Brian Winston

PhD Candidate

Brian is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Dept. of Psychological & Brain Sciences co-advised by Drs. Fred Barrett and Janice Chen.  

Brian’s research program investigates how psychedelic drugs affect the mind and brain in real-world scenarios. To date, most psychedelic neuroimaging studies have administered drugs to people lying down with their eyes closed. Using these data, the field has built theories and models for how psychedelics alter thoughts, behavior, and brain activity with the assumption that these models will generalize across contexts. During most of waking life, however, people have their eyes open, they process information, interact with other people, and solve problems. Anecdotally, psychedelic effects are different in these states, but the field has not yet characterized how. Brian and his colleagues record people’s brain activity while they watch movies. Movies simulate many features of real life such as movement through space, social interaction, emotional changes, and narrative structure. These data allow us to probe how psychedelics modulate perception, emotional responses, memory, causal judgment, and much more. 

Brian is also investigating whether psychedelic drugs enhance brain metaplasticity. An intriguing hypothesis is that psychedelics enable flexible and durable behavioral changes by transiently increasing the malleability of neural circuits. Brian and colleagues are testing this hypothesis in rodent and human models. 

Read more about Brian’s research at brianwinston.com. You can follow him on X: https://x.com/winstonian3