Psychedelic drugs such as LSD and ketamine cause the brain to enter a “higher state of consciousness,” according to scientists. For the first time, a new study has showed the diversity of brain activity increasing as a result of taking these drugs. Scientists say the findings could lead to new treatments for mental health conditions, including depression and schizophrenia—as well as answering fundamental questions about our conscious experience.
Anil Seth, co-director of the Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science at the University of Sussex in southern England, is an author of the study published in Scientific Reports. He tells Newsweek: “[A higher state of consciousness] has a very specific meaning in terms of this study, and that meaning can get a little conflated with the hippy idea of a higher state of consciousness and psychedelic drugs.
“What we mean in this study is the measure of the mathematical diversity of brain activity, which, very roughly, is how unpredictable the activity of the brain is. We use this [because] this measure has previously been applied to try to track changes when people fall asleep or go under general anesthesia, which would generally be thought of as a lower state of consciousness.”
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While scientists already know that diversity lowers when people are asleep, the researchers were interested in what happens when people go the other way. People in a psychedelic state are conscious and they often report experiencing things like hallucinations. “Boundaries between self and world disintegrate and things like that,” Seth explains. “We predicted that instead of a reduction in the level of diversity [as seen when you go to sleep], we’d see an increase. And that’s what we found… it’s higher on this specific scale of diversity, or unpredictability of the brain activity. This is the first example that I’m aware of where it goes in the other direction, where you see an increase in this measure.”
Scientific testing of psychedelic drugs
Scientists have investigated the potential therapeutic benefits of these drugs for many years. LSD, for example, was first synthesized by Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann in 1938. Ten years later, U.S. researchers started testing its potential clinical applications and continued to do so for decades. However, as people started taking the drug recreationally in the mid-1960s, governments made the drug illegal, and restrictions on the drug largely stopped scientific testing with LSD
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