Rats on LSD For Research? You Have to See This!

Amaze Lab

What is consciousness? That’s a question that has plagued scientists and psychologists for generations and neurophysiologists at The University of Lund are looking to answer that very query.

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00:00What is consciousness? That's a question that has plagued scientists and psychologists for

00:08generations. But now neurophysiologists at the University of Lund are looking to answer

00:13that very query. And they're doing it with these rats that are on hallucinogenic LSD

00:18and other drugs. This is postdoctoral researcher Sebastian Marientes Baeza to explain.

00:24What we do is to implant in the brain of rats very tiny wires that are thinner than

00:32a hair. And with that we can capture the neural activity of different brain regions at the

00:39same time, together with different metrics of behavior.

00:44He says that psychedelics are now being used frequently in certain human therapies. But

00:48little is actually known about why they are helpful in those scenarios. With the researchers

00:52saying at the moment, the experiment is simple, just measuring the rat's spontaneous behaviors

00:56and activities. They've been doing this for seven years, and they have now discovered

01:00a synchronization in several key areas of the brain. And Pal Halia, another researcher

01:05working on the project, says this could indicate that drugs are messing with normal brain communication

01:10channels, a process which could provide insight into mental conditions.

01:14We urgently need a better understanding of how consciousness is generated. But right

01:18now we only know that it is generated in our brains, and we don't know if it can even

01:23be generated, if it will occur spontaneously in other intelligent systems, or if you actually

01:31have to kind of design it.

01:32They said this could also be valuable data with regards to the next generation of artificial

01:37intelligence.

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