Andrew Huberman· PhD
So all of the so-called psychedelics across these distinct uh classes that I can talk more about um the way I put it is they all have the ability to profoundly alter one's sense of reality and that can mean many things. Part of that is profoundly altering the sense of self um acutely. So when someone's on the psychedelic um so the different classes that can be the specific pharmacological classes that can be called a psychedelic are one the what are called the classic psychedelics. So in the literature you'll see that term and hallucinagen and psychedelic are all have traditionally been used synonymously. Um, I think there was a little of a tendency to stay away from psychedelics of the baggage, but there's been a return to that in the last several years. But the classic psychedelics or classic hallucinagens are things like LSD, um, psilocybin, which is in so-called magic mushrooms. It's in over 200 species that we know of so far of mushrooms. Uh, dimethylrypamine or DMT, which is in dozens and dozens of of plants. um measculine which is in the peyote cacti and some other cacti like San Pedro and even amongst these classic psychedelics um there are two structural structural classes so that's the chemistry there's the tryptoamine based compounds like psilocybin and DMT and then there's the phenthylaminebased compounds these are the basic two basically building blocks that that you're starting from either a tryptoamine structure or a phenthylamine structure But that's just the chemistry. The all of the what's more important or at least to to someone like me are the receptor effects and then ultimately that's going to have a relationship to the behavioral and subjective effect. So all of these classic psychedelics serve as agnist or partial agonist at the serotonin 2-way receptor. So subtype of serotonin receptor. Then you have these other classes of of of that you compounds that you could call psychedelic. Another big big one would be the NMDA antagonist. So this would include ketamine, PCP, and dextroathorophin. Something I've done some research with which folks might recognize from like robo tripping, guzzling, like you know, uh, call syrup. A large overlap in the types of subjective effects that you get from those compounds compared to the 2-way agonist classic psychedelics. Um, but then you have another big one, MDMA, which really stands in a class by itself.