Scientists gave people psychedelics and then wiped their memories

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In a hospital room in Madison, Wisconsin, Dave was lying on a bed, looking at the molding around the ceiling. A vent caught his eye. The shimmer of the metal grate turned into pointed swords, and thoughts of Japanese martial arts and sword fighting filled his mind. Some bright colors emerged, contrasting with the sanitized neutrals of the medical environment, and he heard notes of instrumental music. That’s all he remembers after being given psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, even though his trip lasted hours. (Dave applied for a pseudonym because he was concerned that public knowledge of him taking psychedelics could harm him professionally.)

During the session, the researchers asked him what he was thinking and feeling, and he apparently had “a long conversation about those points, which I don’t remember anything about,” he said.

It’s not that their trip wasn’t memorable. Dave’s memories were intentionally wiped, enough that he remembered “probably not even 10 percent” of the trip. He was also injected with midazolam, a sedative that can be used to produce amnesia.

Their experience, part of a pilot study involving eight people at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Transdisciplinary Center for Psychoactive Substance Research, showed that it is possible to combine these two drugs to give someone a near-normal mushroom high, and then use midazolam to erase their memory. Why make someone travel, just to take away the memory?

Typically, when scientists try to isolate the effects of a drug, they do so using double-blind randomized clinical trials, or RCTs, in which participants (and their doctors) are not sure whether they received a drug or a placebo. But “no one is going to mistake 200 micrograms of LSD for a placebo,” said Balázs Szigeti, a postdoc at Imperial College London’s Center for Psychedelic Research. It can be painfully obvious whether or not someone has taken an active drug.

Psychedelics have strong and unique effects, and to further complicate matters, they are heavily influenced by context, such as a person’s way of thinking, environment, and beliefs. In other words, people’s expectations of what happens with psychedelics can play a role in what they experience. These problems have dogged the study of psychedelics since the first wave of research in the 1950s, and the Wisconsin study is a recent attempt to answer this enduring question: How much does a person’s subjective experience and expectation of Does a psychedelic trip, compared to just the drug’s chemical effects on the brain, influence the drug’s ability to alleviate conditions such as depression, addiction, or post-traumatic stress disorder? Now that federal regulators and the public are taking notice of psychedelics, scientists are again asking: What is the best way to study these compounds to truly understand their effects?

The first person to use “blinding,” a crucial part of an RCT, was probably a psychiatrist named William Rivers. Blinding means that patients are randomly assigned to groups in which some receive an active drug and others a placebo, and are assumed to be unaware which group they are in. This ensures that both patients and physicians do not bias the study and affect the results.

In 1906, Rios gave himself an alcoholic or non-alcoholic drink made by a colleague, with the flavor masked so he couldn’t tell which was which. He then looked at how drinks affected how easily your muscles tired, noting that earlier work on the same topic may have overestimated the effects of alcohol, because people knew if they were drinking.