Early and Contemporary Human Neuroimaging Studies of Serotonergic Psychedelics
Preprints.org preprint DOI: 10.20944/preprints202005.0510.v1 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Review |
|---|---|
| Topics | Serotonin |
| Citations | 2 |
| Key findings | Neuroimaging techniques are essential for studying the neural correlates of altered consciousness induced by serotonergic psychedelics in humans. |
Abstract
Serotonergic psychedelics are known to elicit changes in conscious awareness, including perception of the environment and the self, as well as in mood, emotion and different aspects of cognition (Nichols, 2016). The effect of these compounds is complex and resists a straightforward classification that is useful for other drugs, such as “stimulants” or “sedatives”. While the effects of certain psychedelics do have a stimulant dimension, their defining characteristic is the capacity to temporarily induce a state of altered consciousness. Because of this, the study of psychedelics cannot be based only on animal models, since humans are alone in their capacity to explicitly report the contents of their conscious awareness. Psychedelic research with healthy human subjects necessitates techniques for the non-invasive recording of brain activity or its physiological and metabolic correlates. These techniques are referred to as “neuroimaging”, and here we review their application in the study of the neural correlates of altered consciousness induced by serotonergic psychedelics.
Comparable studies
Other narrative reviews on serotonin, most cited first.
Citations in the library
Cites 60
- The Brain's Default Mode Network Annual Review of Neuroscience May 4, 2015
- Neural correlates of consciousness: progress and problems Nature Reviews Neuroscience April 20, 2016
- The entropic brain: a theory of conscious states informed by neuroimaging research with psychedelic drugs Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 2014
- Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences April 11, 2016
- Homological scaffolds of brain functional networks Journal of the Royal Society, Interface October 29, 2014
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