Psychedelics may reopen locked learning opportunities

This excellent Lucid News discussion of how psychedelics produce their benefit comments: "A shared feature of psychedelics may be their ability to unlock temporary time spans of growth called “critical periods,” according to new research from Johns Hopkins University.  A critical period is a window in development where an animal has their only chance to learn a behavior. For instance, within their first 48 hours of life, snow geese will learn to associate whatever object is in their immediate field of vision as their parent. Whether this is their true mother, a human, or a model airplane, once this window has passed, the association sticks for life.  The research, published last week in the journal Nature, showed that injecting LSD, MDMA, ibogaine, ketamine, or psilocybin into adult mice re-opened their youthful critical period for learning socially rewarding experiences after the immediate effect of the drug subsided.  Acknowledging the potential differences between rodents and humans, the researchers found that how long the critical period remained open in mice was proportional to the duration of psychedelics’ effects in people – for days after with ketamine, and for weeks after with ibogaine.  Researchers previously showed that MDMA could prompt the re-opening of critical periods. The new research reveals that this same action can also be initiated by ibogaine, ketamine, LSD, and psilocybin.  Gül Dölen, a neuroscientist whose lab at the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University conducted the current study as well as the previous MDMA research, suspects psychedelics “are the master key for unlocking lots of different critical periods.”  “There’s an adage you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” she adds about the current study. “And when we gave psychedelics, what we found is that we can teach old mice new tricks.”

For more psychedelic news and research, visit the psychedelic health professional network homepage.