Rats on acid: How feeding rodents psychedelics is helping unlock the secrets of the human brain

Mind-altering substances, more commonly associated with the Western hippy movement of the 1960s, are now helping Swedish scientists unlock the mysteries of the brain.

Scientists have been exploring the effects of psychedelics and amphetamines on rats' brain activity in experiments that could help to explore where consciousness starts in the brain and provide clues to treat neurological disorders.

Researchers from Sweden's University of Lund spent seven years testing drugs such as LSD and ketamine on rats and then monitoring activity in neurons in different parts of their brains as they performed basic activities, such as walking around an enclosure, and comparing the activity to when they did the same exercise without the influence of the drugs.

"What we wanted to investigate here was to evaluate the commonalities of different psychedelic drugs," said Sebastian Barrientos Baeza, one of the researchers on the team. "Because lately this topic has gained lots of attention and the therapeutic potentials are huge. However, little is known about the mechanisms and we saw a great opportunity."

Ketamine is notorious party drug that is also used as a horse tranquilizer, while LSD – lysergic acid diethylamide – became the favored drug of the 1960s counter-culture.

"It's the simplest experiment possible. We just give the drug, and we compare the activity before the drug and after the drug," said Per Halje, a researcher in integrative neurophysiology at Lund University. 

"What we do is to implant in the brain of rats very tiny wires that are thinner than a hair and with that we can capture the neural activity of different brain regions at the same time, together with different metrics of behavior.”

Carrying out the experiment into the rats' brains under anesthesia, and monitoring electrical signals from 128 areas in the brains of the awake mammals, the researchers found synchronization in neurons in several different areas of the brain.

Halje said that these synchronizations could be disturbing the normal way different parts of the brain communicate with one another, something that could play a role in providing models for psychoses.

"One important aspect is, of course, to understand better the therapeutic mechanism of these drugs. Why is it actually helping in depression, for example? Is it the synchronous activity that perhaps induces plasticity in brain networks that helps you get out of diseased states? That's one application," he said.

However, the research could also provide some clues on where consciousness starts in the brain, Halje said, an area of particular relevance with the development of artificial intelligence.

"Before it was perhaps more of a philosophical question, like a fundamental question. But now it actually becomes quite important since we are developing artificial cognitive networks that perhaps also can develop consciousness. We just don't know. And we don't know what to measure, what to look for," he said."We urgently need a better understanding of how consciousness is generated," Halje said.

Psychedelic drugs are largely banned in Europe due to concerns about their possible harmful effects, but research in recent years suggests they may be beneficial to some when taken in a controlled setting, especially when tackling mental health issues such as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression, alcoholism and eating disorders.

In Switzerland, some private clinics and hospitals now have government permission to give the drug to patients for depression or anxiety disorders under supervision. However, the enthusiasm surrounding the substance has led some specialists to be concerned about the risks of self-medication, with patients sometimes obtaining LSD to treat their addiction or depression outside of any medical framework.

Despite such concerns, the movement to further study the possible benefits of such drugs is gaining political support. Earlier this year, several EU parliamentarians formed a new group in a bid to steer institutional discussions on the therapeutic application of psychedelics, dubbed the MEP Action Group for the Medical Use of Psychedelics. 

Meanwhile, other groups like the recently launched Psychedelic Access and Research European Alliance (PAREA) and PsychedelicsEUROPE are also working to promote the development of EU policies and regulations for psychedelic-assisted treatments in the EU.

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