At PSYCH Symposium in the British Museum on 6 July, the panel ‘Neuroimaging & Psychedelics: The Past, Present & Future’ explored how neuroimaging can inform our understanding of psychedelic medicines.
Hosted by Sifted journalist Tim Smith, a panel of experts in neurology and psychedelics discussed how technology such as fMRI and Clinical Positron Emission Tomography (PET) neuroimaging can provide new insights into the psychedelic experience, help us better understand their impacts and provide insights for drug development.
The panel explained that we don’t yet know whether the quality of a patient’s psychedelic experience relates to the later clinical effects.
Beata Godlewska, Clinical Researcher, Honorary Consultant Psychiatrist at Oxford University, explained that there is a delay of a few weeks between what happens in the brain and when people respond to the treatment, as the changes that happen in the brain “need to have a chance to interact with the world – with the environment.”
Godlewska noted: “This gap is changing thanks to neuroimaging studies showing that there are emotional and cognitive concepts that are rooted in the brain and, through the change in the brain function, it goes back to a normal activity level and we stop seeing things as negative – which was seen as psychological 20 years ago. I think this is a good direction of change.”
Smith questioned whether machine elves and other experiences under the influence of psychedelics such as DMT could ever be explained by neuroimaging.
Timmermann believes these technologies can help us get better at characterising what the biological facts of those experiences are – but on a fundamental level, experience “has its own register and has its own value”.
“I don’t think we can reduce experience fundamentally to any form of brain activity,” Timmermann responded.
“I have a bit of a conviction that we should develop ways of doing science about experience. We should improve the way that we incorporate experience into ways that are reproducible under scientific understanding, so we can apply the rigorous science to experience.
“If you ask me about the crisis in mental health right now – it is very much related to that gap in understanding. What is a mental health disorder and how does it relate to the experience we have in the world?”
Matt Wall explained that beyond fMRI, PET neuroimaging can provide vital insights on drug development including whether or not a drug gets past the blood-brain barrier, and exactly how strong an effect a drug is having on the receptors it is binding to.
Additionally, with the development of non-hallucinogenic, novel derivatives of psychedelic compounds, PET imaging could allow researchers to map new analogues onto specific mental health conditions.
