New Study: Psychedelics Reopen Social Reward Learning Period

A new study has just been published by Johns Hopkins researchers, showing psychedelics reopen the brain for social reward learning, results that could have interesting implications for psychedelic medicine research.

Published in Nature by a team of researchers led by Gul Dolen, the data supports a new hypothesis of psychedelic drug action. The results from rodent subjects show pro-social preferences decline with age; but psychedelics like psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, and ketamine can re-establish this openness in adult mice.

During specific periods of brain development, the nervous system exhibits heightened sensitivity to ethologically relevant stimuli, as well as increased malleability for synaptic, circuit and behavioural modifications. These mechanistically constrained windows of time are called critical periods and neuroscientists have long sought methods to reopen them for therapeutic benefit.

Recently, we have discovered a novel critical period for social reward learning and shown that the empathogenic psychedelic MDMA is able to reopen this critical period.

Translation. There are “critical periods” where brains are more open to stimuli and potential learning — and psychedelics can re-establish or re-open them.

The data also showed that this effect correlates with duration of drug action, and that the time of critical period re-opening is proportional to the duration of psychedelic effects.

This shows that psychedelic effect might be a critical part of the potential benefits, and so could have implications for the development of shorter-acting or “non-psychedelic” psychedelics.

For more on this study, read Johns Hopkins’ summary here. 

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