Psychedelic drugs may help repair your brain, study reveals
Another news piece on the benefits of psychedelic drugs
It’s getting a bit ridiculous, to be honest.
Just how much evidence is needed before the world recognizes what ancients and ravers have always known: the benefits of psychedelics?
Just go and Google the topic and you will find a mountain of studies researching different aspects of psychedelic delights like magic mushrooms, MDMA, DMT and LSD, and how they can help us find relief from anxiety, depression, creative plateau’s and more.
Well the latest study might be the biggest breakthrough yet, proving the hypothesis that psychedelics alter neuronal structure i.e. helps repair the brain. You know the brain, the elusive organ that studies itself, responsible for our entire consciousness?
Researchers from the University of California just published a study in Cell Reports hinting at how psychedelics may repair the brain’s overall function, including growing new dendrites, increasing the density of dendritic spines, and here’s a big one- multiplying new neural connections (synapses), leading to the overall improvement of the brain’s plasticity.
Mirroring Ketamine
The results are similar to changes seen in people who take Ketamine, the anaesthetic and recreational drug recently reintroduced as an experimental antidepressant due to its fast effects and diminishing of suicidal thoughts.
“Ketamine is no longer our only option,” Olson states, “Our work demonstrates that there are a number of distinct chemical scaffolds capable of promoting plasticity like ketamine, providing additional opportunities for medicinal chemists to develop safer and more effective alternatives.”
The results are so outstanding that the team is already looking into the development of safe analogs to psychedelics due to the addictive nature of some of these substances, pushing to rebrand these drugs as “psychoplastogens.”
Could this be the get-out-of-jail card psychedelic drugs deserve?
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