psychedelics
Article
psychedelics is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between February 13, 2021 and August 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “ketamine and psychedelics, which is a good match for ketamine-assisted and psychedelic-assisted therapies”; “Psychedelics are pretty well-tested (albeit informally) for things like chronic pain”. It most often appears alongside 5-HT2A receptors, AMPA receptors, ampakines.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: February 13, 2021
- Last seen: August 08, 2021
Appears In
Related Pages
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- 5-HT2A receptors (1 shared issues)
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- AMPA receptors (1 shared issues)
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- ampakines (1 shared issues)
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- Bessel van der Kolk (1 shared issues)
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- Chapin (1 shared issues)
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- coherence therapy (1 shared issues)
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- Dr. van der Kolk (1 shared issues)
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- EMDR (1 shared issues)
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- Friston On Computational Mood (1 shared issues)
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- ketamine (1 shared issues)
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- LSD (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Fourth, what do we know about all of this pharmacologically? Priors seem to be encoded in NMDA receptors and their relative strength modulated by 5-HT2A receptors, so if you wanted to downweight priors (and so relatively upweight sensory evidence), you would want NDMA antagonists or 5-HT2A agonists. That would mean ketamine and psychedelics, which is a good match for ketamine-assisted and psychedelic-assisted therapies where you take the relevant drug, then explore a trauma or memory that you're "stuck" on, then find that your explorations have "unstuck" you much more than they would have without the drug. Sensory evidence seems to be something something AMPA receptors, so maybe ampakines would also be helpful here, but I don't know of any sufficiently good ones, except maybe ketamine again.
Inline links: encoded in NMDA receptors, 5-HT2A receptors
So this model, where inappropriately narrow sensory evidence channels create a bottleneck that makes it impossible to process sufficiently traumatic memories, ties a lot of things together. It gives me the understanding of the trauma-somatization link that The Body Keeps The Score never quite managed. It helps tie together the mechanisms of action for psychedelics, meditation, and therapy. And it resolves the apparent dichotomy between depression as low confidence and depression as negative prior that's been bothering me for so long. This is the most exciting paper I've read so far this year and an important addition to my understanding of predictive processing and psychiatry in general.
2: A lot of people reading that post overestimated whether psychedelics could help them with their own weird issues. Psychedelics are pretty well-tested (albeit informally) for things like chronic pain. They seem to work okay but not miraculously, kind of like everything else. I don’t think this necessarily means the mechanism doesn’t work - if you chose a random antibiotic and took one dose of it to prevent random sinus problems, that would probably also only work “okay”, since it would mix infective causes with non-infective causes, appropriate antibiotics with inappropriate antibiotics, and a single dose of antibiotic isn’t very effective anyway. I think psychedelics as treatment for things like chronic pain are at the “we should figure out the mechanism” stage and not the “patients can use this as a miracle cure” stage.