Mushrooms Don't Make You Grow...

When Timothy Leary (renowned psychologist) advised his generation to “turn on” by taking psychedelic drugs, he got it all wrong. The truth is, turning off parts of the brain may be the real secret to expanding your mind, a new study of hallucinogenic mushrooms finds.

(A version of this article appeared in Motley, UCC's official magazine in the Feb Issue, 2012)

The study involved 15 people who had previous experiences taking hallucinogens. These ‘lucky’ volunteers were then injected with psilocybin which is the ingredient responsible for mind trips thanks to mushrooms. The effect was immediate, peaking in just minutes and lasting for about an hour.

Some described the experience as ‘dissolving’, while another said they were ‘kneeling at the foot of God’. Their brains were scanned before and after the trips. It was shown that there were decreases in the amount of blood flowing through parts of their brains. The reduction of brain activity was seen in particular in the thalamus.

This reduction in action is not what would be expected. For years, people have thought that hallucinogens ‘turn-on’ brain activity. Even I, with my limited and naive knowledge perused that these kinds of drugs were activating other pathways in the brain. Stimulation, not depression. Stimulation would more likely explain the kaleidoscopic hallucinations often experienced by magic mushroom users.

So what is going on?

It may be suppressing core regions that help to coordinate and control the brain that has deeper, more philosophical consequences. It fits with how Aldous Huxley described the effects of mescaline — a hallucinogen that, in his words, flung wide the “doors of perception.”

So, decreased activity in certain parts of the brain may allow for a more unconstrained conscious experience, in a way lifting the ‘filters that are at play in terms of limiting our perception of reality’ according to Matthew Johnson, an experimental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Scientists believe that the highly interconnected brain that we all have is essential for maintaining a person’s sense of self. So, by turning off some of these networks, it may be possible to treat certain psychological conditions by opening the brain to new ways of thinking, researchers hope.

Several studies have shown that psilocybin can change people’s attitudes for the better and may be useful for treating depression, a condition linked to too much activity in the normal network pathways of the brain.

“Chemically switching off might have very profound beneficial effects,” says Nutt, who suspects that psilocybin could also be useful for treating obsessive-compulsive disorder. “It may help people completely locked into a mindset that drives their lives.”

I have to add though that using psychedelic drugs is dangerous. Many people argue that taking mushrooms is safer than any of the other hallucinogens, and that could be the case, but one has to remember that altering your perception of reality can have lasting effects e.g persisting anxiety, psychological disturbances or even ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’.

It is seriously messing with your mind. So please, don’t use this article as an excuse to experiment. Studies like this are done to try and find ways to cure disorders in a controlled manner. Not to reason that it’s ok for drug misuse.

Dublin - City of Science 2012

 This is all gonna be pretty exciting - stay tuned for more news concerning this...

'Dublin has been chosen to host Europe’s largest science conference, ESOF 2012 (Euroscience Open Forum), from 11-15 July, 2012. To celebrate this prestigious, international event in Dublin, the City of Science 2012, an innovative science themed festival will run throughout the year across the island of Ireland combining the best of Irish culture, arts and science.'

For now, check out: http://www.dublinscience2012.ie/

Its the power of... MUSIC!

I always knew that there was power in music, but this blows my mind!

A new type of miniature medical sensor that is implanted in the body can be powered by a driving bass rhythm. The sensor would be used to measure pressure changes in parts of the body, helping those with aneurisms or incontinence due to paralysis. 


The way that it works is thus: There is a tiny vibrating cantilever at the heart of the sensor. A cantilever is a thin beam attached at one end, kind of like a diving board. Music within a certain range, between 200 and 500 hertz has been found to be able to cause this little lever to vibrate. These vibrations generate electricity which can store a charge in a capacitor.

Babak Ziai (what a name, right?!), a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering said, ‘The music reaches the correct frequency only at certain times, for example, when there is a strong bass component.’

What’s really cool is that the acoustic energy can bass through body tissue. Thus if the sensor is implanted in the body, it can be recharged.

