Psychedelic therapy has proven useful in treating depression, PTSD, and addiction, but no one really knew why it worked. New research may hold the answers.
exhibits heightened sensitivity to stimuli related to specific functions, as well as increased malleability for synaptic circuit modifications. The constrained window of time during which the brain can develop a specific function is called a critical period. Recently, a novel critical period for social reward learning was discovered.
A time-honored research protocol called conditioned place preference was used to measure whether social contact provides sufficient reward to develop a preference for the place where the social contact occurred.
And here is the remarkable thing: This research demonstrated not only that reopening the social reward learning critical period in mice is a shared property across psychedelic drugs. It also found that “the time course of critical period reopening is proportional to the duration of acute subjective effects reported in humans.” Each psychedelic keeps the window for social reward learning open in direct proportion to how long its acute effects last in humans.
The fact that such different psychedelics had the same ability to reopen a period of social reward learning, which is the linchpin for their therapeutic effect, suggests a deeper underlying mechanism, and Nardousupply an apparent mechanism.
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