
Manoj DossUniversity of Texas at Austin | UT · Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
Manoj Doss
Doctor of Philosophy
About
35
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Additional affiliations
September 2011 - August 2013
Publications
Publications (35)
Background
Ayahuasca is an Amazonian brew with 5-HT 2A -dependent psychedelic effects taken by religious groups globally. Recently, psychedelics have been shown to impair the formation of recollections (hippocampal-dependent episodic memory for specific details) and potentially distort memory while remembering. However, psychedelics spare or enhanc...
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder with defining abnormalities in memory, and psychedelics may be promising candidates for the treatment of PTSD given their effects on multiple memory systems. Most PTSD and psychedelic research has investigated memory with fear conditioning and extinction. While fruitful, conditioning an...
Psychedelics are recognised for their potential to re-orient beliefs. We propose a model of how psychedelics can, in some cases, lead to false insights and thus false beliefs. We first review experimental work on laboratory-based false insights and false memories. We then connect this to insights and belief formation under psychedelics using the ac...
Psychedelics (hallucinogenic 5-HT2A agonists such as psilocybin) are gaining recognition for their potential to treat a range of conditions, including anxiety-related psychopathology. Despite early promising results, the mechanisms by which psychedelic therapy alleviates anxiety are not well understood. Here, we review neural and cognitive mechanis...
In this interview, Manoj Doss addresses the "Cinco Sins of Psychedelic Research," highlighting methodological concerns and biases, including those stemming from self-experimentation and researchers' personal drug experiences. Advocating for a closer integration of cognitive psychology and neuropharmacology, he calls for empirical approaches to stud...
In recent years, psychedelics have generated considerable excitement and interest as potential novel therapeutics for an array of conditions, with the most advanced evidence base in the treatment of certain severe and/or treatment-resistant psychiatric disorders. An array of clinical and pre-clinical evidence has informed our current understanding...
Despite distinct classes of psychoactive drugs producing putatively unique states of consciousness, there is surprising overlap in terms of their effects on episodic memory and cognition more generally. Episodic memory is supported by multiple subprocesses that have been mostly overlooked in psychopharmacology and could differentiate drug classes....
Psychedelics are recognised for their therapeutic potential and ability to re-orient beliefs. However, the prospect that psychedelics can induce false or maladaptive beliefs has been under- considered. Here, we review experimental work on false insights and false memories. We then connect this to insights and belief formation under psychedelics usi...
Psychoactive drugs modulate learning and emotional processes in ways that could impact their recreational and medical use. Recent work has revealed how drugs impact different stages of processing emotional episodic memories, specifically encoding (forming memories), consolidation (stabilizing memories), and retrieval (accessing memories). Drugs adm...
A recent paper in Nature Medicine found that psilocybin therapy in patients with depression decreased brain network modularity (measured with task-free functional magnetic resonance imaging), an effect supposedly not found with the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor S-citalopram. This decrease in network modularity also correlated with depressi...
Psychoactive drugs modulate learning and emotional processes in ways that could impact their recreational and medical use. Recent work has revealed how drugs impact different stages of processing emotional episodic memories, including encoding (formation of memory traces), consolidation (stabilization of memory traces), and retrieval (accessing mem...
Despite distinct classes of psychoactive drugs producing putatively unique states of consciousness, there is surprising overlap in terms of their effects on episodic memory and cognition more generally. Episodic memory is supported by multiple subprocesses that have been mostly overlooked in psychopharmacology and could differentiate drug classes....
Clinical research into serotonergic psychedelics is expanding rapidly, showing promising efficacy across myriad disorders. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) is a commonly used strategy to identify psychedelic-induced changes in neural pathways in clinical and healthy populations. Here we, a large group of psychedelic ima...
Here we raise issues in Daws et al. (2022) published in Nature Medicine.
Classic psychedelic drugs such as psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) have recaptured the imagination of both science and popular culture, and may have efficacy in treating a wide range of psychiatric disorders. Human and animal studies of psychedelic drug action in the brain have demonstrated the involvement of the serotonin 2A (5-HT2A...
