Visual stimuli, like watching videos, can diminish the potentially therapeutic effects of psychedelics, recent research suggests.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- A recent study highlights the importance of set and setting in psychedelic experiences, showing that keeping your eyes closed seems to enhance psychedelic effects, in part by more intensely increasing brain entropy.
- External stimuli like videos seem to diminish these effects by competing with the drug’s impact.
- These insights suggest that therapeutic psychedelic sessions could benefit from minimizing external distractions.
By Saga Briggs
You’ve likely heard the phrase “set and setting” when it comes to psychedelics: The quality of a trip depends on the mindset you have and the environment you’re in when you kick off a trip. But while it’s a common claim, there hasn’t been much research on the effects of set and setting on the psychedelic experience.
To bridge that gap, a recent study systematically examined these kinds of effects, including those that result from keeping your eyes open or closed during an LSD experience. The results found that participants who kept their eyes closed tended to experience “stronger” trips, as evidenced by self-reported data and increased correlations with brain entropy, which refers to the heightened complexity and randomness in brain activity.
On a broader note, this study was the first quantitative analysis to find that the effect of setting in psychedelic experience can be directly gathered from physiological measurements. Another key finding? Visual stimuli, like watching videos, seem to distract the brain from an otherwise rich experience facilitated by closing one’s eyes.
Visuals or visions?
Psychedelics are known to increase brain entropy, which you can think of as a measure of how many different thoughts or images your brain can create at once. (For a contrasting example, people exhibit decreased brain entropy while undergoing general anesthesia or a loss of consciousness.) An increase in brain entropy often positively corresponds with the subjective richness of psychedelic experiences, an effect also observed in research on meditation and flow states associated with musical improvisation.
Brain entropy seems to be a key factor in gauging the therapeutic potential of psychedelics.
“…the therapeutic mechanisms of psychedelics are thought to depend on their acute entropy-enhancing effect, potentially reflecting a window of opportunity (and plasticity) mediating therapeutic change,” the researchers noted.
However, the power of those therapeutic effects may depend on set and setting, through factors like mood, expectations, and environment. So while psychedelics may reliably increase brain entropy, that increase doesn’t necessarily translate to therapeutic effects if the setting isn’t right.
In most psychedelic clinical trials to date, participants have been given eye shades (or instructed to close their eyes) and headphones for music. Meanwhile, some companies, such as ketamine clinics, are experimenting with pairing drug and video, hoping to enhance the effect of the drug with virtual images of “naturescapes” and other stimuli. However, no studies to date have systematically assessed the impact of set and setting on brain activity and subjective experience during a psychedelic experience.
Psychedelic settings
For the study — led by Pedro Mediano, Fernando Rosas, Robin Carhart-Harris, and a long list of other psychedelic researchers — 20 healthy people participated in two experimental sessions: one in which they received intravenous saline (placebo) and one in which they received intravenous LSD (75 μg). Whole-brain magnetoencephalography (MEG) data were collected under four conditions: resting state with eyes closed, listening to instrumental ambient music with eyes closed, resting state with eyes open (focusing on a “fixation dot”), and watching a silent nature documentary video. In addition, subjects filled out questionnaires after each session, rating their subjective experience of intensity, emotional arousal, ego dissolution, positive mood, and simple and complex imagery.
Compared to placebo, the researchers found that external stimuli increased entropy across conditions, with video yielding the highest absolute entropy. “It is noteworthy that the simple act of opening one’s eyes has an especially marked (augmenting) effect on brain entropy,” the researchers wrote.
But interestingly, stronger external stimuli weakened the subjective effects of the drug, despite the enhanced brain complexity. Subjective experiences varied with the setting. Specifically, closing the eyes intensified the correlation between brain entropy and the drug’s subjective effects. The research team interpreted this as a “competition” between external stimuli and endogenous LSD-induced imagery.
“I suspect because there’s a great deal of informational complexity in the visual and auditory stimuli itself, this lifts the baseline brain complexity for processing it, and then psychedelics do what they do — i.e., lifting complexity, but on top of this elevated baseline,” Robin Carhart-Harris, PhD, Ralph Metzner Distinguished Professor of Neurology, Psychiatry, and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California San Francisco, told Big Think…
more…
https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/eyes-wide-shut-psychedelic-trips-intensify-with-eyes-closed/
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