What do psychedelic drugs do to our brains? AI could help us find out

Randomized clinical trials, which involve giving some participants a drug, others a placebo, and comparing the effects of both, are considered the gold standard in such studies. But such trials are slow and expensive, and tend to involve only a small number of participants. "[It takes] multiple years, costs a seven-digit amount of money, [and] the ethics approvals take forever," says Bzdok. Instead, his team used natural language processing to assess 6,850 written accounts of hallucinogenic drug use. Each account was written by a person who took one of 27 drugs--including ketamine, MDMA, LSD and psilocin--in a real-world setting rather than as part of a lab-based experiment.