Compound found in the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca can grow new brain cells
nature.com
nature.com
From this research, it was wonderful to discover:
-Neurogenesis is an effective treatment for clinical depression
-Diseases like Alzheimer's and Dementia kill neurogenesis
Could DMT become like a coffee of the future?
I don’t mind the visuals and unfiltered and distorted perceptions and my other senses engaged, but the unfiltered hearing is the worst for me!
I like the distorted additional sounds but it’s combined with just unfiltered sound that I can’t turn off!
pls fix
> There is a bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders. About six years ago, I accidentally tasted it, and was surprised at its extraordinary bitterness
One letter, which I couldn’t readily find, eventually reduced to “My lord, I had a tooth ache and was chewing on random things in the forest. Willow bark made me feel better”
[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.003...
Perhaps this is due to European destruction of the native history of the Americas - they’re seen as primitive groups with little social complexity. I think that if their histories were better preserved we’d be less surprised that they had an understanding of the native plants around them.
You'll find similar outcomes throughout history and the world. Whether it's nationalism, communism, religion, tribalism or what ever. Us and them dynamics are constantly being created and exploited by various groups throughout our collective history.
No one said such actions are uniquely European or religious.
Haven't we done exactly that with alcohol ?
One of the main reasons of why today everyone has a fridge with a freezer is because Clarence Birdseye, the founder of what today is Birds Eye (frozen foods company) was taught how to freeze fish under thick ice by the Inuit in Canada.
He then took the idea and developed it further using refrigeration equipment. Then they provided grocery stores with free freezers so that they could sell their products.
Then you have potatoes, tomatoes and corn. These crops were also developed by Native Americans. Without that effort, what you would be eating today would be similar to the teosinte, corn's wild ancestor.
Potatoes are responsible for a massive population boost in Europe. The reason is because wheat uses more land, requires more work and has fewer calories than potatoes.
Andean peoples had many techniques for dehidrating food... The word "jerky" comes from the Quechua "charqui", which means dried meat. They also employed freeze drying techniques to preserve food, such as chuño (freeze dried potatoes).
In addition to that, you have many varieties berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries), cacao (used for chocolate), vanilla, pineapples, etc.
But the variety you eat today is most likely the "garden strawberry", which is a hybrid variety developed in France by crossing Fragaria virginiana (from North America) and Fragaria chiloensis (from South America).
Other varieties of strawberry are not as popular.
Europeans did a great job further developing crops from the Americas. Italians alone bred tomatoes for every culinary purpose you can imagine.
Wouldn't you stop after the first dozens of people trying different plants become sick or die? I know I would.
About ten years ago Utah was doing something where they were emulating herd movements using livestock which helped to create a lot of biodiversity both above-ground and below, which helped water supply, plant growth, really everything improved and this was almost entirely inspired by how native Americans managed land pre-settlers. I think was called something like the Utah grazing improvement project.
A pregnant woman will often crave the foods that contain just the nutrients her body requires at the time. Has she figured out exactly what her body needs and what foods contain it?
In terms of material supporting the theory, google "pregnant cravings nutrients" and you will get hundreds of results... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#...
Calling it a "disorder" and "largely non-nutritive" seems a bit broad, when it could be satisfying a particular need. Even though eating feces might not be a good idea and more serious examples do seem useless and damaging.
I wouldn't dare call it "she", "knows", "exactly", in the strict sense, but the less-than-conscious parts of a human should have a pretty good though fuzzy experience of what foods are beneficial in which circumstances.
How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely?
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912
Bottom line, it is trial and error, an evolution of ideas and culture over many generations.
Also, you talk about naturally occuring DMT, but be aware that there is absolutely no scientific proof that DMT is contained in any amount sufficient to provoke a trip in the human body, even with a MAOI; it's there, yes, but in minute amounts and almost certainly as a byproduct of the synthesis of something else. Maybe you're right on the other hormones, but if that's the case it's not due to the MAOI properties of harmals either, since we're not seeing people using pharmaceutical MAOIs tripping.
