\u201cThe power of mescaline to me is that it is doing something different than other psychedelics,\u201d said doctoral student Noah Cavallaro, who conducted the study with professor Craig Ferris, who specializes in psychology and pharmaceutical sciences at Northeastern. <\/p>\n
Cavallaro noted that mescaline and psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin produce similar \u201challmark effects\u201d such as visual distortions, altered perception and changes in cognition. But mescaline appears to be doing something different in the brain compared to these other classical psychedelics. <\/p>\n
\u201cIf two compounds produce similar hallucinogenic symptoms through different neural pathways, comparing them could help us pinpoint what\u2019s actually causing those specific experiences,\u201d Cavallaro said.<\/p>\n
Mescaline is a naturally occurring chemical found in cacti<\/a>, mainly peyote cacti that are located in the Southwest United States and Mexico. The drug has been used for 5,700 years<\/a>, according to archaeological evidence, making it one of the oldest hallucinogens.<\/p>\n At Northeastern\u2019s Center for Translational Neuroimaging<\/a> (CTNI), Ferris and students are at the forefront of this movement, using MRI machines to examine the brains of live and awake rodents that have been given drugs such as marijuana<\/a> and psychedelics, including mescalin, psilocybin and LSD.<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWe went through our cannabis phase and have a number of publications out on our animals smoking weed,\u201d Ferris said. \u201cNow we\u2019re in our psychedelic phase.\u201d<\/p>\n The study<\/a> on mescaline was published in the May edition of the journal Neuroscience Bulletin, a neuroscience journal.\u00a0<\/p>\n According to the research, a dose of mescaline elicited what Cavallaro called a \u201cparadoxical\u201d effect on the cerebellum, the part of the brain responsible for motor control and which acts as a \u201cgatekeeper\u201d for processing sensory information.<\/p>\n \u201cEssentially, the cerebellum is being shut down within, but it\u2019s talking more to other parts of the brain,\u201d said Cavallaro, who also studied the effects of psilocybin on the brain<\/a> in a similar experiment with the lab.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n Ferris said that this \u201chyperconnectivity\u201d among different parts of the brain was also seen in rodents who had been given LSD and psilocybin. But the mescaline\u2019s unique dampening effect on the cerebellum, and the cerebellum\u2019s role as a gatekeeper of sensory information, suggested that that region of the brain could contribute to the hallucinatory effects of the drug, Cavallaro said.<\/p>\n \u201cYour whole body \u2013 internally and externally \u2013 is being inundated by sensory information,\u201d Ferris added. \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be devastating if you didn\u2019t \u2018gate\u2019 all of that sensory information out? You would be basically hallucinating.\u201d<\/p>\n By \u2018gating,\u2019 Ferris was referring to the cerebellum\u2019s process of filtering and triaging sensory information so that the body can respond appropriately.<\/p>\n But while a person can describe their mescaline-induced conversations with God, or the vivid images or colors he or she may see while on the drug (two common reported reactions to mescaline, Ferris said) a rodent, alas, cannot. So, researchers used sound and smell (olfactory) stimuli to test whether rodents\u2019 sensory perception was altered as a result of a mescaline dose.\u00a0<\/p>\n The rodents had no reaction to a \u201crewarding\u201d smell while they were high, according to the research.<\/p>\n The drugged rodents had a mixed response to sounds in a test to measure a key gatekeeping feature of the cerebellum called \u201cprepulse inhibition\u201d<\/a> \u2013\u00a0 a neurological function where a weak tone (a prepulse) suppresses the brain\u2019s \u201cstartle\u201d response when the tone is repeated suddenly or loudly.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf I was standing behind you and I clapped a loud sound, you would jump \u2013 you\u2019d be startled by that sound,\u201d Ferris said to explain the concept. \u201cBut then if I did it seconds later \u2026 you would completely ignore it.\u201d<\/p>\n To test this response, researchers exposed drugged rodents to a series of tones at low, middle, and high frequencies. The rodents\u2019 cerebellums were able to effectively \u201cgatekeep\u201d and filter out the repeated loud sounds at the high and the low frequencies, according to the study, but when exposed to sounds at the middle frequency, the rodents \u201cfailed miserably,\u201d Ferris said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen you look at the brain activity data, and you see all that deactivation in the cerebellum, it raises the question, is the cerebellum being shut down completely or is it selectively filtering out signals?\u201d Cavallaro explained. \u201cWhat we were able to determine with both the pre-pulse inhibition and with the olfactory tests was it\u2019s a selective filter.\u201d<\/p>\n \tNortheastern Global News, in your inbox.<\/p>\n Sign up for NGN\u2019s daily newsletter for news, discovery and analysis from around the world.<\/p>\n Patients with some psychiatric disorders also can have difficulty gatekeeping sensory stimuli, Ferris said. For example, post-traumatic stress can be triggered by certain sounds and feature \u201cauditory illusions,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0 the phenomenon where your brain interprets a sound wave differently than its actual physical properties \u2013 for example, making you hear sounds that aren\u2019t there or making you perceive impossible acoustic properties. \u00a0People experiencing their first schizophrenic episode show hyperconnectivity patterns<\/a> similar to those shown by rodents exposed to mescaline, according to the research.<\/p>\n Cavallaro said the next step in the research is to measure how different doses affect cerebral brain activity and expand the research beyond the lab.<\/p>\n \u201cThis is a drug that hasn\u2019t made its way into the clinic,\u201d Cavallaro said. \u201cTo draw the translational gap between rodents and humans, I think the clinic is the next step.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For millennia, people have used the psychedelic mescaline as a spiritual and religious tool.\u00a0 New research from Northeastern…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":595760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[78],"tags":[718,18,26486,135,19,17,10402,172,1420],"class_list":["post-595759","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-drugs","tag-eire","tag-faculty","tag-health","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-mri","tag-research","tag-students"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116954660809238222","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=595759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/595759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/595760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=595759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=595759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=595759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Professor](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/neu_ms35vn640.jpg\")
Craig Ferris leads the Center for Translational Neuroimaging at Northeastern University. Photo by Alyssa Stone\/Northeastern University<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/EmailGraphic.png\")
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