Webinar Tue Apr 29th 2025 Gül Dölen: Reopening critical periods with psychedelics (and why we gave octopuses MDMA).

What if the brain’s most sensitive windows for learning and change—once thought to close forever—could be reopened? And what if psychedelics held one possible key for such reopenings? 

On Tuesday April 29th 2025 at 6PM UTC+3, in a webinar lecture organized by the Finnish Association for Psychedelic Research, neuroscientist Gül Dölen will share her research uncovering how psychedelic drugs like MDMA, LSD, psilocybin, and ibogaine can reopen critical periods of brain plasticity, particularly those involved in social reward learning. Understanding psychedelics through this framework dramatically expands the scope of disorders (including autism, stroke, and allergy) that might benefit from adjunct therapy with psychedelics.

The session will also provide a look into her lab’s research on psychedelics and octopuses – why octopuses were given MDMA and how they reacted, and how such research can help improve our understanding of why critical periods exist, why they close, and how they might be reopened.

The event contains a Q&A section and the total length is 2 hours. The event is free of charge – you can register here. The webinar will not be recorded.

You can support us in organizing such free events by paying our membership fee for 2025. You’ll find our membership products on the main page of our web store. We also accept donations. 

About the speaker:

Dr. Gül Dölen is a Professor and the Renee and Bob Parsons Endowed chair in the Department of Psychology, the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute, and the Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics at the University of California, Berkeley. Additionally, Dr. Dölen maintains an adjunct professorship in Neuroscience and Neurology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she previously served as an Assistant and Associate Professor. Dr. Dölen earned her M.D., Ph.D. at Brown University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and completed postdoctoral training at Stanford University. Dr. Dölen is the recipient of several prestigious awards including: the Joukowsky Family Foundation 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, the Johns Hopkins University President’s Frontier Award, and has been named one of Vox magazine’s 50 Future Perfect.