Short Wave - Brain Scientists Are Tripping Out Over Psychedelics

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

Psychedelic drugs – like LSD, salvia, ayahuasca, Ibogaine, MDMA (AKA ecstasy), or psilocybin (AKA 'magic mushrooms' or 'shrooms') – are experiencing a resurgence of interest in their potential medical benefits. At the Neuroscience 2022 meeting held by the Society of Neuroscience, the appetite for psychedelic research permeated the sessions, discussions, and even after-hours barroom talk — drawing in researchers, neuroscientists, companies, reporters, and advocates alike. "In the last couple of years there has been a lot of excitement in psychedelics. I think it started first in the popular media." says Alex Kwan, associate professor at Cornell University. "Neuroscience, actually, I think took another year or two to catch on." Today on the show, host Aaron Scott and NPR's brain correspondent Jon Hamilton chat psychedelic drugs — whether this renewed interest will represent incremental or revolutionary changes in the fields of medicine, psychology, and neuroscience. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Potheads, Aaron Scott here, and today we are going to turn on and tune in to some mind-bending brain science, which means we have NPR science correspondent John Hamilton. Hello, John. Hello, Aaron. When we last talked a couple of weeks ago, you were on your way to the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego. Right. 23,000 brain scientists all in one convention center.

It is absolutely my favorite nerd fest. What were all those brainiacs talking about? Drugs, Aaron, psychedelic drugs. Oki-dokey. Drugs like MDMA, also known as ecstasy, and psilocybin. That's the chemical that makes magic mushrooms magic. Of course, there's also LSD and plant-based hallucinogens like salvia, ayahuasca, ibogaine. John, you are starting to sound like a friendly drug dealer at Burning Man here.

Yeah, it might sound. like it, but I'm talking about a scientific meeting here. Brain scientists are looking at psychedelic drugs because these chemicals may be the key to a whole new way of treating psychiatric disorders. I'm talking about problems like anxiety, depression, PTSD, substance abuse, obsessive compulsive disorder, even chronic pain. These drugs also offer a way to study things like learning and consciousness. It's my understanding that this has always been sort of on the fringe.

I mean, I remember going to a conference in New York and the aughts put on by the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, where there was all sorts of hunger for this sort of research. But there weren't many studies to actually back it up. So if we hit the tipping point, were there a lot of studies in psychedelics at the meeting? Well, there were quite a few. But it was really more than that. It was kind of in the air. So one night I went out to this local bar. I was going to interview some random brain scientists.

And as it happened, the first person I met was Emma Hewels from the University of Michigan. My name's Emma, and I studied the role of different cortical regions in consciousness using anesthesia and psychedelics and looking at how they changed the brain. Sylocibin. Cilocybin, salvia, DMT, ketamine, all of them. I'm Nick, Nick Coleman. I work in the same lab as Emma. It's George Meshore and Desnash Pell's Lab. I'm currently working on assessing psilocybin for its therapeutic potential to treat chronic pain conditions. It's interesting because psychedelics have gotten a ton of hype in the past few years and a lot of media attention,

but it's really just now that the research is starting to catch up. So today on the show, why brain scientists are getting into psychedelic drugs? You're listening to Shortwave, the Daily Science podcast from NPR. So, John, the study of psychedelics isn't exactly new. I mean, back in the 1950s, psychologists like Timothy Leriot, Harvard, were studying the therapeutic potential of hallucinogens like LSD and psilocybin. But then the drugs were outlawed in the 1960s, and all this research, it just stopped. So take us through the resurgence. When did psychedelic drugs become so interesting to today's brain scientists?

Well, it's pretty recent. In the 1990s, there were a few researchers who started looking at these drugs again. They were still sort of on the scientific margins, though. By 2016, psychedelics were really moving into the mainstream. There were two important studies that came out that year. Both of them showed that psilocybin, the hallucinogenic chemical and magic mushrooms, reduced depression and anxiety in people with life-threatening cancer. Yeah, I remember reading about those in the news,

and it seems like in the years since there's been a lot of stories and articles about how psychedelics are going to be the next big thing in neuroscience. So has that moment arrived? Well, that was one of the things I wanted to sort of gauge at the neuroscience meetings. So I went to the session called psychedelics and neural plasticity. It was about how these drugs helped rewire the brain. And this session was mobbed. My rough count was that there were a thousand people who showed up and a lot of them were standing in the back.

Wild. I mean, it was amazing. And I was able to chat with a couple of the speakers later on. One of them is Alex Kwan. he's a brain scientist at Cornell University. In the last couple of years, there has been a lot of excitement in psychedelic. I think it started first in the popular media. Neuroscience actually I think took another year or two to catch on in terms of the basic neuroscience.

