In a recent article in Psychology Today, Danilo Bzdok, M.D. goes through the novel research using natural-language processing tools in machine learning to understand conscious awareness and how drugs alter it.
Although understanding the brain would seem like an eternal task, some of the most recent advances can help new deductions about how our brains work and how drugs could help people with mental health conditions.
According to Bzdok, the available big-data repositories on the human brain allows for reframing questions in medical science as machine-learning problems, which in turn can help researchers view these issues in new ways and develop new insight.
How The Brain Works
Current research shows the potential of psychedelics in alleviating symptoms of mental health disorders. How are they working and why are key questions.
Now, when we’re not in a task-focused mind state, the brain’s default mode network (DMN) is active.
The DMN is the deepest neural processing layer. It’s also the greatest energy consumer of any brain network, which summed together uses 20% of our body’s total energy. Translation: the DMN is one of the most “expensive” parts of one of a human’s most “expensive” parts.
What’s more, brain areas involved in the DMN have had the biggest evolutionary increase in size compared to other parts of our brain, and compared to those of our nearest relatives, monkeys.
Neuroscience experiments esteem that this layer is working to model probability. That is, the DMN may help humans anticipate the future by providing the brain with different perspectives, solutions, and strategic insight on how to value information and make smart decisions.
All this is central to what defines human thought, intelligent behavior, and consciousness.
Mental health, treatments and psychedelics
According to the article, the DMN is key to understanding creativity and many major psychiatric disorders. The connection? It’s likely that mental health conditions are this evolutionary advantage’s snag. Therefore, adjusting the system could help heal such conditions.
Our brains filter out a large amount of sensory input throughout ordinary life. Now, psychedelics may help lift those filters, which have been built up over time and affect how our DMN processes and interprets.
Machine-learning tools and approaches are helping to understand how different brain receptor pathways and neurotransmitters relate to different psychedelic-consuming experiences.
Researchers were able to combine three separate sets of information: people’s descriptions of experiences with psychedelics, data on the receptor affinities with drug compounds, and data on brain receptors showing where and how dense each is.
While the question of how drugs work in consciousness cannot yet be answered, further investigations on the brain’s mechanisms as well as the drugs’ mechanisms affecting the brain may soon allow to better predict which specific drugs will help which groups of people.
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