Researchers Put Rats on LSD to Figure Out More About Human Consciousness

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

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

00:12 that very query. And they're doing it with these rats that are on hallucinogenic LSD

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

00:23 What we do is to implant in the brain of rats very tiny wires that are thinner than hair.

00:33 And with that we can capture the neural activity of different brain regions at the same time

00:41 together with different metrics of behavior.

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

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

00:52 saying at the moment the experiment is simple, just measuring the rats spontaneous behaviors

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

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

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

01:09 channels, a process which could provide insight into mental conditions.

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

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

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

01:31 have to kind of design it.

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

01:37 intelligence.

01:38 [MUSIC]

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