To Your Health: Your brain on LSD and your mother on a treadmill

In a first, scientists can now see how the psychedelic drug compound LSD affects brain activity.

Using brain scans, researchers from Imperial College London conducted an experiment in which they gave lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) to 20 volunteers and used brain scans to study how the drug changes the way the brain operates.

The brain regions that contribute to vision were much more active when a person was under the influence of LSD. This explains how the vibrant hallucinations that many LSD users experience are formed, according to the study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Under normal conditions, information from our eyes is processed in a part of the brain at the back of the head called the visual cortex. However, when the study volunteers took LSD, many other areas of the brain — not just the visual cortex — contributed to visual processing.

"Scientists have waited 50 years for this moment: the revealing of how LSD alters our brain biology," said Prof. David Nutt, one of the study's authors.

Allie Shah

The love of physical activity might start in the womb.

The research involved mice, not women. A team led by Robert A. Waterland, an assistant professor of pediatrics, nutrition and molecular and human genetics, put half of the pregnant mice in cages with exercise wheels, while the other half had no wheels.

The mice with the wheels ran an average of 6 miles a night, decreasing to about 2 miles late in pregnancy. The offspring of those mothers turned out to be about 50 percent more physically active than those born to mothers that hadn't had the exercise wheel option. And that difference persisted throughout their lives.

How does this apply to humans? Observational studies of active pregnant women and their babies have reported "results consistent with ours," Waterland said. But it hasn't been clear whether active mothers simply raised their kids to exercise a lot or whether there might have been a genetic predisposition to physical activity.

"Our study in a mouse model is important because we can take all those effects out of the equation," Waterland said. "I think our results offer a very positive message. If expectant mothers know that exercise is not only good for them but also may offer lifelong benefits for their babies, I think they will be more motivated to get moving."