23 ms·

Brain scans reveal how LSD affects consciousness

376 points by etiam 11y ago

jdpigeon 11y ago
Finally some good research on LSD in humans. Very interesting finding about the increased connectivity to the visual cortex. It certainly vibes with my anecdotal experience -- the whole visual world just seems more meaningful and 'in focus'. Tripping in an art gallery can be a real treat :)
- atom-morgan 11y ago
  I can't believe I never thought of doing that.
  - pazimzadeh 11y ago
    It's my favorite thing to do. Also helps that in a museum no one will judge you for staring at the wall for an eternity.
    - omarchowdhury 11y ago
      The non trippers don't see those moments as eternity.
- stevedekorte 11y ago
  I tried that at the Van Gough museum but got creeped out at seeing everyone ignoring each other and staring at walls and had to escape to a nearby park.
  - de_Selby 11y ago
    Sounds like a pretty normal art gallery experience then.
neurobuddha 11y ago
That is the most "lit up" MRI scan that I've ever seen. Obsessive compulsive people have highly activated brains, and I know musicians activate many parts of the brain - but not like this.
- coldtea 11y ago
  Feels like that too :-)
  - jonasjojo 11y ago
    The color map in the illustration does not represent blood flow (~neural activity) but "connectivity" with the visual area. The measure used to estimate this connectivity isn't given in the article, and I wasn't able to find the associated publication. I am inclined to scepticism with this kind of measures. There exist a lot of them, and the choice of one, if not the crafting of a new one is likely to be influenced by the hypothesis of the tester.
- matthewwiese 11y ago
  Interesting comment on OCD, given that I have the disorder. Could you link me a source for that claim? Many friends of mine study neuroscience so I'm inadvertently becoming more interested as an amateur.
  - neurobuddha 11y ago
    This scan shows glucose metabolism vs "normal": https://www.pinterest.com/pin/264445809342542302/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/264445809342542302/
CitizenKane 11y ago
Very fascinating continuing research! This group has been doing a number of studies on psychedelics and this is not their first rodeo. You can see some of their previous research here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267512525_Homological_scaffolds_of_brain_functional_networks https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267512525_Homologic... (PDF) which talks about the brain under the effects of Psilocin, which is the active chemical which comes from Psilocybin Mushrooms. It's a fascinating area of research, and I've found it surprising how few drugs are actually examined in this manner. The lack of rigor that goes into the law with regard to drugs is deplorable.
nefitty 11y ago
Pretty cool. I'd like to point out that meditation might have a similar dampening effect on the default mode network as well. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 The question arises again, can psychedelics have lasting effects or is meditation the only way to create permanent positive change in that direction? Finally, a quote from a letter to Osho: "Many people are experimenting with the drug ecstasy. I heard you say once that a lie is sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end, and truth is bitter in the beginning, and sweet in the end. I have been meditating, but I don't have the experiences people report from the drug ecstasy. Is the drug like the lie, and meditation the truth? Or am I missing something that could really help me?"
- notthegov 11y ago
  If you meditate for emotional stillness and spiritual depth, then there is no reason you can't seek happiness and awareness from a girlfriend or a psychedelic drug experience. Or from both at the same time. You could meditate alone for a thousand lifetimes and not experience love. Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially true. It can only show you glimpses. Whatever this world is, it is here for us to enjoy. Proclaiming the answer to enlightement is living an ascetic life without luxury items, smart attractive people or drugs of any kind is silly. "Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." - Alan Watts (Obviously Osho didn't live an ascetic life. He meditated enough not to need MDMA but not Rolls-Royces.)
  - taneq 11y ago
    > Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially true. Even if some people can experience psychedelic states through extensive meditation, that doesn't make their experience intrinsically better. They're chasing the same experience as someone who experiments with psychedelic drugs, but there always seems to be an irritating sense of smug superiority from people who do meditate.
    - 11y ago
techload 11y ago
Interesting also the linked study on Psilocybin, which seems to decrease activity among brain hubs: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/6/2138.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/6/2138.full "Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition."
jarmitage 11y ago
I backed this study on Walacea, you should check it out if you're interested in this research getting funded whilst governments etc play catch up https://walacea.com/ https://walacea.com/ Edit: watch out for this study's results soon: https://walacea.com/campaigns/dmt/ https://walacea.com/campaigns/dmt/
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
caycep 11y ago
there's also the new 5HT2a inhibitor, pimavanzserin...as a thought experiment, what would scans w/ this medicine AND LSD onboard show?
- tpm 11y ago
  A hint may be somewhere here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0009019 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....
mavci 11y ago
Fringe, anyone?
- mavci 11y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTskUKq81MQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTskUKq81MQ
keypusher 11y ago
I used to work with fMRI scanners, and I would definitely not want to lay inside completely still while tripping on acid for 8 hours. Interesting results though.
justsaysmthng 11y ago
LSD and psychedelics are the next frontier in science IMHO. And I don't mean just neural science, psychology or psychiatry. It seems that these substances hold the key to how the brain "produces" reality and that could open doors to areas such as computer-brain interfaces, transfer of consciousness, fully immersive "life-long" virtual reality and so on. But that's just peanuts. There's the social aspect - psychedelics have had a strong influence on millions of people when they became popular in the '60s, shifting their worldview, which in turn lead to new directions in music, art, film, literature, science and society in general. Then there is the "ecological" aspect. Many people report "feeling one" or "connected" to everything including other living beings when tripping on psychedelics. That metaphor persists after coming down and many people become aware of their place in nature, what they eat, how they treat animals and plants and eventually other humans. "Flower power" might just be what's necessary to curb humanity's most stringent problems, such as "climate change". "Make love not war" hippy slogan will also help given how armed the world is right now. I would add "use condoms !" to it though - there's too many of us here already! :). The MRI images are a confirmation of the "mind expanding" term used so often in conjunction with these substances. Maybe "mind expansion" is what's needed in order to combat the "mind shrinking" that is so beneficial to the few, who, with their ignorance and greed, are about to run this ship into the ground. I'd love to see more research, a lot more research with these substances. Understanding these links is very important, because right now there is a new, larger, global wave of psychedelic use which is unprecedented.
