What do psychedelic
drugs do to our brains? AI could help us find out
The words people used to describe their trip
experiences could lead to better drugs to treat mental illness.
Psychedelic drugs have long been touted as possible
treatments for mental-health disorders like depression and PTSD. But very
little is really known about what these substances actually do to our
brains—and it can be hard to find out. Understanding how they work could help
unlock their potential.
Some scientists are using AI to figure it out. Researchers
at McGill University in Montreal are among those using natural language
processing—the technique that allows voice assistants or search engines to work
— to study written “trip reports” of drug users’ experiences. The work could
shed light on how hallucinogens trigger specific mental states, whether that be
euphoria, anxiety, or a sense of being at one with the world.
Danilo Bzdok, who co-led the research, hopes it will aid in
the design of new drugs for mental health disorders. “It’s the largest study
[of its kind] on psychedelics of all time,” he says.
Randomized clinical trials, which involve giving some
participants a drug, others a placebo, and comparing the effects of both, are
considered the gold standard in such studies.
But such trials are slow and expensive, and tend to involve
only a small number of participants. “[It takes] multiple years, costs a
seven-digit amount of money, [and] the ethics approvals take forever,” says
Bzdok.
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Instead, he and his colleagues at SUNY Downstate Health
Sciences University in New York City and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, used natural language processing to assess 6,850
written accounts of hallucinogenic drug use. Each account was written by a
person who took one of 27 drugs—including ketamine, MDMA, LSD and psilocin—in a
real-world setting rather than as part of a lab-based experiment. The accounts
were accessed from the website of Erowid,
a member-supported drug information organization.
The team then integrated this data with records of which
receptors in the brain each drug is known to interact with. Together, these
steps allow the team to identify which neurotransmitter receptors are linked to
words associated with specific drug experiences.
For example, words linked to mystical experiences, such as
“space,” “universe,” “consciousness,” “dimension,” and “breakthrough” were
associated with drugs that bind to specific dopamine, serotonin, and opioid
receptors.
Bzdok says the approach could provide new starting points
for drug development. In theory, drugs that are designed to target these
receptors should elicit specific aspects of psychedelic drug experiences, says
Bzdok, whose work was published today in the journal Science Advances.
Frederick Barrett, a psychedelics neuroscientist at Johns
Hopkins University in Baltimore, isn’t wholly convinced. “Folks don’t always
know [what drug they’re taking],” he says. “Doses are not always well
calibrated in the real world, and there’s a lot more variation that goes into
real-world experiences than it may be possible to even fully recognize.”
Bzdok’s approach is similar to that taken by MindState Design Labs, a biotech
company aiming to identify drugs that trigger beneficial mental states. The
company’s ultimate goal is the development of new treatments for mental-health
disorders. “I think it’s a great paper,” says Dillan DiNardo, company CEO. But
the company’s approach will focus more on individual receptors rather than
groups of receptors, he says.
The problem is that no one really knows which aspects of
psychedelic experiences are beneficial to mental health. A clinical trial
published last year, for example, suggested that MDMA was useful for some
people with severe PTSD. But that doesn’t mean that people who take MDMA
recreationally will be protected from developing the disorder.
And while it’s intuitive to think that drug experiences rich
in positive emotions will help people feel better, some people find that
experiencing negative emotions like anxiety and grief help them confront their
trauma, says Barrett.
The use of trip reports is valuable, and complements
traditional work, he says. But he adds that “anything generated from this
analysis would still have to be validated and verified within carefully
controlled clinical trials or other experiments.”
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