The Thinking Meat Project

Learning about how hallucinogens work

Hallucinogenic compounds like LSD probably work their magic through the 2A serotonin receptors that appear in various places in the brain (the cortex and thalamus in particular). However, other drugs that also activate those receptors do not have the same effects, and it’s not clear why. Recent research focused on the precise area in the brain that hallucinogens are believed to affect, and discovered several ways that the area responds differently to hallucinogens than to chemically similar non-hallucinogenic drugs. The hallucinogens kick off a separate cascade of signals in addition to the usual cascade activated at those receptors, and the sum of the two processes might be what lies behind the effects of the hallucinogens. There’s an article at Scientific American and a press release on EurekAlert that go into more of the details.