AI & Psychedelics: How AI could help Psychedelic drugs in long-term treatment for mental health?

Psychedelics, also known as hallucinogenic drugs have been widely stigmatized as dangerous illegal drugs. These drugs are psychoactive drugs that are used to alter sensory perceptions, energy levels, and thought processes. But very little is really known about what these substances actually do to our brains.  AI is crucial to unlocking the potential of psychedelic drugs.

To better understand how these subjective effects manifest in the brain, some scientists are using AI methods to figure it out and drug companies are now employing artificial intelligence in their research. AI analyses enabled algorithms to scour 6850 accounts of people's experiences with 27 drugs to learn more about how they alter consciousness and to gain a better understanding of their subjective effects and how they work on the brain.

Psychedelic drugs have long been used for mental health:

Every psychedelic functions differently in the body, and each of the subjective experiences these drugs create has different therapeutic effects. Danilo Bzdok at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, and his colleagues use natural language processing that allows search engines to work and is mentioned in "trip reports". Advancements in AI have massively accelerated and optimized the process.

AI researchers used to describe their trip experiences could lead to better drugs to treat mental illness. They linked with any of 40 receptors in the brain that the drug is known to interact with and mapped drug effects onto areas of the brain where these receptors are most active. They found it will aid in the design of new drugs for mental health disorders. The use of trip reports is valuable, complements traditional work, and is verified within carefully controlled clinical trials or other experiments.

Randomized Al trials, which involve giving some participants a drug, others a placebo, and comparing the effects of both, are considered the gold standard. AI analyses over 6,000 written testimonials of psychedelics experiences from the Erowid Center, an organization that collects and provides information about psychoactive substances. AI approach could provide new starting points for drug development.

The team of SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in New York City integrated 6,850 written accounts of hallucinogenic drug users' data with records of which receptors in the brain each drug is known to interact with. Together, these steps allow the team to identify which neurotransmitter receptors are linked to words associated with specific drug experiences.

MindState Design Labs company's ultimate goal is the development of new treatments for mental health disorders. But the company's approach will focus more on individual receptors rather than groups of receptors. And also, Medicine Innovations Group is turning to artificial intelligence in its quest to develop the most effective psychedelic therapeutic drug offerings in the market.

AI findings align with the leading hypothesis that psychedelics temporarily reduce cognitive processes involved in inhibition, attention, and memory, among others, while amplifying brain regions involved in sensory experience. Emerging in pharma almost in parallel, AI and psychedelics are natural partners.