Frontiers in Neuroscience
January 22, 2018
Camila Sanz, Federico Zamberlán, Earth Erowid et al.
112 citations
Subjective reports of experiences under hallucinogens like LSD are semantically most similar to reports of high-lucidity dreams, while Datura (a deliriant) resembles low-lucidity dreams. Sedatives, stimulants, antipsychotics, and antidepressants rank lowest in similarity to dream reports. Frequent words across both dreams and hallucinogen experiences include perception-related terms ("see," "visual," "color"), emotion ("fear"), setting ("inside," "outside"), and family members ("mom," "dad"). The analysis confirms that hallucinogens produce experiences with the highest semantic similarity to dreams among all psychoactive substances.
Consciousness and cognition
March 1, 2019
Charlotte Martial, Héléna Cassol, Vanessa Charland-Verville et al.
98 citations
Near-death experiences (NDEs) share consistent features across cultures, suggesting a common neurobiological basis. Analyzing semantic similarity between about 15,000 reports from 165 psychoactive substances and 625 NDE narratives, the NMDA receptor antagonist ketamine produced reports most similar to NDEs, followed by Salvia divinorum and serotonergic psychedelics like DMT. The similarity was driven by concepts of self and environmental consciousness, as well as therapeutic, ceremonial, and religious aspects of drug use. Ketamine may serve as a safe experimental model for NDE phenomenology, and endogenous NMDA antagonists might be released near death.
Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience
November 1, 2018
Camila Sanz, Carla Pallavicini, Carla Pallavicini et al.
78 citations
Classic psychedelics produce a wide range of subjective effects influenced by the user's mindset and environment, and their common mechanism involves activation of the serotonin 5-HT2A receptor. The diversity of effects across different compounds may also stem from their binding affinities for multiple neurotransmitter receptors and transporters. By analyzing two binding affinity datasets alongside natural language processing of thousands of trip reports from Erowid's Experience Vaults, preliminary evidence showed that similarity in binding profiles across phenethylamines and tryptamines correlates with similarity in the language used to describe experiences.
Frontiers in neuroscience
January 1, 2018
Camila Sanz, Federico Zamberlan, Earth Erowid et al.
3 citations
correction
No Summary
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
February 22, 2022
Camila Sanz, Federico Cavanna, Stephanie Müller et al.
1 citation
preprint
Low doses of psilocybin (microdoses) can be detected in natural speech. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled experiment, participants given 0.5 g of psilocybin mushrooms showed significant differences in verbosity and sentiment scores compared to placebo, though semantic variability did not differ. Machine learning classifiers using these speech metrics distinguished between the psilocybin and placebo conditions with high accuracy (AUC≈0.8). These findings suggest that unconstrained natural language may serve as a practical, low-cost tool for monitoring microdosing effects, addressing limitations of existing questionnaires designed for larger psychedelic doses.