https://www.wired.com/story/the-psychedelic-scientist-who-sends-brains-back-to-childhood/
Sorry about this one. I just read this amazing article in Wired, and I just had to capture what it meant. So . . . a blog entry as a magazine article review. Sorry about that. Please just ignore it if it is outside of your interests. Thanks for your forbearance.
Read The Article
The author does a masterful job of weaving personal reflection and insight into this discovery. Go read it now, and then come back here and see if this resonates with you.
Critical Learning Periods
Research indicates that humans have a very few critical learning periods, when our brain is tuned to learn new things. Young childhood is clearly one of them. Neuroscientist Gül Dölen may have found a way to open up critical learning spaces in our adult brains using psychedelic drugs. If this proves to work, it can be used for all manner of therapy and learning opportunities. A few examples:
Length of learning window. The initial research seems to indicate that this “learning window” or “critical period” is not just during the actual drug experience, but it endures for some longer period of time.
Languages - we know young children’s brains are tuned to learn languages. If this therapy can reopen that critical learning period, it would be very helpful for adult learning of all kinds.
Personality Disorders - this is not cited in the article, but it is well document that if young children do not have a caring adult in their lives before age two, they frequently have a personality disorder, which relates to their relationships with other people. They seem to miss acquiring the cues of empathy and how people form relationships. This might offer those individuals a new lease on life.
Stroke - after a stroke, the brain trauma seems to open a brief window when the victim can regain the use of the damaged brain function, if they do so within a very narrow window of time. This therapy could open a much longer window.
Addictive Behavior. The use of psychedelics in a carefully conducted coaching session seems to be effective for many people to help cure addictive behavior. It raises their awareness and sense of values to a higher level, where they see and feel the addictive behavior as a problem they can resolve.
Risk of abuse. As with any treatment the risk of misuse for this type of intervention is very high. It is possible that some of the “strong leaders” of cult behavior actually understood this and used substances to encourage their flock to be more easily persuaded about their world views.
Autism. This problem might be the result of some failed biology at an early age. One researcher had identified a compound that should have assisted autistic individuals to overcome some of the problem, but it did not work. The thought now is that the compound might work if the person can be reset to the critical learning point for this problem.
More Detailed
Critical Learning Periods
It is well documented by now that young children have a unique ability to acquire some skills early in life, and that this ability fades with time. The brain in the young child is tuned for these tasks, such as learning to communicate with language. We learn to walk, and see and hear, and to bond with other people. Those are all acquired skills! When that has been accomplished, the brain removes all of that capacity and gets on with a more efficient mode of operating for adult life. The number of neurons actually changes as a result.
Critical periods are well known to neuroscientists and ethologists, because they lay the groundwork for a creature’s behavior. They are finite windows of time, ranging from days to years, when the brain is especially impressionable and open to learning.
Just so, young birds are uniquely equipped to learn the song of their species at birth, so that they can participate in their species mating and other rituals.
As the article points out, many other things about humans are learned in these early years. This would include basic values about human empathy and ethics, perfect pitch, etc.
We also know that a serious investment in meditation or mindfulness can reap great rewards in changing one’s values, motivation, happiness and fundamental view of life. Some neuroscientists have been experimenting with psychedelics as a shortcut to accomplishing these same objectives.
Social Reward Experiment
There is a well established experiment where mice are exposed to a stimulating chemical and exposed to a certain type of bedding. When the chemical is withdrawn, they continue to prefer that type of bedding - it provides some reward to their brains. There does not appear to be a critical period for this cocaine reward. But if you move the mice from cocaine to socializing with other mice the bonding only occurs when the mice are young. An adult mouse is not open to this socializing conditioning.
The same thing was proven with octopuses, which are notoriously anti-social. Getting them accustomed to socialization at a very young age also tuned them to see that as a pleasurable experience. (If you want a unique experience about an octopus, watch this movie: My Octopus Teacher. We sentient animals are all priceless.)
Young mice—especially adolescent ones—strongly preferred hanging out on the bedding they associated with their friends. The adult mice didn’t seem to give a damn about the composition of their bed. They weren’t connecting it to the pleasures of company. The younger mice, in their highly impressionable state, were. “The social world is something that you learn, just like the visual or olfactory world,” Dölen explains.
But if you give the adult mice a bit of MDMA, they are just like the younger mice in learning this pleasurable connection. It turns out that many drugs have that same effect on adult mice - but NOT cocaine!
Those contextual details explain why most people with PTSD are not miraculously cured after partying all night at an MDMA-fueled rave, but why, in the supportive environment of a therapist’s office, the same drug permits them to undertake the cognitive reappraisal needed to heal. It also tantalizingly suggests that different critical periods could be opened—not just for PTSD, but for stroke, vision or hearing correction, or acquiring a new language or skill, or any number of other things—simply by changing what a person is doing while on the drug.
This phenomenon is not just at the level of the brain’s neurons, but it extends down to the level of gene expression.
Strokes
Stroke patients have only a short window of time in which they can regain even some of what they’ve lost. Immediately after a stroke, a critical period naturally opens—and then closes some months later. No one knows why this is, but Dölen has a hunch: Just as pandemic-era isolation caused a “radical destabilization” of the social world, a stroke causes a radical destabilization of a sufferer’s motor world. That person’s motor cortex is no longer receiving information from their muscles. So a sudden change in the motor world—a stroke—could fling open a critical period for motor skills. Dölen thinks that these naturally occurring critical periods are the brain’s way of trying to adapt to profound, existential change.
Downsides
As with any new therapies, there may be potential downsides from this kind of prolonged new critical learning period. That is for future research.
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