The Effects of Serotonin on Consciousness

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

If you give a blocker of the to A receptor, it doesn't really do much to consciousness. It might make you thinking a little bit narrowed and stereotyped,. But it's a subtle effect, cognitive rigidity. So that's the low entropy, high predictability kind of phase. And so part of my thinking is that maybe it becomes engaged naturally during exceptional conditions. If it's not doing much bazily, then maybe it's there for some kind of emergency situations or crises. I've got a paper in development at the moment which proposes that hypothesis.

The Convention on Psychotropic Substances was a 1971 United Nations treaty that placed strong restrictions on the use of psychedelic drugs — not only on personal use, but medical and scientific research as well. Along with restrictions placed by individual nations, it has been very difficult for scientists to study the effects of psychedelics on the brain, despite indications that they might have significant therapeutic potential. But this has gradually been changing, and researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris have begun to perform controlled experiments to see how psychedelics affect the brain, and what positive uses they might have. Robin and I talk about how psychedelics work, how they can help with conditions from addiction to depression, and how they can help people discover things about themselves.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Robin Carhart-Harris received his Ph.D. in psychopharmacology from the University of Bristol. He is currently the Director of the Centre for Psychedelic Research in the Department of Brain Sciences at Imperial College London, and holds an honorary position at the University of Oxford. His research involves functional brain imaging studies with psilocybin (magic mushrooms), LSD, MDMA (ecstasy) and DMT (ayahuasca), plus a clinical trial of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.