The Western Scientific Method for Psychedelics

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Scientists have been injecting DMT into healthy volunteers and then recording their brain activity with EEG, you know, those caps that record the oscillatory activity in the brain. And recently we've completed a simultaneous EEG FMRI study. It's quite pioneering and it allows us to bring together the high temporal resolution of EEG with the high spatial resolution of FMRI. Look at things like complex patterns in the temporal activity. But also look at brain networks and then dynamics. The plan is to begin this in the next month in February to begin a protocol of actually begin the experiments themselves following a continuous infusion protocol with DMT.

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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