“This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs.”
Most American students and faculty will remember this saying, accompanied by an egg frying in a pan. Well, British scientists now have actual pictures of what your brain looks like on drugs. Specifically, what your brain looks like on LSD.
Scientists from the Imperial College London, working with the Beckley Foundation, used brain imaging and scanning technology to visualize the brain activity of individuals on Lysergic acid diethylamide, more commonly known as LSD. The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) published the findings this past Monday, April 11.
The team found 20 healthy volunteers to participate in the study. These individuals were deemed psychologically and physically healthy prior to the experiments. They also had experience with hallucinogenic drugs in the past.
The researchers administered either 75 micrograms of LSD or a placebo to each of the individuals, using an IV to do so. The scientists then monitored their brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG), allowing the group to study the activity of the whole brain through examining blood flow and electrical activity.
The resulting images could reveal that a brain on LSD changes the way its various components interact.
“We found that under LSD, as compared to placebo, disparate regions in the brain communicate with each other when they don’t normally do so,” David Nutt, a neuropsychopharmacologist at Imperial College London and one of the study’s leaders, told Nature. “In particular, the visual cortex increases its communication with other areas of the brain, which helps to explain the vivid and complex hallucinations experienced under LSD, and the emotional flavour they can take.”
The processing of visual information normally occurs in the visual cortex. However, when under the influence of LSD, many other parts of the brain contribute to this function. The result is a more unified system, which could lead to an explanation for reports of “dream-like hallucinations” from people who have taken the drug, even with their eyes closed.
“We observed brain changes under LSD that suggested our volunteers were ‘seeing with their eyes shut’ – albeit they were seeing things from their imagination rather than from the outside world,” Robin Carhart-Harris, a co-author from the Imperial College London, said. “We saw that many more areas of the brain than normal were contributing to visual processing under LSD – even though the volunteers’ eyes were closed.”
“Furthermore, the size of this effect correlated with volunteer’s ratings of complex, dreamlike visions,” Carhart-Harris continued.
When under the influence of LSD, the participants’ brain activity was similar to what one would expect of an infant brain.
“Our brains become more constrained and compartmentalized as we develop from infancy into adulthood, and we may become more focused and rigid in our thinking as we mature,” Carhart-Harris said. “In many ways the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: free and unconstrained.”
The research team hopes that this study might pave the way for future studies examining the use of psychedelic compounds, such as those found in LSD, for the treatment of mental disorders like addiction or depression. However, this could be difficult, as the United States’ Drug Enforcement Administration lists LSD as a Schedule 1 drug. This means it has “no currently accepted medical use and a high potential for abuse.”
The study concludes: “In many psychiatric disorders, the brain may be viewed as having become entrenched in pathology such that core behaviors become automated and rigid. Consistent with their dysregulating effect on cortical activity, psychedelics may work to breakdown such disorders by dismantling the patterns of activity on which they rest.”
This conclusion is not without precedent. During the 1950s and 1960s, over 500 people participated in studies on LSD as a treatment for alcoholism. In 2012, Nature reported that a group of scientists performed a retrospective analysis of those studies, according to Nature, revealed that “59 percent of people receiving LSD reported lower levels of alcohol misuse, compared to 38 percent of people who received a placebo.”
“For the first time, we can really see what’s happening in the brain during the psychedelic state, and can better understand why LSD had such a profound impact on self-awareness,” Nutt told Reuters. “This could have great implications for psychiatry.”
