The mechanism by which the LSD obscures the boundary between himself and others is obviously the first step in treating schizophrenia

byMatias carcamo

The effect of "LSD" which is one of hallucinogenic drugs, like symptoms of schizophrenia, is that "self-consciousness collapses and the boundary between myself and others becomes ambiguous". If it is possible to identify which receptor in the brain LSD acts on, can it be useful for treatment of schizophrenia? As a result, researchers investigated how drugs can interfere with the influence on self-consciousness of subjects who administered LSD.

Role of the 5-HT2A receptor in self- and other-initiated social interaction in LSD-induced states - a pharmacological fMRI study | Journal of Neuroscience
http://www.jneurosci.org/content/early/2018/03/19/JNEUROSCI.1939-17.2018

Scientists Discover That LSD Blurs The Line Between You And Others: Health: Tech Times
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/223276/20180319/scientists-discover-that-lsd-blurs-the-line-between-you-and-others.htm

Scientists Made a Startling Discovery About Schizophrenia After Dosing People with LSD
https://www.livescience.com/62059-schizophrenia-lsd-sense-self.html

LSD blurs boundary between self and other | EurekAlert! Science News
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-03/sfn-lbb031318.php


"Self-consciousness" is greatly involved in mental diseases such as schizophrenia and depression. For example, patients with schizophrenia will find it difficult to follow their own consciousness, and in the case of depression, they will be obsessed with self-centered thinking patterns and become "contrary to" themselves.

When LSD is taken, Katrin Preller, a psychologist at Zurich psychiatric university hospital in Switzerland, said that LSD is self-conscious of people, because the boundary between self and others becomes vague as well as mental illness like schizophrenia We investigated how to destroy them. Although it is worldwide restricted to administer LSD to subjects for research purposes, Switzerland is one of the few countries allowed for LSD administration for research purposes.

In the study, a total of 24 people, 18 males and 6 females who do not suffer from mental illness, were taken as subjects and "when taking LSD" "when not taking LSD" "hindering the effect of LSD with LSDKetanserin"When I took the MRI scan of the subject's brain in three patterns. When doing MRI scan, the game screen is displayed to the subject through the headset and tasks "make eye contact with avatar made with computer" are imposed. Then, after completing the first task, the subject performs the task of "warping the line of sight to the space the avatar is seeing". People whose self-consciousness like collapsed schizophrenic patients can not do the above task.

Ketanserin is a drug that inhibits LSD from acting on the serotonin receptor called "5-HT2". It was thought that 5 - HT 2 is the key to the mechanism by which LSD affects self - consciousness from past research on animals. It is the fact that I investigated in this research whether the effect of LSD can be somewhat reduced by deliberately inhibiting the influence of 5SH2 by LSD.

However, what was revealed in the research was more than "somewhat". The group that was inhibited by 5-HT2 with ketanserin had the same LSD effect as the placebo group.

"This result was surprising, as LSD interacts not only with 5-HT2 but also with various receptors in the brain," said Preller, who conducted the study. However, it is said that the effect of LSD was the weakest when it was the first dose of ketanserin.

byGoaShape

We concluded that this research is provisionally that 5 - HT 2 has a major role in controlling self - consciousness, and Mr. Preller said that in the next study, for patients with psychiatric disorders I am trying to find out if symptoms are relieved by administering a drug targeting 5-HT2.