A team of researchers from Germany conducted experiments with LSD on 25 volunteers and found out exactly how this drug alters human consciousness.
The drug LSD - lysergic acid diethylamide - was discovered back in 1938, and seriously puzzled scientists. They found that the substance has a powerful effect on humans, causing hallucinations and an altered state of creation. But they could not understand why this is happening. And only now researchers think they have found the cause of such strange symptoms.
A research team from the University Psychiatric Hospital Zurich published the results of their work on the PNAS portal. Scientists selected 25 volunteers and gave them LSD, and then scanned their brains. Some were given ketanserin, a drug that blocks serotonin receptors. This is a neurotransmitter, which, as was thought earlier, causes the very "coming" from the drug.
When volunteers were asked to complete a questionnaire after completing the trial, there was one important item. Thanks to him, it turned out that people who had blocked serotonin receptors did not experience any subjective drug effects from the drug.
The scan results were equally interesting. Scientists have seen that LSD interrupts a chain of neurons that connect four main brain regions, including the thalamus, a kind of information filter. In fact, due to this, the dose of LSD allows more information to pass to other parts of the brain, bypassing this barrier.
Now that scientists understand how the drug works, they can use this information to study disorders that cause the same symptoms, such as depression and schizophrenia.
Vasily Makarov