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Those who have dabbled with psychedelics like LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide, or acid, man), don’t need studies and scientists to know that they open up new doors of perception.

That’s an Aldous Huxley reference.

Studies are ongoing, though, with researchers at Cornell University in New York making some interesting discoveries into the ‘how’ aspect of a trip.

The Guardian reports:

[LSD] lowers the barriers that constrain people’s thoughts. In doing so, it frees the mind to wander more easily and experience the world anew.

“Normally, our thoughts and incoming information are filtered by our prior experience,” said Parker Singleton, a PhD candidate at Cornell University…

“But if you take that filtering and suppression away, you are looking at the world with new eyes. You get a totally new perspective.”

Researchers put the Rebus (‘relaxed beliefs under psychedelics’) model to the test, which says that the brain works as a prediction engine.

This helps us make sense of the world, through prior beliefs and experiences.

However, LSD weakens the influence of prior beliefs:

In one sense, the drugs rewind the brain’s clock to a time before it learned that walls tend not to move and furniture is rarely threatening…

The brain’s activity is constrained by the mountains and valleys of our prior beliefs, but on LSD these obstacles are flattened out. “It allows us to move more freely and have more dynamic brain activity,” [Amy Kuceyeski, a senior author] said…

David Nutt, professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial College London, who was not involved in the research, said that “flattening the landscape” allowed parts of the brain to talk to each other for the first time since early childhood.

Those new avenues of discussion often allow people to get new insights into old problems, and also point to why psychedelics are now being used to help people with depression, anxiety, and other mental health disorders.

It’s not just psychedelics, other drugs are now being seriously considered as ways to treat past traumas.

MDMA is being considered as a way to help trauma survivors face painful memories, “in part by calming the amygdala – the part of the brain which acts as a smoke alarm, telling the body to prepare for danger.”

You can read more on that here.

[sources:guardian&wired]