What can neuroscience tell us about the potential of psychedelics in healthcare?

What can neuroscience tell us about the potential of psychedelics in healthcare?
Curr Drug Abuse Rev. 2015 Jan 6;
Authors: Mackenzie R
Abstract
Health-related psychedelic research should focus on helping us flourish, not just remedying ill-health or addiction. We don't know enough about how psychedelics could enhance human flourishing. Factors promoting health-through-flourishing include finding meaning in life, spiritual practices, comfortable levels of social bonds, emotionally/physically satisfying sex in a long-term monogamous relationship and control over one's daily life. Psychedelic research could find more. Neuroscience anchors psychedelic research into disease and disorder, eg addiction, PTSD, migraine, anxiety, pain etc. Neurophenomenological psychedelics research could illuminate relationships between health, ASC/NOSCs and cognitive liberty to promote human flourishing. If we accept the self as an epiphenomenon of subsystems within the brain, we 'know' 'unconsciously', but are not aware of, many things which affect our lives profoundly. These include control over identifying, remembering and forgetting our states of mind and how to move between them. A prerequisite for integrated investigations into ASC/NOSCs is the establishment of a taxonomic knowledge base which lists, categorises and characterises ASC/NOSCs to enable us to choose specific states of mind and move securely among them. Or, in other words, to enable us to ...

Source: Current Drug Abuse Reviews - January 10, 2015 Category: Addiction Tags: Curr Drug Abuse Rev Source Type: research