Gül Dölen | Psychedelic Mediated Reopening of Critical Periods: Basic Mechanisms and Therapeutic Opportunities

Event details Date: Wednesday, August 26, 2026 Time: 12:10 PM to 1:30 PM Location: Berkeley Way West (2121 Berkeley Way), Room 1102 Type: Lecture / Workshop Audience: Alumni,Faculty,Prospective Students,Public,Staff,Students About this event Institute of Personality and Social Research Colloquium Psychedelics are a broad category of compounds that induce altered states of consciousness. These drugs have shown remarkable promise for the treatment of debilitating disorders ranging from post traumatic stress disorder to depression and addiction. Although early studies focused on linking binding targets of psychedelics to their therapeutic effects, these pharmacological and biochemical explanations fail to account for the diversity, durability, and context dependence of psychedelics’ clinical and acute subjective effects. More recently, neurobiological explanations offer fresh insights and demonstrate that a unifying property of psychedelics is that these compounds reopen critical periods, induce metaplasticity, and reorganize the extracellular matrix. Here we review this evidence and argue that the neurobiological and therapeutic effects of psychedelics challenge the biochemical imbalance model that has dominated translational neuroscience since the 1950s and favor instead a learning model that better accounts for psychedelics’ unique therapeutic profile. Dr. Gül Dölen is a Professor and the Bob & Renee Parsons Endowed Chair in the Department of Neuroscience, and Department of Psychology, the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, and also maintains an Adjunct Professorship in Neuroscience and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University, School of Medicine. She is the recipient of several prestigious awards, including the Joukowsky Family Foundation Outstanding Dissertation Award, the Conquer Fragile X Rising Star Award, the Angus MacDonald Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the Society for Social Neuroscience Early Career Award, the Searle Scholars Award, and the Johns... Official event details: https://events.berkeley.edu/live/events/325067-gl-dolen-psychedelic-mediated-reopening-of