Behold, The First-Ever Brain Scans Of LSD's Mind-Altering Effects

LSD, once a demonized hippie drug, has been evolving toward a clinically validated psychotherapy tool and Silicon Valley productivity hack for years now. And this week, it hit a major milestone. In a landmark study published Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the first modern brain scans of people tripping on LSD illustrate the neural bases of the psychedelic drug's powerful consciousness-altering effects.  The research, which was conducted by the Beckley/Imperial Research Programme in the U.K., showed that LSD reduces connectivity within brain networks and boosts connectivity between brain networks that don't normally interact.  "Normally our brain consists of independent networks that perform separate specialized functions, such as vision, movement and hearing -- as well as more complex things like attention," Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychedelic researcher at Imperial College London and one of the study's authors, said in a statement. "However, under LSD, the separateness of these networks breaks down and instead you see a more integrated or unified brain." Carhart-Harris and his colleagues scanned the brains of 20 healthy volunteers over the course of a six-hour LSD session after they'd been injected with a high dose of the drug. Two types of brain scans -- functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, and magnetoencephalography -- measured brain activity by detecting changes in blood fl...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news