- MrBra 11y ago
  If you guys want to start soft with some small dosages of mdma at home, I definitely recommend you to spend some time watching Daft Punk videos on YouTube, you won't regret that! It will a be somewhere in the middle between sweet, smooth, nice and brainfucking! You won't forget the music and the mood for long...
payamb 11y ago
For me LSD & Mushrooms were eye opening experience, I was born in a huge city, I grow up far away from nature, surrounded with cars, Millions of people . I think psychedelics opened my eyes to nature, To what we were created from, We are a part of that but today we are so busy progressing in our careers, Buying bigger house and saving more money we ignore our real nature. Earth is not just ours, Its home to million of other creatures that we ignore to see, Its what feed us and there are a lot of amazing secret living there. I believe in third eye. and i believe psychedelics opened that third eye for me.
omginternets 11y ago
I'm a Ph.D student in Cognitive Science and I'm currently writing my dissertation on the topic of conscious perception. I think this study is pretty damn interesting because the cingulate cortex (ACC & PCC) along with the thalamus are implicated in states of consciousness (i.e. wake/sleep/coma/vegetation/etc) and also in "access consciousness" (i.e.: “consciousness” in the sense of “I am conscious of such and such”). Subjects dosed with psilocybin have decreased BOLD (blood-oxygen level-dependent) signals in these regions. BOLD signal essentially tells you how active a brain region is (the more active the region, the more energy it needs, so the more irrigation it requires), so this tells us that the thalamic and cingulate regions are relatively suppressed by psilocybin. This is congruent with a longstanding (albeit simplistic) theory on how hallucinogens work. The idea is that hallucinogens would actually be inhibitory in their function, but they would selectively inhibit regions that are, themselves, inhibitory. So in a hand-wavy way, you can think of the ACC as keeping imagination in check. It inhibits perceptual areas (that are also activated by imagination) so that when you imagine a tiger, you don’t actually _see_ a tiger. With psilocybin & LSD, this function is suppressed so you see the tiger. Again, I'm simplifying to the point of risking a collective beat-down from my colleagues and lab-mates, but I thought it might help illustrate what's groovy about this study.
- d33 11y ago
  Interesting! Is there a brain region related to telling apart results of imagination and our actual perception that would work as a fail-safe mechanism?
  - Balgair 11y ago
    The ACC. Brains are squishy and evolved from fish, especially the basal ganglia parts like the ACC. They don't have fail-safe parts. Whatever gets 'routed' is going to synapse regardless of if it is 'real' or not. You cause a neuron to fire and it fires and sends it's signal onwards, it does not care why it fired. Caution, hand-waving abounds in this comment.
    - conceit 11y ago
stared 11y ago
See also how brain connectivity gets changed by psilocybin (magic mushrooms): http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/12/psilocybin-changes-brain-connectivity.html http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/12/psilocybin-changes-b... (and the actual paper: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/101/20140873 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/101/201408...). In short: you get more long-range correlations, so the perceived synesthesia may have very "hardware" basis.
Mahn 11y ago
I spent an hour reading this thread and I still have no idea whether I should try it or not. I always leave confused when I read about LSD, as if it's both amazing and horrible.
- johnthedebs 11y ago
  As someone that's done it (a dozen or so times), I always read these threads and feel confused about whether I should recommend it to other people. I usually do recommend it, though, with plenty of caveats. It can be an incredible experience if only for the shift in perception that it causes. It makes you see that the way your mind operates day-to-day (through highs, lows, and in-betweens) does not even come close to the range of experience that's possible. It can be euphoric, and it can be scary, and depending on your predispositions it can probably improve your life significantly (given that you integrate insights from your experience into "normal" life), or really mess with your head (esp. if you have latent schizophrenia or similar - I'm admittedly pretty ignorant about this so obviously do your own research). Anyway, my recommendation to people using it for the first time is to start with a low dose (you often won't even realize it's having any effect until after the trip is over – I didn't believe it my first time), make sure you are in a safe place where you can be left alone to relax if you need to, and ideally make sure to have someone with experience & that you trust to spend time with you and guide the trip. Also, here's some recommended listening: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/03/21/james-fadiman/ http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/03/21/james-fadiman/
TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
This is sadly anecdotal because I can't find a reference online, but there was a story a decade or two ago about someone who sold completely inert blotting paper tabs at a festival. No LSD, nothing at all. 100% placebo. And people still tripped on them - to the extent that some of them came back and wanted to buy more, telling him how amazing the LSD was. Perhaps the science is a little less straightforward than it seems.
- conceit 11y ago
  That's what hippies call the setting. That's literally what the hip in hippie means to me, the ridiculous enthusiasm. I don't mean offense, but I find other words for the kind of careful optimism that is necessary to keep this ignorant excitement going. That said, the article's link to the paper seems broken. Because there's no correct link to the paper yet in this discussion, my impression that most comments here don't really hold scientific merit gets stronger. I will admit that I don't understand enough of statistics to judge the methods used, if there was any control group at all.

