Psychedelic Research

This paper found the hallucinogen DOI reduced the power of low-frequency oscillations (0.3–4 Hz) and altered (that is, desynchronized) the relationship between pyramidal cell firing and slow oscillations in anesthetized rats. Presumably other classical serotonergic hallucinogens would do the same. This is particularly intriguing because oscillations are a potential mechanism of ‘binding’ the activity of neurons that are processing the same information. In other words, it is possible that these lower frequency oscillations serve to connect neural activity in distant neurons. The changes induced by DOI might be important for the fundamental effects of hallucinogens on consciousness. One caveat is that the animals were anesthetized. Still, the finding is consistent with what Jordi Riba and colleagues (2004) reported in humans given ayahuasca, although the low frequency changes (1.5-6 Hz, they didn’t report lower) that Riba et al. measured with EEG were more occipital. The reduced low-frequency oscillations may be the same phenomenon previously reported by Lambe and Aghajanian.

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