What if you could get all the potential benefits of ketamine without the "trip"? For part two of our series on psychedelics, we look at how some researchers are trying to disentangle the "trip" from the drugs' effects on the brain — and why the answer could help direct the future of psychedelic research. (Spoiler alert: People generally know if they're tripping or not.) This episode: a researcher navigating this challenge by putting his patients to sleep. Catch the rest of this series on psychedelics and related drugs this week by following us on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Have other questions about psychedelics and the brain? Let us know by emailing [email protected]! Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy
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You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. I'm talking with one of our producers, Rachel Carlson, who's been reporting a series on psychedelics and related drugs. Hey, Rachel. Hi, Gina.
So in our last episode, we talked about how drugs like psilocybin and ketamine are raising all these questions about the limits of what we know about our brains and how we experience reality.
Definitely check out that episode if you missed it, but also this one will make sense without it. Rachel, you touched on one thing in that episode that we're going to go a little deeper on today, and that's the challenge of studying these drugs.
Exactly. So when we're talking about how drugs like psychedelics and ketamine work, or if they work at all, what the heck are we actually talking about?
There's the drug. There's the trip. And then there's all these non-drug factors, meaning the stuff at the beginning, like the expectations you set, the hope you have, the lessons you learn.
This is Dr. Boris Heifetz. He's an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist at Stanford University. And he told me that researchers have been wondering for a while if the trip that comes with a lot of psychedelics, this journey or experience, is really important, or if it's just this unnecessary byproduct when it comes to making people feel better.
So a lot of people actually have been talking about this for years, like, well, what if you just knock someone out? What if you eliminated experience during a psilocybin trip or during one of these drugs in this broad class, in which I'll include ketamine for a
So that's exactly what Boris did.
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