376 points by etiam 11y ago

Finally some good research on LSD in humans. Very interesting finding about the increased connectivity to the visual cortex. It certainly vibes with my anecdotal experience -- the whole visual world just seems more meaningful and 'in focus'. Tripping in an art gallery can be a real treat :)

atom-morgan 11y ago
I can't believe I never thought of doing that.
- pazimzadeh 11y ago
  It's my favorite thing to do. Also helps that in a museum no one will judge you for staring at the wall for an eternity.
  - omarchowdhury 11y ago
    The non trippers don't see those moments as eternity.
stevedekorte 11y ago
I tried that at the Van Gough museum but got creeped out at seeing everyone ignoring each other and staring at walls and had to escape to a nearby park.
- de_Selby 11y ago
  Sounds like a pretty normal art gallery experience then.

neurobuddha 11y ago

That is the most "lit up" MRI scan that I've ever seen. Obsessive compulsive people have highly activated brains, and I know musicians activate many parts of the brain - but not like this.

coldtea 11y ago
Feels like that too :-)
- jonasjojo 11y ago
  The color map in the illustration does not represent blood flow (~neural activity) but "connectivity" with the visual area. The measure used to estimate this connectivity isn't given in the article, and I wasn't able to find the associated publication. I am inclined to scepticism with this kind of measures. There exist a lot of them, and the choice of one, if not the crafting of a new one is likely to be influenced by the hypothesis of the tester.
matthewwiese 11y ago
Interesting comment on OCD, given that I have the disorder. Could you link me a source for that claim? Many friends of mine study neuroscience so I'm inadvertently becoming more interested as an amateur.
- neurobuddha 11y ago
  This scan shows glucose metabolism vs "normal": https://www.pinterest.com/pin/264445809342542302/ https://www.pinterest.com/pin/264445809342542302/

CitizenKane 11y ago

Very fascinating continuing research! This group has been doing a number of studies on psychedelics and this is not their first rodeo. You can see some of their previous research here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267512525_Homological_scaffolds_of_brain_functional_networks https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267512525_Homologic... (PDF) which talks about the brain under the effects of Psilocin, which is the active chemical which comes from Psilocybin Mushrooms. It's a fascinating area of research, and I've found it surprising how few drugs are actually examined in this manner. The lack of rigor that goes into the law with regard to drugs is deplorable.