Psilocybin has shown promise for the treatment of mood disorders, which are often accompanied by cognitive dysfunction including cognitive rigidity. Recent studies have proposed neuropsychoplastogenic effects as mechanisms underlying the enduring therapeutic effects of psilocybin. In an open-label study of 24 patients with major depressive disorder...
Psychedelic substances produce unusual and compelling changes in conscious experience which have prompted some to propose that psychedelics may provide unique insights explaining the nature of consciousness. At present, psychedelics, like other current scientific tools and methods, seem unlikely to provide information relevant to the so-called “har...
Salvinorin A (SA) is a κ-opioid receptor agonist and atypical dissociative hallucinogen found in Salvia divinorum. Despite the resurgence of hallucinogen studies, the effects of κ-opioid agonists on human brain function are not well-understood. This placebo-controlled, within-subject study used functional magnetic resonance imaging for the first ti...
With the increasing prevalence of legal cannabis use and availability, there is an urgent need to identify cognitive impairments related to its use. It is widely believed that cannabis, or its main psychoactive component Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), impairs working memory, i.e., the ability to temporarily hold information in mind. However, our re...
Psilocybin is a classic psychedelic compound that may have efficacy for the treatment of mood and substance use disorders. Acute psilocybin effects include reduced negative mood, increased positive mood, and reduced amygdala response to negative affective stimuli. However, no study has investigated the long-term, enduring impact of psilocybin on ne...
The sixth edition of the foundational reference on cognitive neuroscience, with entirely new material that covers the latest research, experimental approaches, and measurement methodologies. Each edition of this classic reference has proved to be a benchmark in the developing field of cognitive neuroscience. The sixth edition of The Cognitive Neuro...
With the sharply increasing prevalence of cannabis use and availability, there is an urgent need to identify cognitive impairments related to its use. It is widely believed that cannabis, or its main psychoactive component Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), impairs working memory, i.e., the ability to temporarily hold information in mind. However, our...
Background:
With the growing acceptance of cannabis use, it is crucial to understand the drug's effects on episodic memory accuracy and distortion. We investigated the impact of the administration of Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the main psychoactive constituent of cannabis, on a context-based memory illusion.
Methods:
In a double-blind, place...
We investigated the impact of 2 hypothetical mechanisms of episodic memory reconstruction- perceptual recombination and conceptual fluency- on objectively measured recollection accuracy and false recollections of neutral and emotional stimuli. Participants encoded negative, neutral, and positive pictures depicting objects and scenes (i.e., target p...
Alcohol and other pharmacologically similar sedatives (i.e., GABAA positive allosteric modulators or PAMs) impair the encoding of new episodic memories but retroactively facilitate the consolidation of recently encoded memories. These effects are consistent for recollection (i.e., the retrieval of details) but some mixed results have been reported...
Background:
It is well established that the main psychoactive constituent of cannabis, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), impairs episodic memory encoding and modulates emotional processing, but little is known about the impact of THC during the retrieval of emotional episodic memories. With the rise of cannabis to treat medical conditions, including...
It is widely assumed that context reinstatement benefits memory, but our experiments revealed that context reinstatement can systematically distort memory. Participants viewed pictures of objects superimposed over scenes, and we later tested their ability to differentiate these old objects from similar new objects. Context reinstatement was manipul...
The psychoactive drug ±3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA) is increasingly used for its perceived emotional effects (eg, prosociality, empathy, psychotherapy), but surprisingly little research has been aimed at identifying the effect of the drug on emotional episodic memory in humans. Here, we report the first double-blind placebo-controlled s...
Recollection is constructive and prone to distortion, but the mechanisms through which recollections can become embellished with rich yet illusory details are still debated. According to the conceptual fluency hypothesis, abstract semantic or conceptual activation increases the familiarity of a nonstudied event, causing one to falsely attribute ima...
Reward motivation is known to modulate memory encoding, and this effect depends on interactions between the substantia nigra/ventral tegmental area complex (SN/VTA) and the hippocampus. It is unknown, however, whether these interactions influence offline neural activity in the human brain that is thought to promote memory consolidation. Here we use...