Topic: Psychedelics

Bessel van der Kolk examines how psychedelics may facilitate integration of disparate experiences and changes to established habits. The webinar explores self-compassion, neuroplastic windows and critical periods, asking how therapeutic support and integration relate to these opportunities for change. The discussion connects potential increases in flexibility with the opening of therapeutic windows and includes audience questions.

Psychedelics like psilocybin have shown rapid and long-lasting efficacy on depressive and anxiety symptoms. Other psychedelics with shorter half-lives, such as DMT and 5-MeO-DMT, have also shown promising preliminary outcomes in major depression, making them interesting candidates for clinical practice. Despite several promising clinical studies, the influence of the context on therapeutic responses or adverse effects remains poorly documented. To address this, we conducted preclinical studies evaluating the psychopharmacological profile of 5-MeO-DMT in contexts previously validated in mice as

Interest in psychedelic compounds is growing due to their remarkable potential for understanding altered neural states and their breakthrough status to treat various psychiatric disorders. However, there are major knowledge gaps regarding how psychedelics affect the brain. The Computational Neuroscience Laboratory at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health, Monash University, uses multimodal neuroimaging to test hypotheses of the brain’s functional reorganisation under psychedelics, informed by the accounts of hierarchical predictive processing, using dynamic causal modelling (DCM). D

The study of altered states of consciousness has long had the potential to provide important insight into the nature of consciousness. In recent years there has been a resurgence of research and public interest in atypical or altered states of consciousness. These have focused both on conditions in which consciousness is considered to be impaired due to brain trauma or enhanced in some way through mediation practices or ingestion of psychedelics. The talk will begin with a brief overview of recent scientific approaches to understanding these different types of altered consciousness. The remain

Psychedelics (5-HT2AR agonists) show great promise in treating mental disorders but their effects on neuronal population activity are not clear. Latent dimensions identified by Principal Component Analysis (PCA) capture the dynamics of this interrelated neuronal population activity. We asked whether latent dimensions emerge or disappear as a result of psychedelic administration (acute), and across other naturally occurring brain state transitions (sleep, arousal). Contrastive PCA (cPCA) [Abid et al. (2018), Nature Comm.] was applied to spontaneous brain activity recordings in rodents before