AUDIO – THEY ARE MAGICAL –
Mar. 13, 2026 – A chemical neuroscientist named David Olson, then a graduate student at Stanford, told me that he encountered these studies and was “struck by the ability of a substance, with a single dose, to have such long-lasting effects.” He wanted to know how the drugs worked. He followed closely as researchers began investigating the effects of mind-altering substances on depression, anxiety, substance-use disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, and other conditions. These studies often identified positive results, sometimes marked ones, and they sparked discussions about a new mental-health paradigm. Might we one day take psychedelics as a kind of therapy? How would clinicians safely prescribe substances that change our perceptions, thoughts, and moods? And perhaps the most perplexing question of all: Why would such drugs make us feel better in the first place?
An important clue came in 2010, when another team at Yale published a study of how ketamine affected the brain cells of rats.
