Abstract Psychedelic substances such as psilocybin and ketamine may represent the future of antidepressant treatment, due to their rapid prolonged effects on mood cognition. The current body psychedelic research has focused administration treatment within a psychiatric context. Here, instead, we put test contention that it is necessary evaluate state this literature from broader biopsychosocial...

Article responding to criticism of the author's book regarding research in near-death experiences (NDEs) and clarifying that psychedelic molecules may be a factor some NDEs but is only one not relevant all NDEs.

Ayahuasca, a South American psychotropic plant tea obtained from Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis, combines monoamine oxidase-inhibiting beta-carboline alkaloids with N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT), a psychedelic agent showing 5-HT(2A) agonist activity. In a clinical research setting, ayahuasca has demonstrated a combined stimulatory and psychedelic effect profile, as measured by subje...

The state of consciousness induced by N,N-dimethyltryptamine (DMT) is one of the most extraordinary of any naturally-occurring psychedelic substance. Users consistently report the complete replacement of normal subjective experience with a novel "alternate universe," often densely populated with a variety of strange objects and other highly complex visual content, including what appear to be se...

What’s to be done? Changing the international classifications enshrined in UN schedules would be difficult, suggests Nutt, but there are things that individual governments could do to help neuroscience, such as giving hospitals a general permission to use banned substances, the same way as UK hospitals are already allowed to use heroin. Amanda Feilding, founder and director of the Beckley Found...

Though synesthesia research has seen a huge growth in recent decades, and tremendous progress has been made in terms of understanding the mechanism and cause of synesthesia, we are still left mostly in the dark when it comes to the mechanistic commonalities (if any) among developmental, acquired and drug-induced synesthesia. We know that many forms of synesthesia involve aberrant structural or ...