nefitty 11y ago

Pretty cool. I'd like to point out that meditation might have a similar dampening effect on the default mode network as well. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25904238 The question arises again, can psychedelics have lasting effects or is meditation the only way to create permanent positive change in that direction? Finally, a quote from a letter to Osho: "Many people are experimenting with the drug ecstasy. I heard you say once that a lie is sweet in the beginning and bitter in the end, and truth is bitter in the beginning, and sweet in the end. I have been meditating, but I don't have the experiences people report from the drug ecstasy. Is the drug like the lie, and meditation the truth? Or am I missing something that could really help me?"

notthegov 11y ago
If you meditate for emotional stillness and spiritual depth, then there is no reason you can't seek happiness and awareness from a girlfriend or a psychedelic drug experience. Or from both at the same time. You could meditate alone for a thousand lifetimes and not experience love. Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially true. It can only show you glimpses. Whatever this world is, it is here for us to enjoy. Proclaiming the answer to enlightement is living an ascetic life without luxury items, smart attractive people or drugs of any kind is silly. "Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun." - Alan Watts (Obviously Osho didn't live an ascetic life. He meditated enough not to need MDMA but not Rolls-Royces.)
- taneq 11y ago
  > Saying you can endogenously experience psychedelic states by meditation or Kundalini yoga sounds nice and ideal, but it is only partially true. Even if some people can experience psychedelic states through extensive meditation, that doesn't make their experience intrinsically better. They're chasing the same experience as someone who experiments with psychedelic drugs, but there always seems to be an irritating sense of smug superiority from people who do meditate.
  - 11y ago

techload 11y ago

Interesting also the linked study on Psilocybin, which seems to decrease activity among brain hubs: http://www.pnas.org/content/109/6/2138.full http://www.pnas.org/content/109/6/2138.full "Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition."

jarmitage 11y ago

I backed this study on Walacea, you should check it out if you're interested in this research getting funded whilst governments etc play catch up https://walacea.com/ https://walacea.com/ Edit: watch out for this study's results soon: https://walacea.com/campaigns/dmt/ https://walacea.com/campaigns/dmt/

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

caycep 11y ago

there's also the new 5HT2a inhibitor, pimavanzserin...as a thought experiment, what would scans w/ this medicine AND LSD onboard show?

tpm 11y ago
A hint may be somewhere here: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0009019 http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

mavci 11y ago

Fringe, anyone?

mavci 11y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTskUKq81MQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTskUKq81MQ

keypusher 11y ago

I used to work with fMRI scanners, and I would definitely not want to lay inside completely still while tripping on acid for 8 hours. Interesting results though.

justsaysmthng 11y ago

LSD and psychedelics are the next frontier in science IMHO. And I don't mean just neural science, psychology or psychiatry. It seems that these substances hold the key to how the brain "produces" reality and that could open doors to areas such as computer-brain interfaces, transfer of consciousness, fully immersive "life-long" virtual reality and so on. But that's just peanuts. There's the social aspect - psychedelics have had a strong influence on millions of people when they became popular in the '60s, shifting their worldview, which in turn lead to new directions in music, art, film, literature, science and society in general. Then there is the "ecological" aspect. Many people report "feeling one" or "connected" to everything including other living beings when tripping on psychedelics. That metaphor persists after coming down and many people become aware of their place in nature, what they eat, how they treat animals and plants and eventually other humans. "Flower power" might just be what's necessary to curb humanity's most stringent problems, such as "climate change". "Make love not war" hippy slogan will also help given how armed the world is right now. I would add "use condoms !" to it though - there's too many of us here already! :). The MRI images are a confirmation of the "mind expanding" term used so often in conjunction with these substances. Maybe "mind expansion" is what's needed in order to combat the "mind shrinking" that is so beneficial to the few, who, with their ignorance and greed, are about to run this ship into the ground. I'd love to see more research, a lot more research with these substances. Understanding these links is very important, because right now there is a new, larger, global wave of psychedelic use which is unprecedented.

