According to researchers at Northeastern University, mescaline, the hallucinogenic compound found in cacti that’s long been used in spiritual ceremonies for its ability to send your brain on a hell of a psychedelic journey, has had its effects mapped for the first time. Now we can actually see what’s going on when your brain goes on a trip.
Your brain is constantly being bombarded with information from all of your senses. The reason all that info doesn’t drive you mad is that your brain has a kind of built-in firewall that filters out that background noise so you can function instead of crumpling to the ground, holding your ears, like in movies when someone’s telepathic abilities are too overwhelming to handle at first.
It seems like mescaline turns off that firewall and lets all that info, all those sensations, run amok.
Scientists Say Mescaline May Flood the Brain With Unfiltered Sensory Information
In experiments with awake rats, researchers found the psychedelic turned down activity in the cerebellum while increasing communication with areas involved in memory, sensation, and perception. All that information that normally gets blocked by your brain’s inner Victor Wembanyama starts getting priority access.
That filter doesn’t completely disappear; it seemingly scrambles up what gets passed the defenses. Sensations the rats usually loved were suddenly ignored. In an example provided by ScienceAlert, the rats usually loved the scent of almond, but when they were on mescaline, they couldn’t care less about it. Why? That’s something the researchers can’t explain just yet.
With further research and an eventual upscaling to human testing, these findings could eventually help research teams better understand how psychedelics work, but more than that, they could also help us better understand psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia or PTSD, which can involve similar disruptions and how the brain filters sensory information.
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