Psychological medicine
October 1, 2023
Jonathan W Kanen, Qiang Luo, Mojtaba Rostami Kandroodi et al.
44 citations
LSD increases the rate at which people learn from both rewards and punishments during a probabilistic reversal learning task, suggesting a state of heightened learning plasticity. Healthy volunteers given intravenous LSD or placebo completed a task where they had to learn which of three stimuli was most often rewarded, with the reward contingencies later reversing. Computational modeling of reinforcement learning showed that LSD primarily enhanced the reward learning rate and also elevated the punishment learning rate, while decreasing stimulus stickiness (a measure of choice repetition), indicating increased exploration. These effects point to a potential mechanism by which LSD could help revise maladaptive associations in clinical treatment.
Comprehensive psychiatry
July 1, 2025
Luca Pellegrini, Naomi A Fineberg, Sorcha O'Connor et al.
17 citations
A 10 mg dose of psilocybin produced a rapid, moderate-to-large reduction in compulsive symptoms in people with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), lasting up to one week after dosing. In a blinded pharmacological challenge study, 18 adults with at least moderate OCD received a 1 mg and then a 10 mg dose of oral psilocybin, separated by four weeks. One week after the 10 mg dose, scores on the compulsion subscale of the Yale-Brown Obsessive Compulsive Scale showed a significant improvement compared to the 1 mg dose (Cohen's d = 0.74). No effect on depression was detected. The drug was well tolerated with no serious adverse events.
The international journal of neuropsychopharmacology
October 31, 2014
Samuel A Barnes, Stephen J Sawiak, Daniele Caprioli et al.
Sub-chronic exposure to the NMDA receptor antagonist phencyclidine (PCP) in rats produced localized reductions in grey matter density in the hippocampus, anterior cingulate cortex, ventral striatum, and amygdala, along with reduced cortical thickness in the insular cortex. PCP-treated rats also showed impaired sustained visual attention on a 5-choice serial reaction time task, especially under higher attentional load, but no significant effect on attentional filtering in an acoustic startle paradigm. These findings indicate that NMDA receptor antagonism can cause brain structural abnormalities in regions implicated in schizophrenia and dissociable attentional deficits.