New research carried out at the State University of Campinas has put another stone in the building in rebuilding psychedelic science: if LSD is used as an adjunct to psychotherapy, the propitious time for so-called psycholytic therapy would likely fall four hours after ingesting the substance.
“Low Dose of LSD and Current of Thought: Augmented Discontinuity of the Mind, Deep Thought and Abstract Flow”, says the title of the second article published by Luís Fernando Tófoli’s group. The work was published in the journal Psychopharmacology, and its first author was the German Isabel Wießner, doctoral advisor from Tófoli, and collaborators from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN)
The authors’ first study had been published in July, as the blog reported. Both works are based on observations with 24 healthy volunteers who participated in two experimental sessions.
In one of the meetings, the person took 50 micrograms of LSD, and in the other, a placebo, but not knowing which one was taking what. Wießner and psychiatrist Marcelo Falchi, who had been in the room with the participants for about ten hours, didn’t even know.
During this time, the volunteers answered verbal questions, scored on scales the intensity of the mental changes experienced and performed tests on a computer. In this second article, the team highlighted changes in thought flow over time, something still little known in the lysergic effect.
It is worth mentioning that LSD was only banned for non-scientific uses in the 1970s. Before that, distributed by the Swiss laboratory Sandoz under the brand name Delysid, it had wide use in offices and studies to treat mental disorders and alcohol dependence, but not with the methodologies and rigorous controls currently used in biomedical research. With prohibition and demonization, the psychedelic almost disappeared from scientific research.
In the design of the investigation led by Unicamp, the control resided in comparing the effects measured on acid days with those on placebo days. This is the method known as “cross-over”.
In one of the tests, the volunteer had to chain together every two hours a list of words that came to mind under the stimulus of a seed-word of three types (animals, objects and abstract words). Later, the team used semantic distance measures to characterize the flow of thought – for example, the separation between “cattle” and “cow” is smaller than between “cattle” and “journey”.
To measure mind wandering, the Amsterdam State of Rest Questionnaire (ARSQ) was used. There are 55 questions, for example, about discontinuity of mind, planning, drowsiness, comfort, body perception, health concerns and visual or verbal thinking that the participant had to answer on the computer after spending five minutes with his eyes closed. Each item asked the person to indicate their degree of agreement/disagreement on a five-point scale.
To sum up very much the wealth of data, the group found that LSD, compared to placebo, accentuated chaotic, significant, and sensory aspects of thinking, as might be expected. As for the flow of mind, interestingly, the semantic distances were greater when the seeds were abstract words, rather than animals or objects.
Temporal differences were also observed. At the initial peak of the lysergic experience, even at the low dose of 50 mcg (1/5 to 1/4 of a full psychedelic dose), chaos made even communication difficult and increased the apparent arbitrariness of test responses.
By about four hours into the experiment, however, the mental entropy caused by LSD had cooled and moved from the chaotic pole to a state characterized by a freer flow of creative and flexible associations. The opposite of the dysfunctional flow of thought characterized by the rigidity and fixation of certain mental disorders, such as the rumination present in severe cases of depression.
This is what the authors tentatively pointed out as a possible therapeutic window. “The main conclusion would be that several elements of the results (increase in meaning, abstract flow) indicate that such a window after four hours seems to bring together several interesting effects with therapeutic potential at this relatively low dose,” says Wießner.
“However, our study looked at healthy participants, so further patient studies will be needed to say something more concrete in terms of therapeutic benefits during this window.”
The researcher says she is surprised by the freer flow of thought stimulated by abstract words. “One potential interpretation is that abstract words encourage broad thinking, in terms of semantic distances, more mental and language travel,” speculates Wießner.
An alternative interpretation would be that abstract terms are more difficult to process in the brain compared to animals and objects, which would evoke more automatic processes. “This second interpretation would go along the lines of reduced frontal control: it may be that the brain cannot sufficiently control cognitive processes, and thus, when more difficult stimuli arrive, this loss of control is reflected in a ‘chaos’ of increased semantic distances in the string of words.”
The natural continuity of the study, proposes the German researcher, would be to investigate the potential of LSD to break these patterns of dysfunctional thought flows in patients or demonstrate and teach other possible flows, for example more oriented towards things that gained a special meaning during the state. lysergic.
That, of course, if one day LSD –which does not cause an overdose or addiction– is one day removed from the list of prohibited substances that ended up as a scapegoat in the War on Drugs declared by Richard Nixon in 1970. Until then, the therapeutic window that he and other banned psychedelics can open will remain closed.
Tófoli, the senior author of the research, draws attention to the fact that “LSD is nowadays proposed less as a therapeutic molecule and more as a tool to characterize the subjective effect”. This is because with other psychedelics, such as psilocybin (mushrooms) and dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the effect is shorter in duration.
Read more about psychedelics in the book:
(Reproduction)
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