Clinical Research
Research restarted in the 2010s with brain imaging: under psychedelics the default mode network, the system associated with a continuous sense of self, goes quiet, and regions that normally ignore each other start talking. LSD specifically is back in trials for anxiety. Alongside the science: microdosing, popularised well ahead of any evidence and mostly failing to beat placebo in controlled trials. And in 2024 the FDA rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD, which is a useful reminder that the renaissance is not a straight line.
Part of LSD
19 moments in this segment.
- - What the imaging shows. The finding that made the field: under psychedelics the brain's default mode network, the system associated with the sense of a continuous self, goes quiet and normally separate regions start talking to each other.
- - Carhart-Harris. Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College, who ran the first modern brain-imaging studies of LSD, the first time anyone had looked directly at what the drug does to a living brain.
- - Psychedelics: Lifting the Veil | Robin Carhart-Harris | TEDxWarwick. Psychedelics: Lifting the Veil, neuroscientist Robin Carhart-Harris.
- - Breakthrough designation. The FDA granting breakthrough therapy status to psychedelic-assisted treatment, the moment the renaissance stopped being a fringe argument.
- - Dr Robin Carhart-Harris - Psychedelics and Brain Imaging
- - Rick Doblin. Doblin founded MAPS in 1986 with the explicit long-term aim of making psychedelic therapy legal medicine, and spent thirty-five years on the regulatory path.
- - The evidence, checked. The awkward finding that controlled microdosing trials mostly fail to beat placebo, and that the placebo effect here is itself substantial and interesting.
- - Structures that stopped talking in infancy. On the connectivity changes, and the argument that the experience is less an addition than a temporary removal of filtering.
- - Oregon. 2020, the first American state to do either.
- - 2-Minute Neuroscience: LSD. (2020).
- - David Nutt. Nutt, who was sacked as the UK government's chief drugs adviser for saying in public that the harm rankings were not evidence-based, and who went on to run psychedelic research anyway.
- - Microdosing. Sub-perceptual doses taken on a schedule, popularised well ahead of any evidence, largely through Silicon Valley.
- - How psychedelics change the brain. A public-science treatment of where the neuroscience actually is, as opposed to where enthusiasts claim it is.
- - LSD as an anxiety drug. MindMed's clinical programme, LSD specifically, rather than psilocybin, returned to trials as a treatment for generalised anxiety.
- - The FDA writes the rules. The agency's first draft guidance on running psychedelic clinical trials, which is what a field looks like when it is being normalised.
- - Where the science stands. A long conversation with Carhart-Harris on mechanism, therapy and the gap between the two.
- - Does it actually work?. A careful public accounting of what the microdosing studies do and do not show.
- - The FDA says no. In 2024 an FDA advisory panel rejected MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD over trial-design and conduct concerns, and the agency followed. A reminder that the renaissance is not a straight line.
- - What the rejection meant. Coverage of the decision and its effect on a field that had been assuming approval was imminent.
