Psychedelics: Brain Mechanisms

Speaker:

Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD

Director of Psychedelics Division - Neuroscape

Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor - Neurology and Psychiatry

University of California San Francisco

Lab Website

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Abstract:

The talk takes a multi-level approach to the question of how psychedelics work in the brain. Key themes include: the pharmacology of classic serotonergic psychedelics, what this tells us about the function and evolutionary purpose of the serotonin 2A receptor, the acute brain effects of psychedelics as determined by functional brain imaging, the entropic brain hypothesis, current evidence for psychedelic therapy, the new 'REBUS' hierarchical predictive processing model of the action of psychedelics, and how this maps on to the phenomenology of the acute psychedelic experience and therapeutic outcomes.