This is your brain on LSD

Photo courtesy of The Guardian,

April 11, 2016

 

Here’s a neuroriddle:

When does connected also mean disconnected?
When it refers to a brain dosed with LSD.

Reports of the first study using brain neuroimaging of a human on lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) went viral in the online psychedelic community this month. The research team, led by Robin L. Carhart-Harris along with his associates, published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Someone who takes LSD, psilocybin (or mescaline, an oldie now coming back in fashion) typically sees hallucinations, and also experiences the ego-melting sense of being intimately connected with an object or person or even the entire universe.

Using three complementary neuroimaging techniques, the study revealed changes in brain activity matching these characteristic psychological effects of LSD. For example, increased cerebral blood flow in one area pointed to greater visual processing, “thereby defining its hallucinatory quality,” according to the report.

But neuroimaging of blood flow and electrical activity showed decreased connectivity between two other areas. These areas of the brain are associated with “ego dissolution” and “altered meaning.” In an everyday state of mind, these areas (called the parahippocampus and retrosplenial cortex) are important for maintaining a sense of self or ego.

The researchers expect these results to “contribute important new insights into the characteristic hallucinatory and consciousness-altering properties of psychedelics that inform on how they can model certain pathological states and potentially treat others.”

In other words, such hard science results will lead to further studies, which in turn could loosen restrictions on supervised medical – and here I am speculating – possibly spiritual applications, even studies in creativity. It is not impossible that in the far future this might lead to safe dosage, and content secure, recreational use.

So this study’s implications are more nuanced than the digital image showing a riot of connectivity might at first suggest. Yes, the fMRI shows a graphic representation of a brain on LSD, and compared to the brain on a placebo, the one on LSD “lights up” while the other seems stodgy and dull. That stodgy brain enables someone to keep it together and function in their everyday lives.

The idea that the gatekeeper part of the brain is unplugged under sway of LSD is a long-standing theory of how psychedelics work, a theory put forth by author Aldous Huxley, who attributed the idea to French philosopher Henri Bergson. (I talk about this in my book Aldous Huxley’s Hands: His Quest for Perception and the Origin and Return of Psychedelic Science).

Such a theory might explain the therapeutic potential of psychedelics when taken under professional guidance (that is, versus dosing on one’s own). As clinical studies are showing, this can happen when an individual loosens the grip of recurring and damaging patterns – the kind imprinted in addiction, alcoholism, depression, and, perhaps most dramatically, in post-traumatic stress disorder or PTSD. For example, the trauma of war or sexual abuse becomes imprinted on who we are, and it takes a kind of opening up to make a psychedelic-assisted therapy patient receptive so those impressions and patterns can eventually be distinguished from the self and, hopefully, fade away.

It may be curious to know about the cranial seat of hallucinations, but far more important is the idea that two areas of the brain give rise to our identity. Enter the bad-pattern-breaking Ninja power of psychedelics. The explanation of how this takes place is tied to our identity – how the brain cobbles together the idea of “me.”

For more, read the journal article, Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging