Psychedelics have been extensively demonized as dangerous illegal narcotics for numerous decades. However, a recent flurry of scholarly study on their use to treat psychiatric disorders has sparked a change in public view.
Psychotropic drugs, or psychedelics, are substances that alter your mental state. Antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs are examples of psychotropics. Psychedelics and other types of hallucinogens, on the other hand, are unique in their ability to generate vivid hallucinations, emotions, and self-awareness for a short period of time.
A team of researchers from McGill University‘s Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital) and Department of Biomedical Engineering, the Broad Institute at Harvard/MIT, SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University, and Mila – Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute have shown how drug-induced changes in subjective awareness are anatomically rooted in specific neurotransmitter receptor systems in the world’s largest study on psychedelics and the brain.
How did the neuroscientists accomplish this?
The researchers collected 6,850 testimonies from persons who used a variety of psychedelic drugs. They developed a machine learning algorithm to extract regularly used terms from the testimonials and relate them to the neurotransmitter receptors that likely produced them in a first-of-its-kind manner.
The interdisciplinary team was subsequently able to link subjective experiences to brain regions containing the most prevalent receptor combinations—which turned out to be the brain’s lowest and deepest information processing layers.
The study also discovered medications and brain receptors associated to visual and auditory experiences, fear, physical experiences, and the passage of time, in addition to the findings on ego breakdown.
It was discovered that optical hallucinations may be linked to brain regions that aren’t normally associated with vision, such as the prefrontal cortex. They also discovered that different types of medications affect people’s internal clocks in different ways, with some stretching time out and others compressing it.
For example, ego-dissolution—the sensation of being disconnected from one’s own self—is a potential effect of several psychedelics for psychiatric intervention. The receptor serotonin 5-HT2A was shown to be the most closely linked to this sensation in the study.
Other serotonin receptors (5-HT2C, 5-HT1A, 5-HT2B), adrenergic receptors Alpha-2A and Beta-2, as well as the D2 receptor, have all been associated to ego breakdown. A medicine that targets these receptors could be able to reliably induce this emotion in individuals who would benefit from it, according to physicians.
The authors of the study observed that different people have different sensitivities to the same medicine. However, this study, which used machine learning to find connections across those experiences, demonstrates that it is possible to find recurring motifs that can be applied from person to person.
The Head of the Team’s Statement
In a statement, study author Danilo Bzdok, a researcher at the Montreal Neurological Institute-Hospital, said, “Our study provides a first step, a proof of principle that we may be able to build machine learning systems in the future that can accurately predict which neurotransmitter receptor combinations need to be stimulated to induce a specific state of conscious experience in a given person.”
The Brain Canada Foundation, through the Canada Brain Research Fund, as well as NIH grant R01AG068563A and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, helped fund this study, which was published in the journal Science Advances on March 16, 2022. Danilo Bzdok was also sponsored by the Canada First Research Excellence Fund’s Healthy Brains Healthy Lives initiative, the CIFAR Artificial Intelligence Chairs programme (Canada Institute for Advanced Research), and Google.
Published By : VATSAL KOTHA
Edited By : KHUSHI THAKUR
