Research Hit: Your Brain on Psychedelic Drugs

New research shows spontaneous and unexpected synchronisation across brain regions

So researchers are giving participants psychedelic drugs to measure their brains!

Well, that has happened, but sorry to say that in this study it was rats’ brains.

Oh, now I’m disappointed!

I wouldn’t be - the thing is with rats’ brains we can get much more refined and higher quality measurements. We can’t randomly wire up human beings in this way.

And this should give us more refined insights then?

Indeed, there is a lot more you can do at a lot lower costs in rats - and their brains are well documented and often used for comparisons to human brains (and obviously researchers understand the differences to human brains).

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And so they gave these rats a bunch of psychedelics and then measured them when they were tripping - happy rats eh!?

In summary, yes. But this is very refined research giving much deeper insight into the brains of rats while awake under influence of LSD and ketamine.