The entropic heart: Tracking the psychedelic state via heart rate dynamics
Fernando E. Rosas, Pedro A. M. Mediano, Christopher Timmermann, Andrea I. Luppi, Diego Candia‐rivera, Reza Abbasi-Asl, Adam Gazzaley, Morten L. Kringelbach, Suresh Muthukumaraswamy, Daniel Bor, Sarah N. Garfinkel, Robin Carhart‐Harris
bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) November 9, 2023 preprint DOI: 10.1101/2023.11.07.566008 via OpenAlex
Summary
AI-generated from the abstractAutonomic signals can reveal aspects of subjective and neural states. A Bayesian framework estimated heart rate entropy under psychedelics. Across four drugs—LSD, DMT, psilocybin, and ketamine—mean heart rate, high-frequency heart rate variability, and heart rate entropy consistently increased during the psychedelic experience. These changes predicted various dimensions of the experience. Heart rate entropy increases correlated with brain entropy increases, while other autonomic markers did not. Cost-efficient autonomic measures can reveal detail about subjective and brain states, opening new research avenues in neuroscience.
Study at a glance
| Characteristics | Observational study |
|---|---|
| Population | Human participants under psychedelics |
| Interventions | LSD DMT psilocybin |
| Topics | Psilocybin |
| Keywords | Neuroscience Heart rate variability Artificial intelligence Hallucinogen |
| Citations | 14 |
| Key finding | Psychedelics consistently increase mean heart rate, high-frequency heart rate variability, and heart rate entropy, with heart rate entropy changes correlating with brain entropy increases. |
Abstract
A growing body of work shows that autonomic signals provide a privileged evidence-stream to capture various aspects of subjective and neural states. This work investigates the potential for autonomic markers to track the effects of psychedelics — potent psychoactive drugs with important scientific and clinical value. For this purpose, we introduce a novel Bayesian framework to estimate the entropy of heart rate dynamics under psychedelics. We also calculate Bayesian estimates of mean heart rate and heart rate variability, and investigate how these measures relate to subjective reports and neural effects. Results on datasets covering four drugs — lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), dimethyltryptamine (DMT), psilocybin, and sub-anaesthetic doses of the dissociative agent ketamine — show consistent increases in mean heart rate, high-frequency heart rate variability, and heart rate entropy during the psychedelic experience. Moreover, these effects have predictive power over various dimensions of the psychedelic experience. Changes in heart rate entropy were found to be correlated with increases in brain entropy, while other autonomic markers were not. Overall, our results show that a cost-efficient autonomic measure has the potential to reveal surprising detail about subjective and brain states, opening up a range of new research avenues to explore in both basic and clinical neuroscience.