Hammersmith campus, in West London, is the setting for a major psychedelic-neuroscience project: in the Centre for Psychiatry laboratory, Robin Carhart-Harris’s team has used psychedelic drugs and brain imaging to investigate how altered states of consciousness correspond to changes in the brain. The campus thus places a demanding scientific question inside a distinctive modern research environment: how to observe experiences such as ego dissolution as they unfold.

Setting and Research Site

The Centre for Psychiatry occupies part of Hammersmith campus, a recently completed complex described as futuristic but oddly depressing. Its buildings are joined by glass-walled aerial walkways; glass doors slide open when they detect the proper identification. Within this network of controlled access and clinical spaces, David Nutt’s laboratory became the base for an ambitious expedition into the neuroscience of psychedelic experience.

The Brain-Imaging Project

Since 2009, a team led by Robin Carhart-Harris has sought to identify the neural correlates—the physical counterparts—of psychedelic experience. Researchers gave volunteers LSD and psilocybin and observed their brains using several scanning technologies, including functional magnetic resonance imaging and magnetoencephalography. The work offered some of the first views of what experiences such as ego dissolution or hallucination look like in the brain while they are occurring in the mind.

Carhart-Harris’s route into Nutt’s laboratory had passed through graduate study in psychoanalysis. He was drawn to its accounts of the unconscious, while frustrated by what he saw as a lack of scientific rigor and inadequate tools for investigating it. That combination of interest and skepticism informs the project’s ambition: to bring experiences long discussed in psychological language into a form that neuroscience can examine.

Significance and Limits

The project is part of a broader effort to use LSD and psilocybin to open a new window onto consciousness and the relationship between brain and mind. Yet psychedelic research also strains conventional experimental methods. Participants and guides can often tell whether a dose is active, making blinding difficult; moreover, the drug’s effects cannot readily be separated from expectations, the therapeutic setting, and the people present. These complications make the research site significant not simply as a place for advanced scanning, but as a point where the promise of measurement meets the challenge of studying an experience shaped by both pharmacology and context.