Scientists Gave People Psychedelic Drugs and Wiped Their Memories

Jul 10, 2023

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A University of Wisconsin study wants to investigate psychedelic drugs, but a placebo option doesn't really exist in this world.

To ensure the most accurate patient response, researchers needed a way for the patients to not know if they were part of the pilot or placebo group.

The answer: combining psychedelic drugs with amnesia-causing drugs.

There's no placebo group when talking about psychedelic drugs. It might seem obvious—a placebo doesn't work if you know you haven't received the real deal, and the effects of these drugs would give that away pretty quickly.

Not being able to test against a placebo makes the study of these drugs much more difficult. So, researchers at the University of Wisconsin came up with a way to "blind" these trippy studies: memory wipes.

As reported by Wired, new research offers up the first real chance to remove patient bias from the results of psychedelic trials—by eliminating knowledge of just where a patient falls within the study's psychedelic-to-placebo spectrum from their brains.

This eight-person pilot study is currently in progress at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances, and is geared toward trying to figure out if psychedelic drugs can actually help heal people. But those sometimes-mind-numbing trips that can last hours kind of get in the way of research.

So, when it comes time to measure the effects of psychedelics on the brain—whether they’re being used to reduce depression, addiction, or post-traumatic stress disorder—researchers needed a way to track quantifiable results, clear of any bias.

Enter a unique "active placebo" strategy. In this method, even placebo patients get a bit of psychedelic trickery with an all-natural concoction known to offer up a hint of hallucination. It's meant to fake out patients one way or the other so that, theoretically, even those not receiving the drug being researched might feel a bit of a psychedelic effect. Even if memories aren't fully cleared, everyone gets a small reminder of a weird experience.

But the real magic comes is in the use of midazolam. This sleep-inducing medicine is known to stave off the creation of new memories. It's functionally an amnesia-producing tool, part of the effort to keep patient memories from tripping up a research study. If you can't remember whether or not you’ve been under the effect of a drug, you can't bias results as easily.

Wired notes that this method could have applications outside of medical psychedelic research. Researchers who analyze medical studies and testing methodologies want to see how this strategy fares, and if they may have some reason to look into inducing future walks down don't-make-a-memory lane in other areas of research.

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