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 (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

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

…it has recently been reported that psychedelics LSD and psilocybin, also bind to TrkB with higher affinity than antidepressants. In this study, we investigated whether psychedelics and classical antidepressants promote TrkB dimerization and neurotrophic signalling in a differential manner. The effects of psychedelics on the TrkB dimerization dynamics and neurotrophic signalling associated with plasticity were studied treating N2a c

Aims. Psychedelics produce fast and persistent antidepressant effects and induce neuroplasticity resembling the effects of clinically approved antidepressants. We have recently found that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) directly bind to TrkB, the receptor for BDNF. Our data suggest that antidepressant and plasticity promoting-effect of psychedelics are mediated by TrkB. Our objective is to test in vivo the effect of LSD on brain functional connectivity, more specifically on the default mode network, and the impact of the modulation of TrkB receptor on this effect. Methods. Functional Ultrasou

…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

…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