Taking LSD temporarily suppresses the work of nerve cells that are responsible for the functioning of the "sense of self", which forces a person not to distinguish between himself and those around him. This could be used to create drugs for schizophrenia and depression, the researchers say in an article published in the Journal of Neuroscience.
“LSD blurs the line between the feeling of oneself and other people during conversations and social interactions with them. Using MRI, we were able to show that this is because the drug affects those parts of the brain that are responsible for the work of self-awareness. And these same shifts in cell activity changed the way the volunteers communicated with others,”says Katrin Preller, a neurophysiologist at the University of Zurich (Switzerland).
LSD, lysergic acid diethylamide, or simply "acid", was accidentally discovered by the famous chemist Albert Hoffman in 1938 while experimenting with spores of the parasitic ergot fungus. LSD was originally intended to be used as a treatment for schizophrenia, but acid quickly became a popular psychedelic drug among young people in the 1960s.
In recent years, as Preller notes, there has been a renewed interest in LSD and other psychedelic drugs among physicians and neurophysiologists. Observing how they act on the brains of volunteers, scientists are trying to understand how they change the work of the psyche and consciousness, and assess the acceptability of their use as medicines.
Preller and her colleagues have been conducting similar experiments for several years. For example, last year they managed to find out that LSD affects special nerve cells, on the surface of which there are special serotonin receptors, the 5-HT2A molecule. If the work of these receptors is blocked, then all the effects of the action of the drug disappear.
With this discovery, Swiss neurophysiologists tried to figure out exactly what these nerve cells control. To do this, the scientists used the help of the same volunteers and the same experimental technique.
During the experiments, biologists gave their wards a piece of paper that was soaked in either LSD, or ketanserin, a substance that blocks it, or plain water. When the volunteers took the drug, the scientists placed them in a magnetic resonance imaging scanner and monitored changes in brain function.
During this process, biologists displayed various images, including photographs of people, on a monitor located inside the scanner, and monitored the movement of the pupils of the volunteers, trying to understand how they react to these images.
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As it turned out, LSD primarily affects those nerve cells that control the functioning of the "sense of self" and social interactions with other people. As scientists note, "acid" lowers the level of activity of these neurons, which is why a person gradually ceases to feel the border between the outside world, other people and himself, which may explain the effects that "psychonauts" often talk about.
The discovery of this part of the brain, as noted by Preller, can be used in medicine. Its activity, in her opinion, may be low in people suffering from schizophrenia, and abnormally high in people suffering from depression and other mental disorders. Accordingly, suppression or stimulation of these neurons can help these patients get rid of these problems with the work of "sense of self", the scientists conclude.