The Hybrid of Dreaming and Psychedelics

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I do remember reading about, you know, the network effects in the brain become a little bit less predictable, I guess. And does that have an easy relationship to the classic things that we think of as happening when we're on an LSD trip? Many times people just see things that are there moving in weird ways, right? Yeah. So that notion that psychedelics are hallucinogens, a little bit misleading with eyes open, things distort. But it's more when you close your eyes that the experience becomes very rich in imagery and very, very vivid as if one is seeing with their eyes closed. It like dreaming. Is it a bit like dreaming or is it really the same thing

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.

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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.

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