1/n I know y’all have been wanting more disruptive science and @moghaddamlab is here to deliver! Our latest preprint suggests a different approach for behavioral modeling of the potential therapeutic effects of psilocybin!!
2/n We were guided by clinical trials showing that psilocybin improves symptoms of depression and anxiety when given during psychotherapy or other clinician-guided interventions
3/n Our thinking was, what if this is not about a classic drug effect per se, but about psilocybin creating a behavioral state that improves the outcome of therapeutic intervention by relaxing prior beliefs and promoting flexible thinking?
4/n Consistent with this idea, we find that psilocybin robustly improves cognitive flexibility in rats using a task where animals switched multiple times between previously learned strategies in response to uncued changes in the environment biorxiv.org/content/10.110…
5/n Additional interesting observation: DOI, in contrast to psilocybin, impaired performance suggesting this effect does not generalize to all serotonergic #psychedelics
6/n And psilocybin did not improve associative/reversal learning, so its cognitive effects seem to be selective for improving shifting to previously learned behavioral strategies
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