Abstract

Contemporary psychedelics research has primarily focused on therapeutic applications and neurophenomenological features of psychedelic states. By contrast, relatively little research has adopted an instrumental approach, in which psychedelics are harnessed as a methodological vehicle to study diverse cognitive-perceptual operations and model psychiatric symptomatology. In this talk, I will present multiple strands of instrumental psychedelics research from our lab. I will start by describing a series of studies on psychedelic- induced and acquired synaesthesia and how this research can inform our understanding of developmental synaesthesia. Next, I will describe our research on the use of microdosing to modulate time perception and flag interval timing as a salient cognitive target for cognitively-oriented psychedelics research. I will then turn to our recent research on nitrous oxide and highlight its utility in the armamentarium of psychedelics and as a model of dissociative states. Despite the value of these different lines of research, clear interpretation of empirical findings from psychedelics research is hindered by persistent methodological challenges in this field. I will conclude by drawing attention to the most salient methodological problems confronting psychedelics research and their broader implications for what we can learn from psychedelics.

Bio

Devin B. Terhune, PhD, is a Reader in Experimental Psychology in the Department of Psychology in the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology, & Neuroscience at King’s College London where he leads the Awareness & Modulation Lab. He completed his PhD on the cognitive neuroscience of verbal suggestion effects at Lund University and was previously a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford and a Lecturer in the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research draws on methods and theories from cognitive neuroscience, experimental psychology, and psychiatry with an aim to characterise different features of awareness, with a focus on dissociative states, and how they can be modulated using verbal suggestion and pharmacological agents.