challenging these conventional explanations.

The study in question was conducted by Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris in conjunction with Professor David Nutt, a psychiatrist who was formerly a scientific advisor to the UK government on drugs policy. Drs. Carhart-Harris, Nutt, and colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to study the effects of psilocybin on brain activity in 30 experienced hallucinogen users. In this study, intravenous administration of 2 mg of psilocybin induced a moderately intense psychedelic state that was associated with reductions of neuronal activity in brain regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).

The mPFC and ACC are highly interconnected with other brain regions and are believed to be involved in functions such as emotional regulation, cognitive processing, and introspection. Based on their findings, the authors of the study concluded that hallucinogens reduce activity in specific “hub” regions of the brain, potentially diminishing their ability to coordinate activity in downstream brain regions. In effect, psilocybin appears to inhibit brain regions that are responsible for constraining consciousness within the narrow boundaries of the normal waking state, an interpretation that is remarkably similar to what Huxley proposed over half a century ago.

The Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom

I don’t know much of it but the studies I have read sourced after peer reviewed science journals (Like this one) mostly indicate that it is actually good for your mind and the effects (not the high or the tripping) last up to about a year. It is also proven to reduce PTSS (Post traumatic stress syndrome).

It has gotten bad rep because as anything that makes one feel good, the government and authorities either make it illegal or only allow big pharma to handle it. If they can’t do the latter then illegal it is(much like marijuana, because both are easily grown without much need for a pharmacist). It also got bad rep because the media blew this out proportion (like marijuana) in order to skew people into trying it. The last thing a crooked government needs is a conscious crowd.

Here’s an excerpt I found interesting in Wired/Science’s 2008 article about Psilocybin mushrooms:

The positive psychological effects of psilocybin — the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms — last for more than a year, say scientists.

Fourteen months after taking psilocybin pills administered by Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Roland Griffiths, more than half of 36 volunteers said the experience was among the most significant of their lives.

The results, published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, demonstrate the persistence of effects first reported by Griffiths in a landmark 2006 experiment. That study, published in Psychopharmacology, was the first in 40 years to test a hallucinogen on people in a clinical setting in the United States.

Formerly the focus of academic and government inquiry, hallucinogens were abandoned by researchers in the aftermath of the Sixties, when rampant recreational abuse frightened authorities and the drugs became culturally intertwined with chemical excess. But with a small but growing number of researchers now studying hallucinogens, the once-promising field is alive again.

“These drugs are no longer being confined to rats in test tubes,” said David Nichols, a Purdue University pharmacologist who was not involved in the study. “What we’re looking at is a largely unexplored technology for brain science — it was discovered in the 1940s, set the psychiatry world ablaze in the 1950s, and was aborted by widespread recreational abuse, the reaction of the media and its confluence with the Vietnam war.”

The Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom

I don’t know much of it but the studies I have read sourced after peer reviewed science journals (Like this one) mostly indicate that it is actually good for your mind and the effects (not the high or the tripping) last up to about a year. It is also proven to reduce PTSS (Post traumatic stress syndrome).

It has gotten bad rep because as anything that makes one feel good, the government and authorities either make it illegal or only allow big pharma to handle it. If they can’t do the latter then illegal it is(much like marijuana, because both are easily grown without much need for a pharmacist). It also got bad rep because the media blew this out proportion (like marijuana) in order to skew people into trying it. The last thing a crooked government needs is a conscious crowd.

Here’s an excerpt I found interesting in Wired/Science’s 2008 article about Psilocybin mushrooms:

The positive psychological effects of psilocybin — the active ingredient in hallucinogenic mushrooms — last for more than a year, say scientists.

Fourteen months after taking psilocybin pills administered by Johns Hopkins neuroscientist Roland Griffiths, more than half of 36 volunteers said the experience was among the most significant of their lives.

The results, published today in the Journal of Psychopharmacology, demonstrate the persistence of effects first reported by Griffiths in a landmark 2006 experiment. That study, published in Psychopharmacology, was the first in 40 years to test a hallucinogen on people in a clinical setting in the United States.

Formerly the focus of academic and government inquiry, hallucinogens were abandoned by researchers in the aftermath of the Sixties, when rampant recreational abuse frightened authorities and the drugs became culturally intertwined with chemical excess. But with a small but growing number of researchers now studying hallucinogens, the once-promising field is alive again.

“These drugs are no longer being confined to rats in test tubes,” said David Nichols, a Purdue University pharmacologist who was not involved in the study. “What we’re looking at is a largely unexplored technology for brain science — it was discovered in the 1940s, set the psychiatry world ablaze in the 1950s, and was aborted by widespread recreational abuse, the reaction of the media and its confluence with the Vietnam war.”