At some point in their lives, everyone is curious about drugs. Whether you actually try them or not is a whole other story. For many scientists, we're incredibly interested in how they actually work in the brain, and how that can be applied to medicine.
If you've ever seen someone on drugs (I'd be shocked if you haven't!), then you know how drastically they can affect someone's mental state. Depending on the type of drug and the dose, that person can either basically be a lump on the couch, or be ready to take on the world.
One of the most interesting but unstudied drugs is LSD, also known as acid. It became really popular in the 1960s with hippie counterculture, although it had already been around for decades. It's definitely not nearly as popular anymore, but it remains one of the most powerful drugs out there.
To find out exactly what is going on when someone drops acid, researchers injected subjects with a good amount of LSD and scanned their brains. They also did brain scans using a placebo for comparison, and the results were shocking, to say the least.
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When I think of LSD, I basically picture this.
But it's been around far longer than that.
After it was made illegal in the '60s that research basically came to a standstill.
A relatively small group was injected with LSD and a placebo.