By Genís Oña. Updated: 2 May 2018
Science is the method that humans use mostly with the intention of knowing our world better. During the last centuries of our history, the progress of this knowledge has reached unimaginable levels, and in this process not only have achieved great scientific and technological advances, but it has also been achieved that a large part of the population can be aware of the themselves.
In this PsychologyOnline article, we will talk about Psychedelic drugs at the frontiers of human knowledge.
Interestingly, the progression of world knowledge has followed a certain order, according to which the mysteries of those objects farthest from the consciousness that recognized them, to attend to the closest: first were the heavens (Copernicus, Galileo) then the Earth (Werner, Hutton), the species (Darwin) until reaching the human being with the medical advances of the 20th century and the brain with the subsequent “decade of the brain".
As you can see, consciousness is the last
The "decade of the brain" allowed us to delve into the depths of our most complex organ and unravel some of its unknowns, but the study of the consciousness that hides behind the Observation and curiosity about the world goes much further, since it is certainly not limited to the brain, and represents the last frontier of inquiry scientific
In the author's opinion, the 21st century will be remembered for addressing this issue. And this is due, in part, to the renewed interest we are seeing in the study of hallucinogenic or psychedelic substances.
This process, called by some authors as psychedelic revival1, it has been taking place since the irruption of the second millennium approximately, and it has done so after a long vacuum of several decades in which research with these substances was not possible, mainly due to political pressure, as research was never prohibited in a explicit. In fact, the Treaty resulting from the Convention on Psychotropic Substances celebrated in Vienna in 1971 specifies in Article 7 that “all uses of substances in Schedule I are prohibited (which includes the most widely used psychedelic drugs such as LSD or psilocybin) except that for scientific and medical purposes made by duly authorized persons {…} will require that the manufacture, the trade and distribution of these substances are subject to a special licensing or authorization regime previous"2.
Beyond recreational use, which unfortunately is often harmful, these drugs have unique psychoactive effects. They allowed in their day the foundation of modern psychopharmacology3,4 and, in addition, they represent a unique opportunity to investigate the nature of the human mind, due to its unique ability to modify its functioning in various ways. The same discoverer of LSD, Dr. Albert Hofmann, predicted that this substance, for psychiatry, would be equivalent to the microscope for biology or the telescope for astronomy.
It would be impossible to list all the studies that have been carried out for just over 15 years, since they cover a wide spectrum of lines of research developed in several countries by professionals from disciplines as varied as psychology, pharmacology or chemistry. However, we can look at some examples that show the exponential growth of interest in these substances.
We can make a search on the clinicaltrials website, where many of the clinical trials that are underway around the world are registered. If we look for the clinical trials in which a psychedelic drug is administered and classify them by years, we obtain the attached graph in Table 1.
As we can see, of 0 studies registered between 2000 and 2005, we find 104 in the last two and a half years. It is worth mentioning that there were studies underway in the first period, and that currently there are many more than 104, as this is only an approximate measure, not all clinical trials are registered in this portal. However, we can get a pretty good idea of the current trend.
We can also choose to scientific information seekers broader like the one it offers us Web of Science, which collects multiple databases in which articles, books and any material from the entire field of academic knowledge are registered. In Table 2 we see how the content available on psychedelic drugs has increased considerably in recent years, especially since 2012, after a significant spike in the year 2009.
Two main lines of research can be distinguished in which psychedelic drugs are used. On the one hand, we have all the therapeutic side, which attempts to study the therapeutic potential of different substances, such as MDMA for the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder5 or psilocybin for the treatment of anxiety associated with terminal states6. In these cases the substances would act as adjuvants within a previously established psychotherapeutic process, although there are other substances that should not be linked to psychotherapy, such as ketamine in the treatment of depression7. On the other hand, there are other studies in which experimental research, and which try to take advantage of the mechanism of action of different psychedelic drugs to advance the neurobiological and neurochemical knowledge of the brain or our mind. Among many other things, the experience of dissolution of the ego and related to functional connectivity has been analyzed8,9 o the neural correlates of the expanded state of consciousness induced by these drugs have been described10.
Although these studies and their respective discoveries were unthinkable years ago and for this reason we must welcome them with enthusiasm, we must not forget to reserve a space in our critical judgment and remember that all these advances are carried out under a conceptual umbrella constituted by a strong reductionism materialistic. Psychedelic drugs, like research tools, represent an opportunity to review many of these conceptions that have governed neuropsychopharmacological science practically since its beginnings, since in the two lines of research previously mentioned, the importance of subjective factors and experiences in the action of psychedelics, not being able to reduce their therapeutic effect or phenomena such as consciousness to simple actions neurochemicals.
In the biomedical sciences this is usually used materialistic reductionism due to the complexity of the studied phenomena, otherwise any experimental approach would be impossible. However, the problem occurs when the simplified object is confused with the real object.
In short, it seems that in the coming years we will be able to effectively witness intensification of the study of the human mind and consciousness, a journey that we do not know very well what will bring us because, as the vanguard of physics, more than solved problems there are new and unexpected enigmas. To paraphrase Kierkegaard, perhaps our object of study is not a problem to solve, but a reality to experiment with.
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
