Speaker Bio
Kenneth Shinozuka, 25, is a third-year DPhil (PhD) student at the Centre for Eudaimonia and Human Flourishing in the University of Oxford. Supervised by Prof. Morten Kringelbach, he has sought to synthesise the research on the phenomenology, neuroimaging, and pharmacology of psychedelics. Additionally, he is conducting research about the effects of psychedelics on hierarchical information processing in the brain. While at Oxford, he served as the President of the Oxford Psychedelic Society for three years, where he co-organised Oxford's first-ever symposium on psychedelic science and a protest in Parliament Square for drug reform. Prior to doing his PhD, Kenneth obtained a BA in neuroscience from Harvard University, where he co-founded the Harvard Undergraduate Science of Psychedelics Club. From 2019 to 2020, Kenneth worked at the Qualia Research Institute, which conducts cutting-edge research on the science of consciousness and psychedelics.
ICPR 2024 Abstract
Synergistic, Multi-level Understanding of Psychedelics: Three Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses of Their Pharmacology, Neuroimaging and Phenomenology
Serotonergic psychedelics induce altered states of consciousness and have shown potential for treating a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders, including depression and addiction. Yet their modes of action are not fully understood. Here, we provide a novel, synergistic understanding of psychedelics arising from systematic reviews and meta-analyses of three hierarchical levels of analysis: 1) subjective experience (phenomenology), 2) neuroimaging and 3) molecular pharmacology. Phenomenologically, medium and high doses of LSD yield significantly higher ratings of visionary restructuralisation than psilocybin on the 5-dimensional Altered States of Consciousness Scale. Our neuroimaging results reveal that, in general, psychedelics significantly strengthen between-network functional connectivity (FC) while significantly diminishing within-network FC. Pharmacologically, LSD induces significantly more inositol phosphate formation at the 5-HT2A receptor than DMT and psilocin, yet there are no significant between-drug differences in the selectivity of psychedelics for the 5-HT2A, 5-HT2C, or D2 receptors, relative to the 5-HT1A receptor. Our meta-analyses link DMT, LSD, and psilocybin to specific neural fingerprints at each level of analysis. The results show a highly non-linear relationship between these fingerprints. Overall, the results point to the need for standardising experimental procedures and analysis techniques, as well as for more research on the emergence between different levels of psychedelic effects.