Maria Balaet - Effects of psychedelics on the brain...before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

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Effects of psychedelics on the brain and behaviour – before, during and after the COVID-19 pandemic.

ABSTRACT
The Great British Intelligence Test (the largest computerised cognitive testing initiative in the world) commenced in December 2019, just prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, and recruited approximately 500k participants during the first 6 months of its release. Out of these participants, 100k agreed to share their emails and be contacted for follow up. From December 2020 one arm of the study surveyed participants who agreed to be recontacted on their recreational drug use patterns at 6-monthly intervals up until January 2023.

We identified that 1 in 3 respondents were recreational drug users, and 1 in 10 respondents were psychedelics users. Having collected one of the largest longitudinal datasets in the world during the COVID-19 pandemic allowed us to model the relationship between recreational drug use (and their fluctuations), cognitive abilities, mental health, scepticism about authorities, compliance with guidelines and resilience during difficult times, relative to the general population. Our results help answer key questions in the field of psychedelics research – are users of psychedelic drugs displaying better mental health and higher resilience levels than users of other drugs or those who never used drugs before? Is there a cognitive fingerprint characteristic to the brains of psychedelics users?

Is there any relationship between the use of psychedelics and behaviour during acute COVID-19 restrictions, or scepticism against authority? Importantly, at the time of recruitment, none of the participants in our sample who are psychedelics users were aware that we were going to survey them on this aspect of their lifestyle at follow-ups, therefore mitigating self-selection bias characteristic to studies looking at psychedelics use. This talk is going to cover key results from our study, and discuss their place in the wider scientific literature and public discourse around psychedelics.

BIOGRAPHY
Maria Balaet is a computational neuroscientist at Imperial College London. She specialises in using super scale cognitive testing and advanced artificial intelligence algorithms to understand how cognitive processes such as memory, attention, problem solving and language differ from the general population in those who use drugs (such as psychedelics) recreationally or suffer with either neurological or psychiatric conditions.

Notably, during the past three years she led one arm of the Great British Intelligence Test (the largest computerised cognitive testing initiative in the world), looking at how and why the pandemic impacted drug use patterns in the UK, and with what consequences on the cognitive abilities and mental health of recreational users. Outside of her research work, she is passionate about public engagement with science, and has delivered dozens of public lectures across the UK as well as abroad, with a focus on the mechanism of psychedelic drugs as well as harm reduction.