Brain Science on Psychedelics

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LAST Week, thousands of scientists, practitioners, entrepreneurs and members of the curious public have converged on Denver for the annual psychedelic science conference. The neuroscience conferences of scientists from the University of Stanford and the University of New York have mixed discussions on the clergy on psilocybin, workshops on the use of ecstasy for couples therapy, stands praising sound healing and a handful of imaginative costumes. I visited for a single day, but I always found it the most colorful scientific conference – if not glitter – that I have covered during my years as scientific journalist.

But it was also among the most fascinating and the most informed. And dare I say, aware of me?

Serious scientific research on psychedelics was faced with a world of challenges from the start. Even the first “psychonauts” of the end of the 18th century tried to fight against the apparent impossibility of quantitatively making the very qualitative experience of such a modified state of mind. (In an early study of the effects of nitrous oxide, a participant in 1799 told the chemist Humphry Davy: “I feel like the sound of a harp.”)

One of the major challenges of rigorous scientific trials of psychedelic drugs – notably psilocybin in mushrooms, MDMA, DMT, LSD, etc. – is that the study participants are quickly aware if they received the medication or a placebo, such as Balazs Szigeti, from the University of California, the San Francisco Psychedelic conference. This can confuse the results much more deeply than a zero study, where participants do not know if they had a simulated treatment or the real thing.

An option is to allow studies – which, as shown by the scientific posters of the conference, are carried out to see if psychedelics can deal with everything from anxiety to postpartum depression through cocaine dependence to the extreme fear of heights. Researchers may not even reveal to participants that there is an arm separate from the study receiving different treatment, suggested Szigeti and his colleagues.

Another is to use emerging pharmaceutical options called non -psychedelic analogues which are promising similar impacts on the plasticity of the brain (a great reason why psychedelics are considered effective in certain treatments), while leaving participants still firmly rooted in their familiar perceptual reality. They are, maybe unsurprisingly, somewhat controversial in the field.

Another option to resolve some of these challenges is to dive beyond subjective reports and to look in brain activity to search for MRI, EEG and TEP analyzes.

But even these, as scientists and mechanists as they appear, come with their own limitations, in particular – as a group of experts noted – how the data is displayed. The “heat cards” of brain activity, for example, cannot show that more blood is channeled and can indicate areas that become more active, whether it is a sober person or during a wild psychedelic trip. And many of these images can be misleading, as Lindsay Cameron, a postdoctoral researcher in psychiatry in Stanford, pointed out.

Cameron cited a figure widely used from an article which shows a considerably increased activity connecting different areas of the brain of people on psilocybin – compared to those who were sober. But, she noted, these types of increase are not special for psychedelics. “This happens with a lot of caffeine. This happens with methamphetamine. This happens with cocaine. Things that increase your brain activity and go up-this is not a completely crazy observation,” she said. “So I want to emphasize: know what you are looking at when you look at these images.”

Another good reminder that everything may not be as it appears.

Lead image: Bruce Rolff / Shutterstock

• Katherine Harmon Courage

  Published on June 24, 2025

  Katherine Harmon Courage is the editor -in -chief of Nautilus.