Fleet MaullThe Entrepreneur’s Zen Master

Is psychedelic science creating a new future for trauma healing?

26 Jan 2026 · 1 min

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A Johns Hopkins neuroscientist gave MDMA to octopuses and they became social. The finding suggests MDMA's bonding effects work across species. MAPS is working to make MDMA-assisted therapy available to traumatized people with limited resources.

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People may have heard about the study with octopuses, where Gul Dolan, a neuroscientist at Hopkins, and she gave MDMA to octopuses. Maps provided the MDMA and octopuses became pro social. They're solitary creatures, but under the influence of mdma, they wanted to hang out with other octopuses. So it gets pro social, evolutionary, conserved, and pre verbal. So I think that what we're going to find is that MDMA is going to work cross culturally in all these different contexts. We'll have to figure out what, what's the therapeutic context, things like that. But that, I think, is one of the more exciting things that Maps is going to be working on, is really to globalize access to highly traumatized populations that maybe don't have a lot of resources. Then there's something else that's really interesting for me, which is MDMA for couples therapy.