Dr. Doris Tsao,
University of California,
Berkeley
Our research will try to understand how special substances called psychedelics can help the brain see the world differently. When people are sad or worried, their brains sometimes get “stuck” thinking the same way over and over again, like a broken record. Psychedelics seem to help the brain break out of those patterns.
We’re studying how this works by showing pictures of faces while brain activity is being carefully measured. We’ll administer psychedelics to see how the brain changes when we show ambiguous pictures that can be interpreted in multiple ways. We think that psychedelics help the brain by loosening its “old ideas” and making it more open to new information.
We hope this research will help us learn more about treating diseases like depression, anxiety, and PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder), where people’s thoughts and feelings can get stuck in painful ways. We hope our work will lead to new, better treatments that help people feel better and more flexible in their thinking.