It’s a clever little device such that when the frequency falls outside of the proper range, the cantilever stops vibrating, automatically sending the electrical charge to the sensor, which then takes a pressure reading. This data is then transmitted as radio signals. Because frequencies continually change in songs, the sensor can be switch between storing charge and transmitting data.

"You would only need to do this for a couple of minutes every hour or so to monitor either blood pressure or pressure of urine in the bladder," Ziaie said. "It doesn't take long to do the measurement."

It is possible to play tones within the frequency range instead of music, but that would be boring. The researchers experimented with a few types of music: rap, blues, jazz and rock. Rap turned out to be the best as it contains a lot of bass! 

To reiterate, this sensor can measure pressure in the urinary bladder on in the blood vessel damaged by an aneurysm. When pressure in the bladder rises, the spinal cord can be stimulated to control urine flow. It can also be used as a diagnostic tool instead of a painful catheter. 

These exciting findings will be presented in the upcoming IEEE MEMS conference in a few days in Paris, and the patent is pending.

My computer should yawn too...

Getting too hot? Sitting by the fire for too long? Try yawning... apparently...


According to researchers from Yale University and the University of Maryland, YAWNING may act to cool the brain when it gets too hot. Yawning opes up the sinuses located to the left and right of the nose, so that letting air into these places would reduce brain temperature.

Researchers argue that yawining is a symptom of conditions that cause an increase in the brain or core temperature. It is true that fits of yawning have been noticed to precede epileptic seisures and migraines.

Studies done in mice do demonstrate that the brains of mice increased in temperature just before a yawn and decreased directly after. A potential cause for this is that the mucus in the sinuses may constantly evaporate, and thus cool the surrounding blood vessels and cerebrospinal fluid. Bringing in new air into the sinues would speed up this process, cooling the brain.

Now I am going to refues to stifle that yawn, whether it happens in class, or in a job interview... or when meeting the Queen. I do not want to overheat my brain.

To Sleep or to Not Sleep?!

I dont know why so many of these articles have to do with sleep patterns - I must be lacking in those REM cycles. Its not surprising though, two jobs and a full-time masters would keep anyone running in circles. Ah, but I do love that feeling, just when you are dozing off, when you no longer think...well here is something you can think of when you can't sleep!

Never let the sun go down on your anger! This biblical warning may actually have a scientific founding according to new research. Sleeping apparently seers bad feeling into the brain, while be awake can take the emotional edge off. The study appeared in a report in the Jan 18 Journal of Neuroscience. It was known that sleep locks in memories - studying the second before you go to sleep and when you wake up fortifies long-term memory. But scientists didn't know whether feelings accompanying painful memories are locked in too. This question is of particular importance to people who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder.

“If we really want to know if this is relevant to trauma survivors, then we need to know if sleep not just changes the memory, but if it changes how you feel about it if you experience it again,” says study coauthor Rebecca Spencer of the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

In the study, Spencer and her colleagues showed participants pictures of neutral scenes, such as a street, or negative scenes, such as an upsetting car crash, to 106 young adults. Participants then rated the emotion inspired by the image on a one-to-nine scale ranging from sad to happy. After that, they were either sent to bed for a full night’s sleep or asked to stay awake for 12 hours. The researchers then retested the participants by showing some of the same pictures mixed in with new images. 

The results were as expected. The participant who had slept were better at remembering which images they had seen the day before. But it wasn't only the memory that remained: sleepers held on tighter to their feelings. Sadness scores given by people who stayed awake tended to weaker in the second session.

These results are to preliminary to base any reccomendations about how much or little sleep should be had after experiencing trauma. So more needs to be researched.

It should be noted that sleep deprivation is actually known to increase stress, so while the bad feeling may be seered into the brain, the temporary effects can be detrimental. “In most cases, it’s better to sleep than to not sleep,” Cognitive neuroscientist Jessica Payne of the University of Notre Dame in Indiana states.

