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In the naturalistic setting (from Amazonian ceremonies to European raves), psychedelics are, more often than not, consumed in groups. Beyond enabling those elusive but seemingly quite frequent telepathic events, it has long been hypothesized that this social context plays a major role in the therapeutic potential of these drugs. However, there had never been a study investigating the overlap between social cognition and psychedelics. To finally address this crucial matter, researchers from the University of Coimbra conducted a groundbreaking quantitative meta-analysis including whole-brain fMRI data from over 2100 participants, to explore the link between DMN and ToM in the context of psychedelics.
Among other findings, they observed that the regions where neural processing related to social cognition, ToM, DMN, and psychedelics overlap are the anterior and posterior cingulate cortices and, when psychedelics act on these nodes, the subjects experience changes in self-perspective and autobiographical memories. These observations suggest that this activity may underlie the potential of psychedelics to modulate social reward learning circuits in disorders presenting deficits in social cognition and ToM -such as ASD- and, once again, situate the psychological effects of psychedelics as the core mediators of their therapeutic outcomes.
Read the full research publication here.
- Reported by Sergio Lázaro Martínez
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