But the psychedelics, they have these remarkable results where people instead of taking, you know, one a day for years and years and years, the MDMA-assisted psychotherapy trials, it’s three pills total. And those no longer adaptive habits become available for relearning, for updating to the current circumstances. And six months later, the underlying condition is resolved. So what people describe with psychedelics is it’s like it was 20 years of therapy in one day. And I think that our critical period idea really provides an explanation. It’s not just that something is happening at the receptor level that is rebalancing a biochemical imbalance. It’s that that thing that’s happening is enabling a reconfiguration of all of the synapses that are relevant to the trauma. And that is the cure. And that is the cure. It’s the reconfiguring that’s the cure. It’s the learning that’s the cure.
Psychedelics open a critical learning period (for good or ill) that allow for mental processes to be relearned and rebuilt. An actual cure.
Note that they do find in their research that the effectiveness of the drugs does wear off after so many repeated uses. So maybe hold off on so many psychedlic doses, to retain the opportunity for guided critical learning in the future (e.g. to recover from strokes and other mental injuries).