The psychedelic substance LSD can lead to a loss of “self,” in a phenomenon known as ego dissolution, say scientists who used functional magnetic resonance images to investigate what happens in the brains of people using the drug.
![[LSD]](http://i0.wp.com/cdn-prod.medicalnewstoday.com/content/images/articles/308/308996/lsd.jpg?w=1845)
The findings are published in the journal Current Biology.
According to the study, lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) is a non-selective serotonin-receptor agonist. It was first synthesized in 1938, and it was identified as a strong psychoactive substance in 1943.
In the 1950s and 1960s, LSD was used in the context of psychological research and psychiatric practice because of its ability to alter consciousness.
However, this is the first time that researchers have examined how LSD changes brain function.
Psychedelic drugs are known to reduce, or even erase, an individual’s sense of self, as if the boundary between the user and the rest of the world has disappeared.
This loss of ego can give rise to a fully conscious experience, say the study authors.
In addition, this state of selflessness, fully reversible in those taking psychedelics, also features in some psychiatric and neurological disorders.
Current findings suggest that LSD and other psychedelic drugs could help scientists gain important insights into the brain, potentially offering a biological explanation as to what constitutes reality.
An international team, led by Enzo Tagliazucchi of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, scanned the brains of 15 healthy people after they had taken LSD. They compared the results with those of a control group.
Among people who had taken the drug, the fMRI images revealed enhanced global connectivity in many higher-level regions of the brain. There was a significant overlap between the regions with higher levels of global connectivity and those housing the receptors that respond to LSD.
Higher-level regions are those that deal with association, while lower-level functioning relates to the senses.
There was also evidence of higher levels of communication between brain networks that are normally separate, resulting in greater brain connectivity.
Moreover, the higher the level of global connectivity in a subject’s brain, the more that person reported a sense of ego dissolution.
The images suggest that ego dissolution occurs as regions of the brain involved in higher cognition become heavily over-connected.
Tagliazucchi explains:
“There is ‘objective reality’ and then there is ‘our reality.’ Psychedelic drugs can distort our reality and result in perceptual illusions. But the reality we experience during ordinary wakefulness is also, to a large extent, an illusion.”
He gives vision as an example. When we see, if any visual information suddenly becomes absent, the brain fills it in; veins in our eyes are filtered so that we do not notice them; and the brain stabilizes our visual perception, to compensate for the constant movement of our eyes.
- LSD is a powerful, mood-altering chemical that can cause hallucinations
- The component lysergic acid comes from a fungus that grows on rye and other grains
- The percentage of population who had ever used LSD in the US fell from 13.3% in 2001 to 7.1% in 2013.
“So when we take psychedelics,” he says, “We are, it could be said, replacing one illusion by another illusion. This might be difficult to grasp, but our study shows that the sense of self or ‘ego’ could also be part of this illusion.”
The researchers observed increased global connectivity in the frontoparietal cortex, a part of the brain involved in self-consciousness, and also between this portion and the sensory areas. These are the parts that receive information about the world around us and convey it to other brain areas for further processing.
The authors speculate that this increased communication between high- and low-level regions could represent “a collapse in the normal hierarchical organization of the brain.”
This could lead to a blurring of the boundaries between lower-level systems, which are anchored to the outside world, and higher-level systems, which operate apart from sensory information.
Could this be related to the blurring of ego boundaries, the phenomenon of ego dissolution and the sense of “expanded awareness” experienced by people using psychedelics?
In other words, the authors propose that, as LSD strengthens the process of information-sharing between regions, so the link between our sense of self and the sense of the environment becomes stronger, potentially diluting the boundaries of our individuality.
The team also noted changes in the working of a brain region previously linked to “out of body experiences,” when people feel as if they have left their bodies.
On the basis of these findings, Tagliazucchi foresees a role for psychedelic drugs within carefully controlled research settings. He plans to carry out further neuroimaging to investigate a range of states of consciousness, such as anesthesia, sleep and coma.
He also hopes to examine what happens when dreaming, compared with the experience of a psychedelic state.
Meanwhile, researchers from Imperial College London, who were also involved in the study, are looking into other psychedelic drugs and how they could be of use in treating disorders such as depression and anxiety.
Medical News Today reported last year on research suggesting that the use of psychedelic drugs does not increase the risk of mental health problems.