How can illegal drugs help our brains | David Nutt | TEDxBrussels

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David Nutt explains how through decades of education and training the brain constrains the contents of the mind by limiting its activity and directions.
And then he will show how psychedelic drugs can break open these limitations to allow new ways of thinking that can help people overcome problems such as depression – and argue that the UN regulations controlling these drugs should be eased so much more therapeutic research can be conducted with these and other 'illegal' drugs to benefit humanity."

David Nutt is a psychiatrist in the Division of Brain Science, Department of Medicine, at the Hammersmith Hospital, Imperial College London.

Thank you.

The last talk was about

electronic technology
and enhancing the brain.

My talk's about an old technology
enhancing the brain;

an old technology
that of course, you all know and love,

and that's called drugs.

But I'll come to that in a minute.

I'm going to start with the brain

because it's the most complex
and evolved element

in the whole universe.

It's what got you here today,
and hopefully, will get you home tonight.

A single mouse brain has
more computing power

than all the computers on Earth today.

Your brains are at least
a million times more powerful.

But unfortunately, it can go wrong.

Over the last few years,

we've discovered the scale of problems
that brain disorders produce.

The sum total of illness and cost
to society from brain disorders

is greater than that from cancer,

cardio-vascular disease,
and diabetes put together.

You see on the graph there

it's the equivalent each year
to nearly 800 billion euros.

It is if we're paying off
the Greek debt every year

in the burden of illness
produced by brain disorders.

We know that investment in these disorders
is not matching the enormous burden.

Here, you can see
on the left hand graph, the red circle;

'brain disorders' are way outside
the predicted line of investment.

They're the largest disability,

and the investment is
disproportionately low.

On the right-hand side, you can see
one of the reasons for this.

You can see the attrition rate for drugs

that go through discovery
into development.

Look at the second cylinder there.

You can see that from
200 Alzheimer's drugs in development,

only one reaches the clinic.

The brain is
a very difficult organ to treat.

Why does the brain go wrong?

It goes wrong
because of external influences:

malnutrition, still a big problem;

parental and other abuse
- psychological and physical -;

toxins - particularly alcohol.

These are images of my own research
showing a normal brain at the top

and a brain severely damaged
by alcohol misuse lower down.

Infections such as meningitis,
encephalitis are still common,

and trauma is a massive problem

in terms of leading
to long-term brain damage

particularly in young men.

And then, there are internal aspects
of the brain development

that can go wrong:
related conditions like autism.

You can have acquired
abnormalities like epilepsy

and there are age-related changes
such as dementia.

But the real focus of my talk today
is how the brain limits itself

and how we can perhaps expand its capacity
or take away the limit it puts on itself.

Your brain is most flexible
when you're a baby.

Some people would argue

that the whole process of education
is about taking away flexibility

and forcing every one of you
to think and behave in the same way.

It's about getting conformity of process

which of course is useful

if you're trying to speak a language
the same way as other people,

but may not be useful

if it limits how you can deal with
other things such as problems.

And also, the constraining of the brain
in itself can lead to problems;

if there is not enough of it
in the right place,

you get disorders
such as ADHD and schizophrenia.

If you get excessive constraints,

you can end up with disorders
like OCD and addiction.

And also the resilience
in the brain can be impaired,

and that will lead to disorders
such as anxiety and depression.

The core of my talk really is showing you
how we can now understand

the limitations that the brain
constrains the mind with

through using drugs.

This research really goes back
to the 1950s

and the personal experience
of this man, Aldous Huxley,

who used peyote and used
LSD, psychedelic drugs,

to understand his mind.

He wrote about it in the book
"The Doors of Perception,"

and he used this quote from William Blake

to explain how these drugs
changed his mind.

He said, "If the doors
of perception were cleansed,

everything would appear
to man as it is, Infinite.

For man has closed himself up

till he sees all things through
narrow chinks of his cavern."

And Huxley realized
that what psychedelics do

is take away this phenomenon
that he inferred

which is that "the brain is
an instrument for focusing the mind."

Modern neuroscience
has shown they were right.

Because, what we now know

is that the brain creates
what the mind thinks it's doing.

Here is an example of vision.

You might be looking out
at a glorious sunset,

but in reality, the light rays
go into your retina

and are transformed
into a series of electrical impulses

which pass into parts in your brain.

And those parts of the brain
reconstruct an image

that they think you're seeing.

And that image, in the words of Blake,

is seeing through the constraints,
the chinks of the cavern

that your brain puts on it.

And if you have mental illness
- for instance, depression or addiction -

then what you see is also
constrained by your brain.

So depressed people don't see
even the brightness of the sky.

They see a dull grey.

And of course, people with addiction

when they see through
the chinks of their cavern,

they simply see the drugs
that they're addicted to.

Psychedelic drugs
take away that limitation.

They allow the mind to work
in a much more flexible way.

This is our research using psilocybin
in magic mushroom juice.

Those two images contain
the same number of connections.

But on the left-hand image, under placebo,

you see that most of the connections
are around the edge.

The brain talks to itself
in regional ways.

But under psilocybin,

there's a massive cross-talk,
much more integration;

parts of the brain which haven't talk
to each other since you were children

are able to engage.

And that's how people can get new insights

and also, potentially overcome damage
of dysfunction of the brain.

Here is another study using LSD
showing essentially the same thing.

On the left-hand side,

you see the visual cortex is
normally very local in how it works.

But under LSD,
when people have their eyes closed,

they can see enormously vivid,
interesting sets of images.

And that's because the brain is
much more interconnected under LSD

than normal.

Here you see that the visual cortex

connects to most of the rest
of the brain in that state.

We've been able to utilize this liberation
of processing of the brain,

produced by psychedelics,

to treat people with depression.

Here is a study published last year

where we took people with depression

who failed two previous
anti-depressive treatments,

and also had failed psychotherapy.

They were given
a single dose of psilocybin,

and you can see there, that a week later,

all of them had recovered to some extend,

and half of them were now
in a state of remission.

They were in the yellow bar there,

which shows that their depression
has actually gone away.

And that's not the first evidence

that psychedelics have therapy
or have therapeutic uses.

We also have evidence
from around the world

that psilocybin can be useful in helping
people deal with alcohol dependence,

with smoking dependence,
with obsessive compulsive disorder.

And most recently,

two major studies showing
it can help people come to terms

with the anxiety and the depression

which almost always accompany
a diagnosis of a terminal illness.

So, these drugs can have
potentially enormous opportunities

for helping people deal
with mental distress.

It's not just psychedelics
that can have that potential.

Many illegal drugs have medical uses.

So for non-psychedelics
such as MDMA, ecstasy,

where there is good evidence
in post-traumatic stress disorder

and also some studies
going on in addiction.

And of course, there is cannabis

where we have a range
of different disorders

from pain, spasticity, cancer, epilepsy,

inflammatory diseases,
and also sleep disorders.

All of these, potentially, are amenable
to treatment with cannabis.

So, why don't we use these drugs?

That's because the WHL and the UN
have said they are too dangerous,

which is certainly untrue.

I can tell you categorically

none of our patients died
in the experiments we did on them.

Most of our governments
perpetuate this lie.

And many of us - hopefully, not you -
have closed minds.

We do not want to believe
that these might have therapeutic utility.

So I want to say to you now,

surely now: you, if not everyone,

should accept the fact

that these drugs potentially
could be very important medicines.

For the sake of the millions of people
in the world who could be helped,

it's time to say there should be no limits

to the therapeutic research
we do with these drugs.

Thank you.

(Applause)