Psychedelic effects on spatial encoding in the mouse retrosplenial cortex
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Date
2024
Authors
Ivan, Victorita E.
University of Lethbridge. Faculty of Arts and Science
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Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Dept. of Neuroscience
Abstract
Psychedelics are psychoactive substances that evoke a characteristic set of mental phenomena that include altered psychological experiences, unstable moods, and perceptual distortions. These hallucinogens provide a means to study brain function. Analyzing their functional effects on neural activity can provide us with important data about their effects on information encoding. The retrosplenial cortex (RSC) is an excellent target to study the effects of psychoactive drugs because it is a hub that integrates and coordinates the activity of distinct brain regions that mediate cognitive processes. The present work indicates that two different psychedelics (psilocybin and ibogaine) have similar short-term effects on neural encoding of spatial position in the RSC. The data indicate that psychedelics disrupt the brain’s process of internally keeping track of position. Furthermore, the RSC exhibited a reduction in the signal to noise ratio of the spatial encoding with chronic amphetamine. Ibogaine administration did not ameliorate this deficit. The data presented in this doctoral thesis are among the first to suggest that cognitive maps are disrupted by psychedelic compounds.
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Keywords
Psychedelic compounds , Retrosplenial cortex , Spatial encoding , Cognitive maps , Neural encoding