Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
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Hey, short wavers. Chances are you've heard about psychedelics once or twice. And shortwave producer Rachel Carlson has been diving into the science behind them. She's joining me this week to talk all about them. Hey, Rachel.
Hey, Gina. So psychedelics are being studied to treat lots of different kinds of conditions.
Chronic Lyme disease, Alzheimer's disease, anorexia nervosa, chronic back pain, obsessive compulsive disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder.
That's Albert Garcia-Romeo. He's a psychologist and psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University. Albert ran a study using a psychedelic called psilocybin. It's the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And he wanted to see if it could help people who'd previously had Lyme disease. Because you may not realize it, but Lyme disease often comes with lots of psychological symptoms in addition to all the physical ones. Lori Unruh Snyder is one of Albert's patients in that study. She's an agriculture professor. She got a tick bite. She got Lyme disease. But it took doctors four years to get to that diagnosis.
Wow, that's a long time.
Yeah, and even after she took a course of antibiotics for treatment, she told me she still didn't feel like herself at all.
I remember distinctly when I was teaching a class, I literally got up in front of the students and my mind just like almost blanked, stopped. I thought I was having early symptoms of like Alzheimer's or dementia and was like, something's really wrong with me.
So she tried psilocybin in this study. Does she feel better?
She does. She told me she felt like she was expressing herself differently. She changed the way she taught her classes. even ones she'd been teaching for years.
Usually as professors, after, you know, 15, 20 years teaching, you roll out the same PowerPoint as the last time. But I couldn't do that. I literally stopped myself and I said, I'm seeing things differently.
But here's the thing, Gina. Researchers like Albert, they don't know exactly why Lori sees things differently. Is it because the drug altered her brain chemistry? Or was it the journey she took while she was on psilocybin? I called myself, like, the new Lori.
Like, there's the Lori before psilocybin and the Lori after. But it's like, I went through this journey of Hearing those that I loved that had passed, you know, saying to me, it's okay, you'll be fine.
Okay, so Lori has this really powerful emotional experience and maybe that's what helped?
Yeah, you know, people often take psychedelics looking for some kind of experience that could transform their lives or change their outlook on everything. So if you're a scientist, how do you tell if the effect of a psychedelic is because of a change in brain chemistry or because of this spiritual journey? I spoke to Boris Heifetz. He's an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist who works at Stanford. And he said it kind of boils down to one question.
How do you control for a transformative experience?
And once I heard him say it that way, I couldn't get it out of my head.
How do you control for a transformative experience?
So I went on my own journey, not like my stuffed animals are talking to me and I can't look directly into a mirror kind of journey. Not like that. But a reporting journey with lots of scientists who had lots of opinions.
So today on the show, psychedelics. How do we entangle the ways they change our experience of the world with how they might change our brains?
Is it possible for researchers to separate those things when weighing their potential benefits? And does the difference matter?
We're breaking down the history of psychedelics and some of the roadblocks researchers are facing when it comes to how to study them now. I'm Rachel Carlson. And I'm Regina Barber. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR. Okay, Rachel, I have a question. Haven't people been talking about and, like, studying psychedelics for a long time?
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