The serotonergic psychedelic DOI impairs deviance detection in the auditory cortex
bioRxiv – September 06, 2024
Source: medRxiv/bioRxiv/arXiv
Summary
Psychedelics can reshape our perception, and recent findings reveal how one compound affects our auditory processing. In awake mice, the psychedelic DOI heightened variability in neural responses while blurring the lines between expected and unexpected sounds. This suggests that DOI dampens the brain's ability to detect surprising auditory changes, offering insights into how such substances alter sensory experiences.
Abstract
Psychedelics are known to induce profound perceptual distortions, yet the neural mechanisms underlying these effects, particularly within the auditory system, remain poorly understood. In this study, we investigated the effects of the psychedelic compound 2,5-Dimethoxy-4-iodoamphetamine (DOI), a serotonin 2A receptor agonist, on the activity of neurons in the auditory cortex of awake mice. We examined whether DOI administration alters sound-frequency tuning, variability in neural responses, and deviance detection (a neural process reflecting the balance between top-down and bottom-up processing). Our results show that while DOI does not alter the frequency selectivity of auditory cortical neurons in a consistent manner, it increases trial-by-trial variability in responses and consistently diminishes the neural distinction between expected (standard) and unexpected (oddball) stimuli. This reduction in deviance detection was primarily driven by a decrease in the response to oddball sounds, suggesting that DOI dampens the auditory cortex’s sensitivity to unexpected events. These findings provide insights into how psychedelics disrupt sensory processing and shed light on the neural mechanisms underlying the altered perception of auditory stimuli observed in the psychedelic state.