Summary of “Scanning the Psychedelic Brain” by Harlan
Ruth Williams summarizes David Nutt’s experiment on illegal psychedelics. So when one trips on magic mushrooms, their brain goes bonkers, resulting in a distorted reality full of geometric shapes. Their brain activity must speed up to make such vivid hallucinations - WRONG! Brain activity and connectivity decrease while under the influence of psilocybin (active ingredient in magic mushrooms). The study was tricky, seeing as they wanted to give thirty volunteers a trip on shrooms. But David Nutt, who conducted the experiment, finally got away with testing and found that the drug is fairly therapeutic. It targets a part of the brain called the default mode network, which regulates ambition, giving the patients a self- revolution or new way of looking at life. Nutt hopes that eventually psilocybin can be used for depressed patients to over come the need for daily medication (Williams, 2012).
What captures my attention about this study was not only that as the article is about drugs, which is an interesting topic on its own, but also that it viewed illegal drugs in a positive light. Nutt hopes that psychedelics will be used in the future for positive medical use. According to the results of the experiment, this doesn’t seem like a very far-fetched idea. What really grabs me is the concept of using only one trip of shrooms to prevent a lifetime of daily medication. In a perfect world, this seems like a perfect idea. But all good things have bad ties. This drug can be just as dangerous as it is helpful, so it will remain off limits until further notice.
References:
Williams, R. (2012, January 23). Scanning the psychedelic brain. Retrieved September 8, 2014, from TheScientist website: http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/31496/title/Scanning-the-Psychedelic-Brain/
I think this is really interesting in light of the changes happening now with marijuana, both our re-evaluation of why it should/should not be illegal for recreational use, but also its role as a medicine. Our society seems to have a kind of false idea that some drugs or substances are "bad" and others are not. Instead, most of them can be used well or used badly (increasing addiction rates to prescription painkillers being another example). Thanks for this post!
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