"How did my ancestors ever think of trying to eat X"? Well, they were dying anyway, so they didn't have much to lose.
My main message is, you and me are so incredibly lucky to live in this era of wealth, health and progress. We should try to appreciate it.
It's a relatively new phenomena that the patient drinks the medicine. Traditionally, before Westerners, the curandero would drink alone in the presence of the patient. And earlier still the curandero drank a medicine derived solely from ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi). That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions. It was not needed for visions and to heal.
Chacruna was added in the 1900s due to the impact of westernization in the region and the negative affect on the curanderos' natural connections.
So it isn't necessarily that a formula of two plants was magically discovered at the very beginning.
EDIT: add to this that when you cut the vine, a rich colored liquid / sap forms on the cut part. It tastes quite sweet. It's not a stretch to imagine the first person simply cut a vine, tasted it and decided to do an extraction in hot water.
Indeed, but harmal alkaloids - those contained in b. caapi - are not only selective, reversible MAOIs but also full on psychedelics by themselves, as anyone having taken a significant amount of them (usually either through b. caapi or a peganum harmala seeds tea) could tell you. You get "visions" with them too.
But what if there are many needles, and this is just the one that was found?
And once something is found, humans do hill climbing to refine.
However, banisteriopsis caapi is orally active on its own: a brew of just the vine will change perception.
So it's an O(n) search to find the ayahuasca vine, then another O(n) to find DMT bearing plants (there are several), which go with it. A typical preparation of the medicine will have a dozen or more plants in it, with two or three recognized as "active" by the standards of Western pharmacology.
So it's plausible to imagine the curanderos adding a bit of this, a bit of that, as guided by the spirits (or intuition, whatever looked good, your choice), then hitting on the combination.
This might sound like I'm being dismissive of what was most likely a directed search for medicinal plants, which isn't my intention. Just simplifying and glossing over that part, to point out that it's a two-stage discovery, and you don't need both plants in a brew to start using one of them.
Then at that point some adventurous people may have just started trying combining it with every other plant they knew about and every future one they discovered, including plants that they otherwise believed had no effect. They probably would've stumbled upon a lot of interesting combinations.
And if they determined it had a strange ability to seemingly "unlock" "dormant" plants and if they spread that knowledge, maybe some people were trying it with absolutely every non-poisonous plant out there. And since DMT-bearing plants are pretty common (as you mention), multiplied across a whole society it may not have taken very long at all. And it would take just one MAOI plant for them to get the idea that other plants might have this unlocking ability, and just one DMT-rich plant to discover other plants might have similar effects, so maybe they iterated through combinations of MAOIs and serotonergics until they found one they felt had a good balance of maximal power and minimal undesired side effects.
So the bottleneck might be the first instance of someone ever discovering any kind of MAOI plant (this vine or any other). After that barrier is passed, I suspect it might be almost inevitable that something like this particular combination would be found pretty quickly (just blindly speculating, but potentially within a generation or two?).
Anyway, they're not rare.
[0] that list looks a bit dodgy, how much maoi is in turmeric for example?
Same question, really.
They replied “the plants told us”
I would wait until replication in primates (human or non-human) before drinking ayahuasca to grow brain cells.
We know that DMT binds with sigma-1 receptors (S1R) which is known to promote neurogenesis, such as fluvoxamine (in addition to many other SSRIs) in humans; we further know that the medication causes neurogenesis in humans, as do other medications with S1R affinity[0].
We then know that DMT does as well, we then measure that neurogenesis is observed in mice due to the same exact mechanism as SSRI's (i.e. medications with S1R affinity) in humans.
Perhaps at some point we should realize deterministic action in the context of the mammalian brain over human exceptionalism.
I'd still like to see some human evidence of this effect to be fully convinced, but still that this story fits in this broader context does help convince me that this is likely true in humans.
Just saying because one of my classmates in art school barely survived jumping out of a five story building due to a bad trip.
Is “sacrificing” a common practice after test is finished? I’m probably not supposed to be bothered by this, but still kinda feels sad. On the other hand the discovery is fascinating. I guess it’s all part of the deal.
