I can’t count how many friends of mine have travelled to the Amazon to use psychedelic drugs. It’s much easier these days to find local shamans offering ayahuasca local to you. And if you are crafty and have access to a forest in Canada for amanitas like I do. Today you can easily forage for your own mushrooms.
But like in the early days of acid when synthetic psychedelics could be too powerful and melt your brain, those self-medicating or going to centers and shamans for help now know that micro-dosing – taking the medicine in tiny amounts – could be beneficial against trauma, depression and PTSD.
Psychedelics appear to work by encouraging the growth of new connections between neurons in the brain. And research, like research into cannabis CBD and THC, is slowly catching up to science.
Researchers don’t fully understand why psychedelics have such powerful therapeutic effects. Now, a study in mice suggests that psychedelics all work in the same way: they reset the brain to a youthful state in which it can easily absorb new information and form crucial connections between neurons.
DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) is a very strong psychedelic found in a number of animals and plants. Psychedelic drugs can affect all the senses, altering a person’s thinking, sense of time and emotions. Psychedelics can cause someone to hallucinate, seeing or hearing things that do not exist or are distorted.
Psychedelics such as MDMA (also known as ecstasy), ketamine and psilocybin — the active ingredient in magic mushrooms — are known for producing mind-altering effects, including hallucinations in some cases. But each compound affects a different biochemical pathway in the brain during the short-term ‘trip’, leaving scientists to wonder why so many of these drugs share the ability to relieve depression, addiction and other difficult-to-treat conditions in the long term.
Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, and her colleagues sought answers by studying how psychedelics affect social behaviour in mice. Mice can learn to associate socializing with positive feelings, but only during an adolescent ‘critical period’, which closes as they become adults.
Researchers gave a range of psychedelics to mice, including ketamine, psilocybin, MDMA, LSD and ibogaine. The drugs seemed to reopen a ‘critical period’ in which mice can learn to associate socializing with positive feelings.
The scientists trained mice to associate one ‘bedroom’ in their mouse enclosure with mousy friends and another room with solitude. They could then examine how psychedelics affected the rodents’ room choices — a proxy for whether the drug affects the critical period.
“It gives hope that [critical periods] are not irreversible and a very careful cellular understanding of psychedelic drugs might hold the key to reopening brain plasticity,” says neurologist Takao Hensch, part of the Nature study.
Some applications in this research may treat people after strokes when there is a critical window for physical rehab after the stroke event.
About anyone looking to self-medicate, find a trusted shaman or micro-dosing center. Never try this without a mentor.
