What Does The Latest Scientific Research Tell Us About How A Psychedelic Trip Affects The Brain For The First Time?
Psychedelics were long treated as dangerous drugs, often associated with the counterculture, thanks to the War on Drugs…
For many decades, they were linked to music festivals, hippies, and underground cultures, so much so that if they were even casually mentioned in passing, they used to cause so much moral panic. But so much has changed today.
These days, psychedelic drugs have proven to hold incredible weight in terms of scientific and medical value. Institutions are spending serious money to research the brains of people on psychedelic drugs, especially psilocybin or magic mushrooms, ketamine, MDMA, LSD, and ayahuasca, to name a few.
Among these, however, psilocybin from magic mushrooms has been the most popular and widely used, compared to other types of psychedelics. There could be several reasons behind this: for one, it’s considered ‘natural’ to most people, given that it comes from nature. They grow in the wild and have been used ceremonially for many centuries as parts of spiritual and cultural rituals around the world, especially in Central America and Mexico. Additionally, magic mushrooms are easier to grow.
But most important perhaps, is that the research behind the health benefits of psilocybin is just so strong.
There’s so much research, and a growing body of it, dedicated to learning more about how it helps treat conditions that humans and the billion-dollar pharmaceutical industry haven’t managed to treat in decades: depression, anxiety, end-of-life grief, addiction, trauma, and so much more.
And researchers still want to know more about why it works so well.
What happens during your first psychedelic trip?
Perhaps the key to understanding how it works so well is knowing what happens during your first psychedelic trip.
A new study conducted by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, sought to find out more. Robin Carhart-Harris, the UCSF neurology professor, explains that, “No one has ever properly tested whether and how the brain changes when someone takes psychedelics for the first time.”
Most people will say that their first experience with magic mushrooms is significant, but researchers want to understand what’s going on at a biological level.
For the study, Carhart-Harris and his team gave 25 mg of psilocybin to 28 healthy people. This dose is considered a ‘heroic’ dose; not by any means close to a normal dose that one would typically take to ‘trip’ out. He and his team then analyzed their brains using various imaging techniques, including MRI and EEG, before and after the dose. The scanning technologies provided valuable insight on any changes to the brain’s activity caused by the psilocybin. Furthermore, their brains were also monitored during the trip.
Following just one dose, the researchers observed notable brain activity associated with well-being. These changes were still evident as much as a month after they were given the drug. “We know what’s going on in your brain when you’re under the influence, when you’re experiencing the ‘magic’, and we know what it will translate to soon after in terms of psychological insight,” Carhart-Harris added.
It was pretty significant that they observed better well-being among the participants, as long as one month after they were given that one heroic dose.
The findings are still in their initial stages, yet these are considered fascinating to the scientific community. It certainly raises more questions than we wish we had answers to, and no doubt more will pursue further studies along these lines in the future.
What makes this study so significant is that researchers found evidence that even one’s first dose of psilocybin was correlated with lasting positive effects on the participants’ well-being.
Whereas traditional pharmaceuticals work on specific receptors in the brain, psychedelics seem to work on several systems at once: memory, emotions, cognition, and perception. Even a person’s sense of self and ego. The fact that psychedelics has a much broader effect can also explain why individuals have incredibly transformative and meaningful experiences
CONCLUSION
There are many ways that the current wave of psychedelic research marks a dramatic breakthrough in society and culture: we no longer see these substances as recreational drugs, but powerful medicines in the realms of mental health, well-being, and neuroscience.
The study above is particularly important because it suggests that psilocybin does more than produce an altered mental state: it can produce lasting, positive changes in the brain itself that begin as early as the very first dose. This kind of phenomenon has never been observed in pharmaceutical medications.
Scientists are only starting to understand how the compounds in psychedelics work, yet findings from studies such as these provide an important glimpse into their valuable therapeutic potential. But given that just a single psilocybin dose has been shown to be extremely powerful, with changes observed for as long as a month after, it raises big questions about what lies ahead for mental health treatment.
We still have so much to learn, and medical researchers as well as scientists warn us that psychedelics are not miracle cures.
Modern science continues to shed light on what happens during a psychedelic trip. Although at this point, we still have many unanswered questions, it remains clear that these psychedelic substances may hold the key to discovering new ways of understanding how the brain works, including consciousness, well-being, and healing.
WHAT IS EGO DEATH, READ ON...
