Psilocybin: hippie psychedelic or miracle antidepressant?”

Date: Thursday, April 17th
Time: 10:30am
Place: Kendal at Ithaca and via Zoom

Description: Psychedelic drugs like psilocybin have a long history of use in shamanistic rituals, and became very popular during the 1960’s hippie movement.  Despite considerable research showing eficacy as antidepressants at that time, they were banned from use in the US for political reasons.  Recent work, starting in Europe and now continuing in the US, has suggested that psilocybin can have very rapid antidepressant actions, relieving symptoms within a day or two rather than the weeks that standard antidpressants take.  I will summarize the biology of psilocybin, how it works to generate the psychedelic pseudohallucinations and altered states of consciousness, and how it might be working as a rapid antidepressant.  I will also discuss the possiblility to generate molecular variants of psilocybin that are antidepressant but not hallucinogenic.

Bio: Ron Harris-Warrick is the William T. Keeton Professor in Biological Sciences emeritus, in the Department of Neurobiology and Behavior since 1980. His research has focused on understanding how the nervous system generates flexibility in simple behaviors such as locomotion and respiration. He has studied both invertebrate (lobster digestion) and vertebrate (mouse spinal cord) systems, looking at the structure of the networks that drive the behaviors. His lab has focussed on how neuromodulators such as dopamine and serotonin can reconfigure these networks to provide a variety of different motor patterns from an anatomically fixed network. He has also studied the plastic changes that accompany spinal cord injury.

Harris-Warrick has been passionately interested in teaching since his arrival at Cornell. He is a strong advocate of Active Learning, challenging his students to think and create in the classroom rather than listening to him drone on. He chaired the committee that completely revamped the teaching of introductory biology at Cornell. He was the first Menschel Scholar, advising the Center for Teaching Excellence on faculty perspectives to new teaching tools. Today’s lecture is derived from his course, “Drugs and the Brain”.