We just don't know much about what these compounds do and a lot of interests from young scientists who want to jump into this area. Kwan also told me about some of his own research. Before he came to Cornell, he was part of this team at Yale studying how psilocybin changes the structure of individual brain cells in mice. So, you know, neurons have these sort of tree branches that extend out and form connections with other neurons. Right, dendrites. Yeah. And Kwan was part of a team that showed that psilocybin changes these dendrites in a way that allows them to make more connections

and stronger connections. He told me that's key to the rewiring involved in brain plasticity, which is really just the brain's ability to change and adapt. So our brain, in fact, is plastic to begin with. We have the ability to adapt and learn new things. For example, we can learn how to play piano. We can learn a new language, even when we're adult. Obviously, we learn those things better as a kid. But then it seems like from our work, what it suggests is that psychedelic seems to elevate that type of plasticity potential to make the brain slightly more plastic to generate even a bit more greater connections. So this ability of the drugs to make the brain more flexible, Is that one of the main reasons that researchers are studying psychedelics as a potential therapy to treat disorders like depression and PTSD?

Yes. One possibility is that this temporary boost in brain plasticity helps rewire the exact circuits that are involved in those conditions. So maybe psychedelics help put your brain in this state where it can learn not to fall into depression or learn to put a traumatic event in the past. So, John, is there evidence that brain plasticity is the magic ingredient and that it's not something else going on? There's some. One clue is that people with, say, major depression can get better after just one treatment with a psychedelic. Oh, wow. One of the speakers who talked about that was Dr. Giedikunutsen. She's a neurologist at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who treats patients with psilocybin and other hallucinogenic drugs.

The stunning effects of the psychiatics is that one or a few single doses can. have such long-lasting impact. It could be months or even years. And that is what makes it such an interesting drug to look at. The thinking here is that if a single dose can cause a long-term change, it must be because the brain has undergone some rewiring. So that would be in contrast to the current slate of drugs for depression and other psychiatric disorders. You usually have to take those every day. Yeah, one and done would be a huge leap forward for a lot of people. So it totally makes sense why there's all this buzz right now. And yet, we have to be wary of magic bullets.

It also sounds a little bit too good to be true. Yes, but there are some real concerns. These drugs often cause hallucinations, which can be scary. They can even cause symptoms that are a lot like schizophrenia. So Knudsen told me that psychedelic treatments require a lot of care from the provider. It can be a quite overwhelming experience to people. And for that reason, you need to prepare them for. that and you also need to be with them while they are in the experience and when people have

been through a psychedelic experience in my lab they say wow this was amazing this was just a fantastic experience and you asked them well would you like to come back next week for another session say thank you but no thank you so so sometimes there's a such thing as being a little too overwhelmed and it seems like something we should point out is i mean all these studies are happening in controlled situations with clinicians there as the patients are taking the psychedelics. Yeah, and that's really important. I should say that another concern has to do with people's expectations of psychedelics. So right now, there are companies and enthusiasts who are sort of emphasizing the potential of these drugs to treat, you know, all kinds of things from obesity to

OCD, right? That's probably optimistic. One of the people I talked to at the Society for Neuroscientism, meeting was Dr. Joshua Gordon. He's the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, and I asked him how consumers should interpret all this news about psychedelics. There is a lot of hype. And if you look at the data that is emerging from these large studies that are being done funded by many of these same people who are excited about making investments in the field, if you look at the data that's coming out of that, these drugs are probably going to be beneficial and helpful, how much more helpful than our current armamentarium of drugs,

we had a lot of hope that would be really transformative in the beginning. Now it's looking like they may be very, very useful and important, but not in the same way transformative that we had hoped. So the hype has come from both companies that want to be in the psychedelic drug business and from advocates for legalization. And Gordon is saying that these drugs are probably, Probably going to represent an important but incremental improvement rather than a revolutionary change. So it's not going to be as simple as just tripping our way to our happy place.

Probably not. But it is likely that psychedelics are going to help some people who haven't been helped by anything else. Thank you for talking about our brain on drugs, John. Always a pleasure, Aaron. This episode was produced by Thomas Liu and edited by Gabriel Spitzer. Abbey Levine checked the facts and Alex Dre Winskis was our audio and engineer. Our senior supervising editor is Giselle Grayson. Brendan Crump is our podcast coordinator. Beth Donovan is our senior director of programming, and Anya Grundman is our

senior vice president of programming. I'm Aaron Scott. Thank you for listening to Shortwave from NPR.