MrBra 11y ago
If you guys want to start soft with some small dosages of mdma at home, I definitely recommend you to spend some time watching Daft Punk videos on YouTube, you won't regret that! It will a be somewhere in the middle between sweet, smooth, nice and brainfucking! You won't forget the music and the mood for long...

payamb 11y ago

For me LSD & Mushrooms were eye opening experience, I was born in a huge city, I grow up far away from nature, surrounded with cars, Millions of people . I think psychedelics opened my eyes to nature, To what we were created from, We are a part of that but today we are so busy progressing in our careers, Buying bigger house and saving more money we ignore our real nature. Earth is not just ours, Its home to million of other creatures that we ignore to see, Its what feed us and there are a lot of amazing secret living there. I believe in third eye. and i believe psychedelics opened that third eye for me.

omginternets 11y ago

I'm a Ph.D student in Cognitive Science and I'm currently writing my dissertation on the topic of conscious perception. I think this study is pretty damn interesting because the cingulate cortex (ACC & PCC) along with the thalamus are implicated in states of consciousness (i.e. wake/sleep/coma/vegetation/etc) and also in "access consciousness" (i.e.: “consciousness” in the sense of “I am conscious of such and such”). Subjects dosed with psilocybin have decreased BOLD (blood-oxygen level-dependent) signals in these regions. BOLD signal essentially tells you how active a brain region is (the more active the region, the more energy it needs, so the more irrigation it requires), so this tells us that the thalamic and cingulate regions are relatively suppressed by psilocybin. This is congruent with a longstanding (albeit simplistic) theory on how hallucinogens work. The idea is that hallucinogens would actually be inhibitory in their function, but they would selectively inhibit regions that are, themselves, inhibitory. So in a hand-wavy way, you can think of the ACC as keeping imagination in check. It inhibits perceptual areas (that are also activated by imagination) so that when you imagine a tiger, you don’t actually _see_ a tiger. With psilocybin & LSD, this function is suppressed so you see the tiger. Again, I'm simplifying to the point of risking a collective beat-down from my colleagues and lab-mates, but I thought it might help illustrate what's groovy about this study.

d33 11y ago
Interesting! Is there a brain region related to telling apart results of imagination and our actual perception that would work as a fail-safe mechanism?
- Balgair 11y ago
  The ACC. Brains are squishy and evolved from fish, especially the basal ganglia parts like the ACC. They don't have fail-safe parts. Whatever gets 'routed' is going to synapse regardless of if it is 'real' or not. You cause a neuron to fire and it fires and sends it's signal onwards, it does not care why it fired. Caution, hand-waving abounds in this comment.
  - conceit 11y ago

stared 11y ago

See also how brain connectivity gets changed by psilocybin (magic mushrooms): http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/12/psilocybin-changes-brain-connectivity.html http://mindblog.dericbownds.net/2014/12/psilocybin-changes-b... (and the actual paper: http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/101/20140873 http://rsif.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/11/101/201408...). In short: you get more long-range correlations, so the perceived synesthesia may have very "hardware" basis.

Mahn 11y ago

I spent an hour reading this thread and I still have no idea whether I should try it or not. I always leave confused when I read about LSD, as if it's both amazing and horrible.

johnthedebs 11y ago
As someone that's done it (a dozen or so times), I always read these threads and feel confused about whether I should recommend it to other people. I usually do recommend it, though, with plenty of caveats. It can be an incredible experience if only for the shift in perception that it causes. It makes you see that the way your mind operates day-to-day (through highs, lows, and in-betweens) does not even come close to the range of experience that's possible. It can be euphoric, and it can be scary, and depending on your predispositions it can probably improve your life significantly (given that you integrate insights from your experience into "normal" life), or really mess with your head (esp. if you have latent schizophrenia or similar - I'm admittedly pretty ignorant about this so obviously do your own research). Anyway, my recommendation to people using it for the first time is to start with a low dose (you often won't even realize it's having any effect until after the trip is over – I didn't believe it my first time), make sure you are in a safe place where you can be left alone to relax if you need to, and ideally make sure to have someone with experience & that you trust to spend time with you and guide the trip. Also, here's some recommended listening: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/03/21/james-fadiman/ http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/03/21/james-fadiman/

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

This is sadly anecdotal because I can't find a reference online, but there was a story a decade or two ago about someone who sold completely inert blotting paper tabs at a festival. No LSD, nothing at all. 100% placebo. And people still tripped on them - to the extent that some of them came back and wanted to buy more, telling him how amazing the LSD was. Perhaps the science is a little less straightforward than it seems.

conceit 11y ago
That's what hippies call the setting. That's literally what the hip in hippie means to me, the ridiculous enthusiasm. I don't mean offense, but I find other words for the kind of careful optimism that is necessary to keep this ignorant excitement going. That said, the article's link to the paper seems broken. Because there's no correct link to the paper yet in this discussion, my impression that most comments here don't really hold scientific merit gets stronger. I will admit that I don't understand enough of statistics to judge the methods used, if there was any control group at all.