Opening The Doors Of Depression

For the past decade Prof David Nutthas been investigating the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs. He spoke to Jason Goodyer about his pioneering work on using psilocybin to treat depression and the effect that psychedelics have on other mental disorders

- Jason Goodyer

YOUR WORK IS CENTRED ON PSYCHEDELIC DRUGS. WHAT DOES THE TERM ‘PSYCHEDELIC’ ACTUALLY MEAN?

Psychedelics was a term developed back in the 1950s by people like Aldous Huxley [the author of The Doors Of Perception]. Psychedelic means mind-manifesting. Typically, we talk about psychedelic drugs as drugs that produce altered states of perception and consciousness, such as magic mushrooms, LSD, mescaline, peyote, DMT, ayahuasca. It turns out they all work on a particular receptor in the brain called the serotonin 5HT2A receptor.

WHAT IS THE ROLE OF THE SEROTONIN 5HT2A RECEPTOR?

The human brain is loaded with them, all in the parts of the brain where you do your thinking and your analysis of yourself. They tie together your consciousness with your other senses. They’re really in that circuit that kind of defines what you are as a human being. When you stimulate those receptors with psychedelics, you change the way the brain processes things.

The brain is an amazing organ; it’s the most efficient computer, 10 times more energy efficient than any computer we’ve yet invented. One of the reasons that the brain is so efficient is that it learns very quickly what to predict. Brains make inferences and we live through those inferences because it’s just so much more efficient. If your brain had to update every, say, 15 milliseconds, everything that’s gone into it, that would consume enormous amounts of energy. So, the brain basically looks for change. It sees what’s there and listens to what’s there, and then when things change, it takes notice. The rest of the time, it just says that things haven’t changed.