Psychedelic drugs can unlock mysteries of brain - David Nutt

You beat me to it! I love the way they banish him but he just keeps coming back!

 

Sidenote: dxm actually taught me more about the meaning of life and death than lsd ever did

I feel the same about Ketamine.
Must be a dissociative quality.

 

Definately. I remember seeing this;

an injection of ketamine works on an entirely different neurotransmitter, glutamate. It blocks the receptors critical for receiving glutamate's signals which quickly improves the brain cell's electrical flow.

I believe this is why it helps with depression. Also I think when you do too much over say a week it probably is why you start coming out with crazy theories etc and believing your the centre of the universe.

 

Its definitely helped my self esteem in the past week or so.

Feel alot more connected to the earth and people around me.

 

I love dissociatives - they seem to have the power to both connect me more with others around me, like cornishman wrote, but also, paradoxically, to insulate me from all the bullshit going on around me.

Yep glutamate and the NMDA receptor are definitely a massive key to effects of dissociatives. I been obsessed with that receptor for years now, a full discussion would no doubt take us away from the main topic of whatever thread this is but deeper insight into the neuroscience of the NMDA receptor is, for me, one of the more exciting scientific advances on the horizon.

 

Pregabalin converts glutamate into GABA, so has a double effect of supplying more GABA, and less glutamate. I believe glutamate plays a huge roll in anxiety - being the most abundant stimulating neurotransmitter. After dissociatives, I find my anxiety is better. Pregabalin is good for anxiety.

 

Never heard of pregabalin before but that is fascinating.I get huge anxiety reduction of dissociatives too but i always assumed it was to do with dual serotonergic activity or something. That's an interesting theory about glutamate and anxiety though, i hadn't really thought of that before but i like it.

 

It makes even more sense that even anxiety-ridden people can experience a K-hole, with no fear. I believe anxiety is a complicated illness, with most neurotransmitters involved. Each person seems to be different in what works for them. SSRIs work for some, but I don't believe it's many. Some people find SNRIs work. For others, it's a dopamine thing (amphetamines help mine, but I believe that's due to having ADHD - which can progress to anxiety). Benzos and Pregabalin are the best thing for me, though.

 

Anxiety is definately a complex thing i reckon. Sometimes i even get thinking of it in terms of sensitivity (to stimuli in general). I think of the brain as if its goal is to create as much vigilance, alertness etc.. while at the same time trying to maintain capacity for relaxation, rational thought, healthy immune system etc. I would love to understand all this stuff better but in a way i still neuroscience as being in its infancy. Maybe its a slightly biased view point arising from my background in psychology, but i think that the fact that cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists can still barely talk to each other tells us something really important.
I think pharmacology is gonna be such a huge key to better understanding though. How different people react in such different ways to the same drug has always amazed me. NMDA receptor antagonists almost feel like they could be exceptionally suited for this purpose however. For one thing only about a third of people like them anyway - but the really intetesting thing is that i can usually predict in advance which of my friends will enjoy the effects or not, purely based on personality.

 

I understand what you mean, and agree with pretty much every word. I don't think there'll ever be one magic anxiety pill, which suits every person (besides Xanax. )

 

Xanax is a VERY short term fix and pretty useless for sorting out anxiety, I'd say it makes things worse if anything relying on that.

 

Do you have experience of long term benzo use, for anxiety? You can't personally comment, when I know that 1mg of Xanax, every two days, was fine for my anxiety. Even though it would wear off, after a day, I spent many periods (of months at a time), just using it like that. Like I said, I believe I'm lucky with benzos. I never let my usage creep up, and they've stopped a lot of mental and physical distress. I believe my regime is perfect for me - maybe not others.

 

I've always had a liking for benzo's and i'd say that xanax feels the cleanest to me subjectively (just in terms of producing anxiolytic effects without too much muscle relaxation and general messiness - as opposed to a rivotril or zolpidem (probably not technically a benzo but dont know where else to put it.))
I've found benzo's easy enough to control in the long term too, however, i generally found the start of a new blister pack could cause problems in the past - like i could get caught out again and again but would always find my feet pretty quickly.

