Dartmouth Events

Please join us on Friday, April 29, 2022, at 3:30 p.m., for a virtual colloquium given by Dr. Gul Dolen, Associate Professor in the Solomon H. Snyder Department Neuroscience and the Brain Science Institute at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Title/abstract are below, and Zoom details will be forthcoming. 

Title: Reopening Critical Periods with Psychedelics: Basic Mechanisms and Therapeutic Opportunities

Abstract:  During specific periods of brain development, the nervous system exhibits heightened sensitivity to ethologically relevant stimuli, as well as increased malleability for synaptic, circuit, and behavioral modifications. These mechanistically constrained windows of time are called ‘critical periods’, and neuroscientists have long sought methods to reopen them for therapeutic benefit. Recently, we have described a novel critical period for social reward learning and discovered that psychedelic drugs reopen this critical period. These findings have significant implications for the implementation of psychedelics in clinical practice, as well as the design of novel compounds for the treatment of neuropsychiatric disease.