Interrupting the Psychedelic Experience Through Contextual Manipulation to Study Experience Efficacy

Introduction

Psychedelic therapy research increasingly treats the subjective experience induced by a psychedelic as the therapeutic agent, shifting focus from drug pharmacology to what the authors call “experience efficacy.” Previous work has linked particular experiential qualities — for example feelings of unity, spiritual-type experiences, insightfulness and altered meaning — with therapeutic outcomes, but methods to manipulate those experiences experimentally without changing the drug itself are limited. Roseman and colleagues propose that intentionally interrupting an ongoing psychedelic experience with cognitive tasks could serve as a tool to test experience efficacy. To illustrate this approach, they present a secondary analysis of data from their 2023 DMT study, testing whether increasing in-session cognitive load (operationalised here by asking participants to provide verbal intensity ratings every 60 seconds) attenuates subjective experience and whether such interruptions are associated with smaller improvements in depressive symptoms two weeks later. They hypothesised lower subjective experience ratings under higher task demands and larger reductions in depressive symptoms when task demands were absent during the experience.