MR of brain under LSD and placebo Courtesy: Imperial College London
The brain activity of people undergoing the complex visual hallucinations associated with the psychedelic LSD has been found to resemble the brain activity of infants.
Researchers from the Department of Medicine at Imperial College London, working with the Beckley Foundation, discovered that people who experience dreamlike hallucinations under LSD are not only processing information from the visual cortex of the brain, but also from additional brain areas.
A 75 microgram dose of LSD, or a placebo, was administered to 20 healthy volunteers in a specialist research center who then underwent various brain scanning techniques, including functional MR (fMRI) and magnetocephalography (MEG).
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“We found that under LSD, compared to placebo, disparate regions in the brain communicate with each other when they don’t normally do so,” Professor David Nutt, senior researcher of the study and Edmond J. Safra Chair in Neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial, told Nature in an interview.
"We ultimately would also like to see LSD deployed as a therapeutic tool," said Nutt, an idea which he said has old roots but lost traction due to "unfounded hysteria over its potential dangers" after 1967.
In the following video watch Nutt and his colleagues discuss LSD and the importance of studying the drug.
In a brain not influenced by drugs, there are different networks that perform different functions, such as vision, movement and hearing. With the use of LSD, the researchers said these network communications break down resulting in a more unified brain.
“In particular, the visual cortex increases its communication with other areas of the brain, which helps explain the vivid and complex hallucinations experienced under LSD,” said Nutt, in the interview.
“In many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: young and unconstrained. This also makes sense when we consider the hyper-emotional and imaginative nature of an infant’s mind,” said Dr. Carhart-Harris, in a statement.
Additionally, the visual cortex, where the information that our eyes perceive is processed, received more information from the parahippocampus, which is involved in mental imagery and personal memory, while listening to music.
“For the first time we … can better understand why LSD had such a profound impact on self-awareness in users and on music and art,” said Nutt. “This could have great implications for psychiatry, and helping patients overcome conditions such as depression.”
Nutt told Nature his team has plans to do separate experiments to look at how LSD can influence creativity, and how the LSD state mimics the dream state.