 

"So, we're thinking [psilocybin] might be an interesting model for early stages for schizophrenia, it might allow us to test new drugs," said Nutt. "When people start to become psychotic, their ego boundaries break down, the relationship between them and the world gets disrupted and the relationship between their different inner experiences gets mixed up. Eventually they start hearing their own thoughts as someone else's voice.

"That breakdown of connectivity in the brain is very classic in schizophrenia. If we can produce this in a laboratory in a normal volunteer, we can then look for new treatments and it is much more efficient to do that in normal volunteers than try to find young people who are starting to develop their illness and it's ethically more acceptable too."

I am surprised researchers have not done this already even with a small sample size. There have been a few approved studies involving mushrooms lately for test sizes under 60 participants in america.

 

"...their ego boundaries break down, the relationship between them and the world gets disrupted and the relationship between their different inner experiences gets mixed up. Eventually they start hearing their own thoughts as someone else's voice."

Yeah, it's baffling, really. I don't have any of my nuclear or extended family with serious mental illnesses so I don't sit theorising about potential medicines for said illnesses but are people in these fields shy about suggesting currently-generally-illicit substances for fear of their reputation..?

With my paraphrased quote from the article, what would be the first thing that came into most people's minds? I think I know - on this forum certainly. Think outside the box(...,maaannn %))!

 

Stimulant psychosis springs to mind - not that I've had it.

 

"That breakdown of connectivity in the brain is very classic in schizophrenia. If we can produce this in a laboratory in a normal volunteer, we can then look for new treatments and it is much more efficient to do that in normal volunteers than try to find young people who are starting to develop their illness and it's ethically more acceptable too."

I'm not sure what similarity this has to the psilocybin state. Has Nutt ever actually taken mushrooms or is he just going on strories he heard? I think this is where the "research" into psychedelics has always turned to shit. People who've never taken it are convinced it's like "being mad".

I wish there was a researcher who actually understood the state before he tried doing research into it.

 

I'm not sure what similarity this has to the psilocybin state. Has Nutt ever actually taken mushrooms or is he just going on strories he heard? I think this is where the "research" into psychedelics has always turned to shit. People who've never taken it are convinced it's like "being mad".

I wish there was a researcher who actually understood the state before he tried doing research into it.

Like Leary for example?


Actually I agree with you but it doesn't do psychedelic researchers much good to publicly announce they've been doing psychedelic drugs, does it Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

 

Yeah like Leary but perhaps a bit more science minded.

Not declare it but it could inform their science - they'd drop the stuff about "Modelling madness" and get into something else. The "model of insanity" was declared bullshit 50 years ago when they tried it with LSD on mental patients.

 

But, how do you sell psychedelic research to the powers that be? Seeing as our understanding of the brain is still quite primitive, researching psychedelic drugs reminds me of what I once did as a silly wee laddie, taking a wire and randomly running the ends of it along the expansion port of my Sinclair Spectrum, watching the TV screen to see what happened. I didn't learn anything from it apart from how to fuck a home computer! In a way, my wire was a model of madness - computer madness. The lesson was, don't do this.

I don't actually think that's a fair analogy, because we can understand drugs effects subjectively. But the scientific establishment doesn't see subjective experience as acceptable data. Applying for funding to study psychedelics is, I suppose, a bit like applying for funding to run a wire randomly along a computer backplane. It won't be taken very seriously.

I think subjectivity has to somehow find an accommodation in the scientific orthodoxy before we can make much formal progress with psychedelics. Either that or we need big steps forward in our understanding of the brain, first.

 

But, how do you sell psychedelic research to the powers that be? Seeing as our understanding of the brain is still quite primitive, researching psychedelic drugs reminds me of what I once did as a silly wee laddie, taking a wire and randomly running the ends of it along the expansion port of my Sinclair Spectrum, watching the TV screen to see what happened. I didn't learn anything from it apart from how to fuck a home computer! In a way, my wire was a model of madness - computer madness. The lesson was, don't do this.

That sounds exactly like me as a kid. I spent my childhood taking my toys apart, to see how they worked. I then learnt to fix the things I broke, and other things. It was a valuable lesson to me. Thanks for that opportunity to go off-topic.