The Role of Music in Psychedelic Medicine

There is renewed interest in using psychedelic drugs to treat people who have difficult psychological conditions. A psychedelic experience (trip) lasts several hours and it could go well or it could go badly. How does what you hear affect the trip? Or, perhaps more importantly, how can music drive the trip and the therapy in a more useful way?

I’m really happy that Bob Dougherty will be at Friday’s Hearing Seminar to talk about a topic I haven’t thought about: How does music affect a psychedelic trip? Psychedelic medications are showing promise in treating difficult conditions like drug-resistant depression. In concert with therapy, a psychedelic experience opens up new ways to treat patients. Composers think about a listener’s emotional journey. Where would you like your trip to go? And how might it affect serious conditions like depression?

Bob is a long-time denizen of the Hearing Seminar and for many years ran the fMRI facility in Stanford’s Psychology Department, giving him a broad view of neural imaging.

Who: Bob Dougherty (Compass Pathways)
What: The Role of Music in Psychedelic Medicine
When: Friday January 24th at 10:30AM
Where: CCRMA Seminar Room
Why: Is there more to psychedelic music than the Grateful Dead?

Come to CCRMA for an interesting journey. [I specifically did not say trip.]



The Role of Music in Psychedelic Medicine
Bob Dougherty (Compass Pathways)
The recent renaissance in psychedelic medicine has highlighted the crucial role of "set and setting" in determining therapeutic outcomes, with music as a particularly important factor. This talk explores the intersection of psychedelics and music, beginning with a historical overview of classic (serotonergic) psychedelics and their applications in both traditional and modern contexts. I will examine the psychological and neuroscientific foundations of psychedelic therapy, with a focus on how music may interact with the mechanisms of action of psychedelics to facilitate emotional breakthroughs and therapeutic change. I will also present a descriptive analysis of music information retrieval (MiR) features from established psychedelic therapy playlists, revealing patterns in the musical characteristics commonly employed in clinical settings. Despite growing interest in this field, empirical data on the role of music in psychedelic experiences remains limited. I propose several strategies for systematic data collection in both clinical trials and naturalistic settings, aiming to build an evidence base for optimizing music selection in psychedelic treatments.

Bio
At the frontier of neuroscience and health technology innovation, Bob Dougherty is applying data-driven methods to advance how we understand and improve mental health. As Vice President of Digital Health Research at Compass Pathways, he's driving data science and machine learning research into psilocybin therapy to make psychedelic treatments safer and more accessible. Before joining Compass, Bob was VP of Research at Mindstrong Health, where he led developments in passive digital biomarkers to create a "digital fingerprint" of mental health through smartphone interactions. Prior to Mindstrong, Bob was Research Director of the Stanford Center for Neurobiological Imaging. Throughout his scientific career, Bob has published extensively in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, statistics, magnetic resonance technology, and machine learning.