LSD persistently disrupts affective pain processing.
Jared Plotkin, Elaine Zhu, Mélanie Druart, Qiaosheng Zhang, Eric Hu, Deven Cathcart, Nellie Jun, Leo Kwok, Tanya Sippy, Jing Wang
bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology May 11, 2026 preprint DOI: 10.64898/2026.05.06.723205 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Experimental study |
|---|---|
| Population | Rats |
| Intervention | Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) |
| Dose | a single dose |
| Topics | LSD |
| Key findings | A single dose of LSD persistently reduces pain affect in rats by suppressing nociceptive responses in the anterior cingulate cortex, dissociating neural excitability from sensory encoding. |
Abstract
Psychedelics produce long-lasting effects, but their circuit mechanisms remain unclear. Here we show that, in rats, a single dose of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) persistently reduces pain affect. This effect is recapitulated by local administration in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), but not primary somatosensory cortex. Neuropixels recordings reveal that LSD suppresses stimulus-evoked nociceptive responses in the ACC, reducing the encoding of aversive value. Despite increasing intrinsic excitability ex vivo, LSD reduces the maximum stimulus-evoked firing of ACC neurons in vivo, indicating a dissociation between excitability and sensory encoding. Together, these findings show that psychedelics disrupt the cortical transformation of nociceptive input into aversive representations.