Keywords from hallucinogenic experiences can help find parts of the brain affected by drugs
People have vast, spiraling experiences on psychedelic drugs, often returning from a hallucinogenic trip full of new outlooks on their life or even changes to their personality. They describe the trips with vivid, emotional language — which might be able to tell researchers what parts of their brains are reacting to the drugs.
It’s a different approach to studying drugs and the brain: normally, researchers looking to understand how substances map onto brain regions would ask people to take the drug before having their brain scanned. This strategy, though, focused more on how the drugs made people feel, and then worked backward to find the areas most likely to be responsible for that feeling.
typically been associated with LSD, or acid, and psilocybin, the compound found in psychedelic mushrooms. Those drugs target a receptor in the brain called 5-HT2A.found that drugs working on other receptors in the brain, like the D2 receptor, were linked with similar feelings. That opens other targets for scientists or pharmaceutical companies trying to make new drugs that could try to create the same experience, or for researchers trying to understand the roots of mental health challenges.
Along with the findings on ego dissolution, the study also identified drugs and brain receptors linked with visual and auditory experiences, fear, physical experiences, and the passage of time. It found that optical hallucinations might be linked to brain regions that aren’t typically associated with vision, for example. They also found that people’s internal clocks react different ways to different types of drugs — some stretched time out, others compressed it.