This is your brain on LSD

From ScienceDaily:

Researchers from Imperial College London, working with the Beckley Foundation, have for the first time visualized the effects of LSD on the human brain.

In a series of experiments, scientists have gained a glimpse into how the psychedelic compound affects brain activity. The team administered LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide) to 20 healthy volunteers in a specialist research centre and used various leading-edge and complementary brain scanning techniques to visualize how LSD alters the way the brain works.

The findings, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), reveal what happens in the brain when people experience the complex visual hallucinations that are often associated with LSD state. They also shed light on the brain changes that underlie the profound altered state of consciousness the drug can produce.

A major finding of the research is the discovery of what happens in the brain when people experience complex dreamlike hallucinations under LSD. Under normal conditions, information from our eyes is processed in a part of the brain at the back of the head called the visual cortex. However, when the volunteers took LSD, many additional brain areas -- not just the visual cortex -- contributed to visual processing.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, from the Department of Medicine at Imperial, who led the research, explained: "We observed brain changes under LSD that suggested our volunteers were 'seeing with their eyes shut' -- albeit they were seeing things from their imagination rather than from the outside world. We saw that many more areas of the brain than normal were contributing to visual processing under LSD -- even though the volunteers' eyes were closed. Furthermore, the size of this effect correlated with volunteers' ratings of complex, dreamlike visions. "

The study also revealed what happens in the brain when people report a fundamental change in the quality of their consciousness under LSD.

Dr Carhart-Harris explained: "Normally our brain consists of independent networks that perform separate specialised functions, such as vision, movement and hearing -- as well as more complex things like attention. However, under LSD the separateness of these networks breaks down and instead you see a more integrated or unified brain.

The original research article is available online HERE. Wouldn't you know, our good old friend the default mode network (DMN). From the first paragraph of the discussion section:

The present findings offer a comprehensive new perspective on the changes in brain activity characterizing the LSD state, enabling us to make confident new inferences about its functional neuroanatomy. Principal findings include increased visual cortex CBF, RSFC, and decreased alpha power, predicting the magnitude of visual hallucinations; and decreased DMN integrity, PH-RSC RSFC, and delta and alpha power (e.g., in the PCC), correlating with profound changes in consciousness, typified by ego-dissolution. More broadly, the results reinforce the view that resting state ASL, BOLD FC, and MEG measures can be used to inform on the neural correlates of the psychedelic state (9, 16). Importantly, strong relationships were found between the different imaging measures, particularly between changes in BOLD RSFC (e.g., network “disintegration” and “desegregation”) and decreases in oscillatory power, enabling us to make firmer inferences about their functional meaning.

Addendum, Apr. 14: The Scientist covers this article and another in Psychedelic Neuroimaging. There is considerable overlap among investigators for the two studies. The article discussed above was published in PNAS. The other article is in Current Biology, Increased Global Functional Connectivity Correlates with LSD-Induced Ego Dissolution. Here's the abstract:

Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a non-selective serotonin-receptor agonist that was first synthesized in 1938 and identified as (potently) psychoactive in 1943. Psychedelics have been used by indigenous cultures for millennia [ 1 ]; however, because of LSD’s unique potency and the timing of its discovery (coinciding with a period of major discovery in psychopharmacology), it is generally regarded as the quintessential contemporary psychedelic [ 2 ]. LSD has profound modulatory effects on consciousness and was used extensively in psychological research and psychiatric practice in the 1950s and 1960s [ 3 ]. In spite of this, however, there have been no modern human imaging studies of its acute effects on the brain. Here we studied the effects of LSD on intrinsic functional connectivity within the human brain using fMRI. High-level association cortices (partially overlapping with the default-mode, salience, and frontoparietal attention networks) and the thalamus showed increased global connectivity under the drug. The cortical areas showing increased global connectivity overlapped significantly with a map of serotonin 2A (5-HT2A) receptor densities (the key site of action of psychedelic drugs [ 4 ]). LSD also increased global integration by inflating the level of communication between normally distinct brain networks. The increase in global connectivity observed under LSD correlated with subjective reports of “ego dissolution.” The present results provide the first evidence that LSD selectively expands global connectivity in the brain, compromising the brain’s modular and “rich-club” organization and, simultaneously, the perceptual boundaries between the self and the environment.