Natural Language as a Window into Drug-Induced Altered States of Consciousness | Enzo Tagliazucchi

Dr. Enzo Tagliazucchi | Tenured researcher at the University of Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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Language is fundamental to communicate subjective private experiences and, as such, for the scientific study of consciousness. Classic experimental paradigms require the verbal communication of simple statements, yet unconstrained natural speech can provide a much deeper perspective into the state of consciousness. In this talk I will show how natural language can be mined to reveal signatures that are not only specific to different psychoactive substances, but also indicative of their pharmacological mechanisms of action. Focusing on very large online databases containing reports of experiences with serotonergic psychedelics and different cannabis strains, I will establish a direct link between the subjective and the molecular levels, and then move towards a general computational formalism that can be applied to predict the subjective effects of psychoactive drugs in terms of their chemical structures.

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