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Interesting New LSD Brain-Function Studies - Yazata - Apr 12, 2016
A collection of new papers on brain function on LSD is in the process of being published by Imperial College in London.
One of the studies inquired into the visual hallucinations so prevalent with LSD. They used brain imaging and compared volunteers who had taken the drug with volunteers who had taken a placebo. They observed during visual tasks that activity was observed throughout the brains the individuals who had taken LSD, while it was concentrated in the visual cortex in those that hadn't. So they believe that LSD makes the whole brain communicate more than is normal in adults where activity has become compartmentalized. (They note that the kind of activation seen with LSD is also seen in infants.)
As an old acid-head in the day, I've always believed that LSD takes down the filters that remove noise in the visual system, thus stimulating feature detectors randomly, creating the characteristic 'patterns', a jumble of unconnected edges, corners and colors that don't cohere into perceptual objects. That might be consistent with what these researchers observed, since if the visual system is receiving all kinds of inputs from the rest of the brain and not just from the eyes, it might become overstimulated.
Another interesting paper to be published examined LSD's effect on the sense of self. They observed that LSD tends to decrease the resting background activity of the brain that they call the 'default mode network', associated with alpha-waves on EKGs. And they hypothesize (I wonder how speculative this is) that this activity is associated with our sense of self-consciousness and that as this activity decreases, the sense of 'me' decreases as well. The researchers hope the research like this using psychoactive drugs might cast new light on the phenomenon of consciousness.
There's more besides that. See here:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2083851-first-lsd-brain-imaging-study-offers-insights-into-consciousness/
and here:
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/149361/20160412/lsd-makes-the-brain-more-complete-scientists.htm
and here:
http://www.nature.com/news/brain-scans-reveal-how-lsd-affects-consciousness-1.19727
It's interesting how each news story emphasizes something different, whatever's of interest to the reporter who wrote it.
RE: Interesting New LSD Brain-Function Studies - stryder - Apr 13, 2016
(Apr 12, 2016 03:52 PM)Yazata Wrote: It's interesting how each news story emphasizes something different, whatever's of interest to the reporter who wrote it.
Unfortunately that's the problem with such studies. Some researchers have a pro-active view about the subject they want to study while others can have a more "institutional" view where their notion of status amongst their peers and career tends to pervert their perception. That's why it's very difficult to have a singular definitive answer on such subject and why it requires taking all information that is available and attempting to sift through for biases.
For instance with LSD I have a bias due to my youthful experimentation. I'd pose that using LSD during the developmental phase could actually increase IQ.
A brain during it's development is still forging interconnections and "training" to be better orientated. Using LSD creates a burst of stimuli (I say burst but a decent trip will last approximate 12 hours), the problem of course is how the brain during that time attempts to organise it's newly interwoven connectivity since it's structured day-to-day way of observing is overloaded by data from newly formed branches of processing (which will decline over time if not repetitively stimulated).
This is why it's extremely disorientating, why people can see and hear things differently than normal and why such things as their imagination (which can start triggering areas of the brain that it usually shouldn't be able to access.) can become either a greatly enhanced form of amusement or a darkly perverted terror.
RE: Interesting New LSD Brain-Function Studies - C C - Apr 13, 2016
Quote:We ultimately would also like to see LSD deployed as a therapeutic tool. The idea has old roots. In the 1950s and 60s thousands of people took LSD for alcoholism; in 2012, a retrospective analysis of some of these studies suggested that it helped cut down on drinking. Since the 1970s there have been lots of studies with LSD on animals, but not on the human brain. We need that data to validate the trial of this drug as a potential therapy for addiction or depression.
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