🫠 Psychonaut POV

Welcome to Tricycle Day. We’re the psychedelics newsletter that delivers all your favorites: sex, drugs, and… oh wait. Just checked the back, and we’re fresh out of rock 'n' roll today. Ah well, 2 out of 3 ain’t bad. 🫠

Tommaso Barba started his career as a social media influencer before pivoting to psychedelic science. Now, stick with us. As the legendary LSD user entrepreneur Steve Jobs once said, “you can only connect the dots looking backward.” Believe it or not, Tommaso’s experience on the 'gram still shapes his research to this day.

We asked Tommaso why he’s so excited about short-acting psychedelics, how his research into psychedelics and sexual function took off, and what open questions he’d most like to study next.

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How did your path through neuroscience and psychoanalysis lead you to studying psychedelics at Imperial College?

My academic background is in psychology and neuroscience, but I’ve always been especially fascinated by dreams and the unconscious mind. Freud and Jung and their representations of how the mind works really captured my attention. That's actually what led me to Robin Carhart-Harris, who became one of my mentors. I found an article he wrote about psychedelics and the unconscious while I was researching psychoanalysis.

Before pursuing psychedelics research though, I was actually on a very different path. In my early twenties, I had built up quite a following as a social media influencer in Italy. That experience shaped me in ways I’m still unpacking. It taught me about communication and influence, but it also showed me how social media can create this dance between grandiosity and irrelevance. It's like the ultra-processed food version of real human connection.

I knew I wanted to work with Robin at Imperial, but I didn't have the background to go there directly from Italy. So I went to Maastricht University first to get solid training in neuroscience for two years. I basically schemed it out. I knew Maastricht had a good track record of sending students to Imperial for internships. I ended up being Robin's last master's student before he moved to San Francisco, but we're still in frequent contact and share a lot of overlapping interests.

What drew you to focus specifically on short-acting psychedelics like DMT and 5-MeO-DMT? What makes these compounds especially promising or interesting to study?

I think they're fascinating to study because they induce these really profound alterations of consciousness that aren't prolonged in time. That makes them ideal to perturb our brain system, not only to understand better how these altered states work, but also to understand how our brain functions in normal waking consciousness.

That's a lot of the focus of the 5-MeO-DMT work we've been doing over the past year. We’re trying to identify the neural correlates associated with ego dissolution and the loss of sense of self by perturbing the system. If you take the self out and look at what's happening in the brain, the idea is you'll also get a better understanding of what having a self means.

5-MeO specifically is very well-suited for this research because it doesn't usually induce profound visual alterations. The changes people report are mainly around their identity—their sense of who they are. This normally involves a loss of body boundaries and narrative self, or the normal internal monologue that makes us think we are who we are.

Your research on psychedelics and sexual functioning broke new ground. What were its key findings, and what new questions did it raise?

That study started with my colleague Bruna Giribaldi, who was the clinical trial manager coordinating our initial psilocybin for depression studies. She was really interested in these questions, and her curiosity was contagious. When she left to go to medical school, she left me with the data and concept to develop.

What we found was that after a big psychedelic experience, either in naturalistic settings or in our controlled trials for depression, people reported improvements in sexual satisfaction and wellbeing that lasted up to six months. They reported getting more pleasure from sexual activity, feeling more connected to their partners, and being more sexually satisfied overall.

These findings were particularly interesting because when we compared them to classic antidepressants, which are known for having negative effects on sexual functioning, we found the effects were going in the opposite direction. It was the first time these effects had been investigated by modern science. The media attention was pretty wild! When you combine drugs and sex, people naturally get curious. We had some quirky representations at times, but I think that's just how it goes.

You're interested in the potential of psychedelics for couples therapy. What does your research tell you about how these medicines can support intimate relationships?

That initial research inspired me to understand the effects of psychedelics on relational intimacy more broadly. I don't think the sexual effects we found were related to bodily function. It's not a sexual enhancer like Viagra. I think a huge component is mindfulness—being more present overall—and also changes in emotional connection between partners.

We're currently running the largest online study of couples taking MDMA or classic psychedelics together, tracking their relationship satisfaction, sexual satisfaction, empathy, and attachment styles. We want to understand how having this kind of shared experience impacts relationship dynamics later on. We're also collecting data from a retreat center in the Netherlands called Beautiful Space that does therapeutic programs with couples struggling with relationship issues.

I do think we need to be careful here. These substances can be like modern love potions, and in stories like Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream or Harry Potter, love potions are usually agents of chaos. They can induce profound and beautiful feelings of connection between partners, but they don't make love last forever without the work needed to sustain it. I've seen reports from couples who had incredibly painful breakups months after their shared experience because they ended up so in love, but other life circumstances interfered. Being in love isn't enough if people aren't doing the right work within themselves.

If resources weren’t a barrier, what research questions in psychedelic science would you most like to explore?

I'm very curious about understanding social dynamics using neuroscience. Specifically, I want to explore social connectedness induced by these drugs and how it's reflected in the brain. There's this index called brain synchrony. When you measure brain activity of two brains at the same time, you can see how the waves are synchronous between them. It's a marker of social connection.

I've done a lot of clinical research over the past several years, but I'm not a neuroimaging expert yet. This year I’m going to be mainly focused on digging into the brain science and understanding brain waves better. It's still a part of my career I haven't developed fully.

We're doing a pilot study now with DMT and social connectedness where we give DMT or placebo at different time points to two people who don't know each other, and then have them interact in tasks like eye gazing and hand holding. I think psychedelics could offer a key to developing profound and beautiful social relationships between people, romantic or not. We still have more research to do, and there are certainly dangers involved, but if used in a certain manner, they could offer a path for people to develop real, meaningful connections with each other.

Want more from Tommaso?

Follow him on LinkedIn for updates on his psychedelic research projects, and participate in his ongoing psychedelic couples study.

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DISCLAIMER: This newsletter is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice. The use, possession, and distribution of psychedelic drugs are illegal in most countries and may result in criminal prosecution.