But wait! There are conflicting study results: a study published in December that found that a night of sleep takes the emotional edge off unpleasant experiences — what some scientists call overnight therapy. That study, led by Matthew Walker of the University of California, Berkeley, used different methods and measurements, which may be responsible for the seemingly opposite findings, says neuroscientist Penny Lewis of the University of Manchester in England.

Ah this often happens when you did deeper - there are so few facts in Science! You haven't learnt anything new really, except that you musn't take things at their face value, I started this thinking there was a new discovery to be made - but the case is still open. Watch this space. If you are pained by this, the maybe you should stay awake all night so the pain doesn't imprint itself. Or not, cos it might be better if you slept... AHHHHH!

Who knows the nose?

Apparently, according to research done at the Weizmann Institute (in Israel), how we rate a certain smells (i.e. whether they are pleasant or not) has to do with an organizing principle for the way we smell. At a deeper level, certain nerves respond to particular scents and it is this connection that allowed researchers to tell whether their test subject found a smell pleasant or unpleasant.

This kind of organisation is seen in other sensory organs. For example, in the eye, the receptors are arranged to map out visual coordinates. The inner ear, as well, is set up based on tonal scale. But until now, the organizational principle for a sense of smell has remained a mystery. 

                                                                                                   

As scientists began delving into this conundrum, they began noticing that there was a connection between the chemical structure of an odour molecule and its place on the ‘pleasantness scale’. Professor Noam Sobel figured that maybe the smell receptors in the nose were arranged on the nasal membrane according to this scale. Note that this idea goes against what was thought previously, which was that the various receptors were mixed, distributed evenly, but randomly on the membrane.

Using lots of tiny electrodes attached to many (presumably very patient) volunteers’ noses, scientists found that the strength of response from each nerve varied from place to place in reaction to different smells. Further investigation showed that the intensity of any reaction was linked to the odour’s place on the pleasantness scale. Therefore, their hypothesis seems correct.

'We uncovered a clear correlation between the pattern of nerve reaction to various smells and the pleasantness of those smells. As in sight and hearing, the receptors for our sense of smell are spatially organized in a way that reflects the nature of the sensory experience,' says Sobel. This doesn’t mean that individuals may experience smells differently, but instead suggests that cultural context and personal experiences may cause a certain amount of reorganization in smell perception over a person’s lifetime.

I knew that my obsession with coriander leaf had something to do with having Indian neighbours when growing up!

Credits:

Long Nose Fish Fine Art Print - Sara Raber

New Scientist

Science Daily

Double-Bagging?

It's been a while since I posted here. This article interested me and I wanted people to know about the study. I’m from South Africa where just under 20% of the population is living with HIV/Aids. This is all news to me!

Apparently using hormonal contraception (i.e. the pill or Depo injection) are at double the risk of getting infected with HIV. On top of that, HIV-infected women who use hormonal contraception are twice more likely to five their HIV to their uninfected partners.

Acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) is a disease of the human immune system caused by the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). So someone can be infected with the virus, (HIV-positive) and then only later develop AIDS.

This study, run by the University of Washington is probably the first study to the risk to male
partners of HIV-infected woman using contraception, according a prof. of global health at the international clinical research centre. It examined almost 3,800 couples in Africa. Each couple had one partner with HIV infection, and the other without. I’m amazed they could find people willing to participate in this sort of study, never to mind couples who knew that their partner was HIV-positive! Ultimately, the statistics showed that using either the pill or the depo injection doubled an uninfected woman’s chances of becoming infected. The same is true for women who are infected – they are twice as likely to transmit their HIV to their partners.

"Women should be counseled about potentially increased risk of HIV acquisition and transmission with hormonal contraception, particularly injectable methods, and about the importance of dual protection with condoms to decrease HIV risk," said Renee Heffron a key author of the study.

The findings of this study were presenting in July in Rom at the meeting of the International AIDS Society. According to UNAIDS estimats, there are 2.2million people living with HIV/AIDS in Europe.

So if you aren’t into abstinence, and if you are sleeping around, double-bagging is the way to go!

Disclaimer: Abstinence is the safest form of contraception.