Seeing Patterns: Clinical Studies with Psychedelics
A Guest Lecture by Matthew Baggott
UCSC CAMPUS Physical Science Building Seminar room 240
March 9th 5:00 P.M.
Psychedelic research in humans? Is that even legal? After decades of regulatory restriction, scientists in the U.S. are again studying psychedelics in humans. In the intervening decades, science has dramatically advanced, with many findings and tools relevant to psychedelics. While studies using animals and cells have deepened our knowledge, they have done so without lessening our puzzlement. Can scientific research with human volunteers adequately address the unusual effects of psychedelics? Matthew Baggott will discuss the challenges of human psychedelic research and what we can hope to learn. He will outline a modest program for research, emphasizing measurement of phenomenology as an important step and illustrate the approach with preliminary results from his ongoing research.
Matthew Baggott is a graduate student in neuroscience at the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, University of California Berkeley. In the mid 1990s, he was part of the first team of researchers to gain federal funding to study MDMA in humans. In his current research, he continues to study the clinical pharmacology and neuroscience of MDMA and classical psychedelics.
contact: aspire_core@ucsc.edu
