PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS MAY RESTRUCTURE THE BRAIN
Psychedelic drugs, such as LSD, DMT and DOI, really can expand your mind… as long as you’re a rat or a fly. A study of the drugs’ effects on the rodents and insects showed neurons in their brains were more likely to branch out and make new connections.
If the drugs have a similar effect on human brains, it’s thought they may have potential as a treatment for depression, anxiety, addiction and even post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“These are some of the most powerful compounds known to affect brain function, it’s very obvious to me that we should understand how they work,” said the paper’s senior author Dr David Olson, of the University of California, Davis.
Depression is widely believed to be a result of imbalanced brain chemistry, but recent research points to the condition manifesting as structural changes in the brain. “One of the hallmarks of depression is that neurites [the ‘branches’ on the ends of neurons] in the prefrontal cortex
– a key brain region that regulates emotion, mood and anxiety – tend to shrivel up,” said Olson. This shrivelling also appears in cases of anxiety, addiction and PTSD, and the further the neurites retract, the harder it becomes for brain signals to bridge the gaps between synapses. But the use of psychedelics increased both the density of neurites and the density of synapses.
Olsen’s team doesn’t yet know if the drugs will do the same in human brains. But the similar effects observed across the rat and fly test subjects suggest the biological mechanisms that respond to psychedelics haven’t deviated during the two species’ evolution.