I think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered.
I don't think this holds. It's pretty obvious that a Thanksgiving turkey or a rotisserie chicken used to be a whole animal, but we still eat those.
Also, you really wouldn't want to eat lab animals, especially ones that have been subjected to pharmaceutical testing.
It's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life.
I've mostly just seen pictures of cows being butchered, but I did watch a rooster die when it had to be shot. It's not ideal. I still eat meat and will continue to do so until lab-grown alternatives are nutritionally and culinarily indistinguishable, and IMO what humans do for food is far more humane than what most of nature does.
I have been on a carnivore diet for some time now. I wanted to know if I was capable of butchering. With some training from a pro, I did it around 6 times(goat). Gave up on meat since.
For some reason I don't feel the same disgust with fishing, so my diet is mostly replaced with fish. Good thing about sea food is you get a lot more variety!
I don't think the corpses were eaten, they took out the parts they needed to autopsy and tossed the rest in a biohazard bag, if it's anything like labs I've worked in.
Why not? I'd argue it's better to be bothered by it than just exclaim "ok it's for science" without any critical view. Anyway: it's extremely common especially with mice. You'd be suprised by the total numbers (which might be hard to acquire having to sift through animal-rights but the order of magnitude should be correct; I'm guessing a couple of tens of millions rodents per year in the US is ballpark correct). A bunch of reasons like what a sibling commenter says but also because you can usually not use mice which were used for experiment A in experiment B exepcting A had no influence.
In short: yes, sacrifice is common at experiment completion. Though it's done pragmatically and as an \ethically appropriate measure.
A bit longer: most brain tissue studies require extraction, fixing, staining,... of brain. so are usually done _ex vivo_ .
Even longer: But even where animal could be kept alive, it raises questions of what exactly one should do:
- Do you keep paying for, up to, years to house an animal that can't be used for anything else? (consider, if you've applied treatments to it, you likely discredit it from inclusion in other studies).
- Did your study cause long-term effects that would lead the animal to suffering were you to keep it alive?
- You probably can't release the animal: most are raised from birth in facilities, they'd not likely survive long (not that mice live very long in the wild as it is).
- Or, if you _did_ release them would they spread anything into the wild?
\ ethically appropriate is decided by ethics boards. Please don't argue with me about what is or isn't ethical animal treatment.
My pet theory is that given the antiviral properties of fungii, psilocybin cubensis kills off undiscovered viruses in the brain stem, allowing inflammation to recede.
(Psilocybin also triggers neurogenesis.)
Do you have information about this?
If the hallucinations come from another plant, then why does the paper say DMT is classified as hallucinogenic?
They were the first anti-depressants available after all!
I am too square I guess.
2) Treatment for end of life (it seems to help with some kind of acceptance of the impending death, creates mental states which make for a less agitated ending)
If you aren't needing 1) above, then thats good. Keep not needing it.
If you aren't needing 2) above, you need to remember we all get there...
For context, when I was in undergrad ~10 years ago, it was accepted as fact that a person only ever had the amount of neurons they were born with, and that new neurons could never be produced endogenously.
In any event, the authors of this study certainly aren't advocating that anyone start using illegal drugs.
I do appreciate the fact that your post is about self reflection on your decisions rather than the judging of others that do decide to participate.
I sincerely hope the trend that we’ve been seeing where compounds like DMT, MDMA, and Psilocybin are getting the proper scientific attention they severely lacked for over 50 years. I understand why that is, but it’s a shame that it happened at all. Imagine where we would be if we had had that time to study and put these and other substances to good use.
In a safe environment, with people you trust, it will "Change" your life.
Not really comparable to smoking cigarettes, drinking caffeine or alcohol, which virtually no one believes any similar effect and are usually used for much more mundane reasons.
Caffeine withdrawal symptoms are up there with a heavy drinking hangover that just won't go away during which I'll contemplate ending it all.
