Therapeutic value of hallucinogens

Recent studies reported in the Archives of General Psychiatry [link] and the Journal of Psychopharmacology [link], reveal that hallucinogens actually have legitimate therapeutic value. Scientists now believe these agents have the potential to help patients with post-traumatic stress, drug and alcohol dependence, unremitting pain, depression and the existential anxiety of terminal illness. According to Roland Griffiths, author of the first study:

“The psilocybin experience takes away the veil of fear and enables patients to see things in a more expanded and interconnected way. It can relieve the existential anxiety of terminal illness. The psychological improvements have helped many to reverse the course of their illness, which reinforces the notion that one should never underestimate the healing power of the psyche. Scientifically, these compounds are way too important not to study.”

This sounds familiar. In college I wrote my undergraduate thesis on the Neurological Basis of Hallucinatory Experience. I had the foresight (or audacity) at the time to recommend that hallucinogens would be a useful method-of-investigation for Psychologists. I said: “.. it would be negligent not to consider the guided peyote session as portal into alternative states of consciousness” [link].

Synthesizing minds

At a graduate seminar many years ago, a fellow student named David Stoltenberg proposed a theory that said that the simple act of reading is a “cross-sensory” event in the brain ..he even had a name for it ..“sensory synesthesia” ..which he described as “perceiving the sound of a color ..or the light of a sigh.” He was giving a multi-media presentation to demonstrate this idea ..but it didn’t turn out the way he planned ..the projectors malfunctioned ..the main point got lost ..and what I was able to get out of it left me feeling unconvinced ..it sounded too much like science fiction. When I think back, I realize I owe Dave a big apology ..and a pound of red Lebanese ..he was right ..you have to be able to “hear” what you “see” in order “understand” what you “read”.

Research now shows that synesthesia, far from being a “fringe” phenomenon, can actually enhance cognitive function in addition to being part of the reading process. Many notable artists, poets and novelist are thought to have this ability. The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory areas of the brain [link]. It probably lies on a spectrum of the way we normally perceive and experience the world. In other words, we all have it ..just some more than others [link].

Calculating minds

Success at math is often more about focusing attention and screening distractions (caused by threat and anxiety) ..than it is about activating areas of the brain actually involved with math calculation. Sian Beilock (University of Chicago) reports: 

“We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to separate anticipatory neural activity from what’s occurring while performing math. Increased activity in frontoparietal regions of the cortex, involved with focusing attention and suppressing anxiety, were better predictors of math scores than activity in regions associated with arithmetic calculation (the left intraparietal sulcus of the cortex) [link].” 

Think about walking across a suspension bridge if you're afraid of heights versus if you're not – it’s a completely different ballgame. This work suggests that educational intervention emphasizing anxiety-reduction (rather than additional math training) will be most effective in revealing a population of mathematically competent individuals, who might otherwise go undiscovered.

Parsing Gabrielle

Notes made while watching interview with Diane Sawyer.

Her speech centers are still intact ..but some of the pathways that connect speech with concepts may have been severed. They show her a picture of a table and she comes up with words all right ..just not the right ones. She’s guessing and her therapy involves prompting her to narrow down the range of possibilities until she’s in the vicinity of ‘table-ness’. It is geared toward building alternate pathways to replace the one’s she lost. The connection between her lexicon (the place where words are stored) and semantic memory (memory for meaning) may be all that’s affected. Prognosis is good. She can read words from her lexicon OK. Her difficulty is connecting them with ideas in the mind. So it’s just a process of generating alternate pathways. I wonder if she can write or type in complete sentences. I wonder if there’s a way to prompt the language pathways of the brain to act with equipotentiality, same as they did during childhood, to help facilitate the regenerative process. Apparently music can help because it activates greater brain-area ..and she can sing the words she has difficulty coming up with on her own.  Spontaneously however, she doesn’t speak in full sentences yet. Her two word utterances show a ‘return to the kernal’ ..meaning she can express the main idea without the generating the phrase-structure necessary to produce a full sentence. Hopefully, she hasn’t lost the rules of grammar ..only the ability to pick-out the words to express them. 

Kernal: When asked if she wants to return to Congress, she relies: “No, better!”
Generative grammar: Two embedded verb phrases are required to turn the kernal “No, better!” into the sentence: “No, I want to get better first”