Psychedelics and music: neuroscience and therapeutic implications

Abstract

From the beginning of therapeutic research with psychedelics, music listening has been consistently used as a method to guide or support therapeutic experiences during the acute effects of psychedelic drugs. Recent findings point to the potential of music to support meaning-making, emotionality, and mental imagery after the administration of psychedelics, and suggest that music plays an important role in facilitating positive clinical outcomes of psychedelic therapy. This review explores the history of, contemporary research on, and future directions regarding the use of music in psychedelic research and therapy, and argues for more detailed and rigorous investigation of the contribution of music to the treatment of psychiatric disorders within the novel framework of psychedelic therapy.

Keywords:

• Psychedelic
• hallucinogen
• LSD
• psilocybin
• music
• music therapy
• music
• neuroscience

Disclosure statement

MK is a founder and shareholder in Wavepath Ltd. FSB and KHP report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper. FSB was supported in part by NIH grants R03DA042336 and a grant from the Heffter Research Institute. KHP was supported by the SNSF grant P2ZHP1_161626.

Notes

1 ‘Classic’ psychedelics produce a range of idiosyncratic and often profound subjective effects via agonist actions on the serotonin 2A receptor. Examples of classic psychedelics include lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD, psilocybin, found in hundreds of species of psychoactive mushrooms, dimethyltryptamine or DMT, found in the Psychotria viridis and Diplopterys cabrerana plants used to brew ayahuasca, and mescaline, found in some psychoactive cacti. The term psychedelic is derived from merging the Greek word psyche, meaning mind or soul, with delos, meaning to unveil or make visible effects.

2 Peak experiences with psychedelic drugs were first defined by Pahnke et al. (Pahnke, 1963; Pahnke et al., 1969) as sharing common features with non-drug mystical experiences. Peak/mystical experiences are characterized by an experience of unity (with one’s self, one’s surroundings, some or all people, or all that exists), loss of one’s usual sense of space and time, deeply felt positive mood, the felt sense that the experience involves some fundamental truth (noetic quality), difficulty putting the experience into words (ineffability), a felt sense of sacredness, transiency, and paradoxicality (simultaneously containing contradictory feelings, thoughts, experiences, or characteristics).