I think it's important to realize "drugs" is so ambiguous and overused it's basically meaningless. Rather than this clear black and white dichotomy of non-drugs vs. drugs, good vs. bad, safe vs. harmful, non-hallucinogenic vs. hallucinogenic, there's a lot of nuance and every substance has its own risks vs. benefits to be considered, understood, and respected. This extends well beyond "drugs", the same can be said of food, exercise, sports, relationships... it's life.
There has been a ban on exploring certain plants in the last 50 years, and with that ban lifting, suddenly there is a constipated rush of research about these plants that would have otherwise been done slowly over decades.
The ban? Schedule one medicine prohibited scientific research of those plants and chemicals. It wasn't until the presidency changed that, by turning a blind eye to it instead of enforcing it. The idea is if states legalize, then research should be legally allowed as well.
Where I live all of this is legal, so it's where most of the research was happening. It's legal in more places in the US today, so for all I know research is happening now in more places.
What states have done is they legalize in the cities where the research is being done. (Or research follows where cities have legalized.)
On the other hand if like many people you suffer from anxiety or depression and find that prescription medicine is ineffective then microdosing drugs can have miraculous effects. THC has helped me deal with anxiety way better than prescription drugs so I now micro dose THC capsules. I’m lucky enough to live in a country where weed and its derivatives are fully legal so I can just go to a store and buy what I need.
The choice is not only between pharma drugs or plant drugs.
Just wondering if you've noticed any improvement from regular exercising?
I'm not the best at "regular" (daily) exercise, but I do notice difference in my mental state when I exercise vs when I haven't for prolonged time periods. I have back problems, my idea of exercise is walking around the block. Which works mostly.
Do you have a particular diet you follow to help alleviate anxiety? (I.e. no caffeine or sugar..etc?)
Just curious about others who suffer anxiety disorder(s) not trying to single you out.
I still think they are a worthy subject of study.
And in this context its studying medicinal properties, so its not even a recreational context.
Environment seems to be the biggest factor in any successful treatment--drugs, psychedelics, or nothing at all--environment reigns supreme.
You're not square at all, these are a good set of questions to be asking.
“In 2000, the psychedelic research group at Johns Hopkins was the first to achieve regulatory approval in the U.S. to reinitiate research with psychedelics in healthy volunteers who had never used a psychedelic. Their 2006 publication on the safety and enduring positive effects of a single dose of psilocybin sparked a renewal of psychedelic research worldwide.”
More US states are legalizing possession of so-called magic mushrooms.
I’m not seeing a conspiracy here.
(It’s also worth pointing out that academic research isn’t “the media.”)
A recent relevant example is Purdue Pharma: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-purdue-pharma-medi...
I don’t know. I’m not seeing any malfeasance and I don’t think research into psychedelics is innately immoral or improper, so I’m not motivated to check the institution’s funding sources. You can probably find this out fairly easily.
Why do you put the word research in scare quotes? Do you not personally approve of the research, or do you have evidence that the research methodology or conclusions are problematic?
With all the above (more uncharitably, since actors have the means, motive, and opportunity), we should certainly be skeptical when we notice this happening and not hand-wave it away.
A bit misleading to say most states or a few states have legalized it.
Sure other states are researching it, but that's a long way from state sanctioned legalization.
I wish everyone in the states had access to it, sadly that's just not the current reality here today. States could benefit economically like most have from legalization of marijuana, billions of dollars to be made.
In addition to Oregon, no states have, but some cities have.
“ The movement to decriminalize psilocybin in the United States began in the late 2010s, with Denver, Colorado, becoming the first city to decriminalize psilocybin in May 2019. The cities of Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, followed suit and decriminalized psilocybin in June 2019 and January 2020, respectively.”
In addition to Oregon, no states have, but some cities have.
“The movement to decriminalize psilocybin in the United States began in the late 2010s, with Denver, Colorado, becoming the first city to decriminalize psilocybin in May 2019. The cities of Oakland and Santa Cruz, California, followed suit and decriminalized psilocybin in June 2019 and January 2020, respectively.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psilocybin_decriminalization...