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The Psychedelic Scientist Who Sends Brains Back to Childhood
Kids soak up new skills, adults not so much. But neuroscientist Gül Dölen might have found a way—with drugs—to help grown-ups learn like littles.
In the corner of an equipment-crammed lab—and beneath the benevolent gazes of drug pioneers Alexander and Ann Shulgin on a poster pinned to the wall—postdoctoral researcher Ted Sawyer hunches over a set of knobs and dials that could be mistaken for a 1950s sci-fi flick control panel. People often talk about psychedelic therapy functioning like a “reset button” for the mind, but until Dölen’s work came out, no one could provide a scientifically plausible explanation for “how something that is so short in duration can have lasting and transformative effects that go well beyond the time period that the drug is in there,” says Rachel Yehuda, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City. Quite a few experts, Dölen included, think that Charles Manson’s ability to completely brainwash his followers relied on the high doses of LSD he regularly gave them prior to bombarding their minds with hate-filled lectures and murderous orders.
Or read this on Wired
