Ayahuasca enhances the formation of hippocampal-dependent episodic memory without impacting false memory susceptibility in experienced ayahuasca users: An observational study.

backgroundAyahuasca is an Amazonian brew with 5-HT

aimsGiven the growing literature on the plasticity-promoting effects of psychedelics, we investigated the acute impact of ayahuasca on recollection, familiarity, and false memory in an observational study of 24 Santo Daime members with >500 lifetime ayahuasca uses on average.

methodsParticipants completed a false memory task at baseline and after they consumed a self-selected dose of ayahuasca prepared by their church (average dose contained 3.36 and 170.64 mg of

resultsSurprisingly, pre-encoding administration of ayahuasca enhanced hit rates, memory accuracy, and recollection but had no impact on familiarity or false memory. Although practice effects cannot be discounted, these memory enhancements were large and selective, as multiple measures of false memory and metamemory did not improve across testing sessions. β-carboline activity potentially accounted for this recollection enhancement that diverges from past psychedelic research. Although ayahuasca did not impact familiarity, these estimates were generally elevated across conditions compared to past work, alluding to a consequence of frequently driving cortical plasticity.

conclusionsWhen encoding and retrieval took place under acute ayahuasca effects in experienced ayahuasca users, susceptibility to memory distortions did not increase, potentially owing to enhancements in memory accuracy.