This is not really new, after all a host of religions across the globe use some such drugs in various ways with special success in tackling alcoholism and existential anxiety in general. Also independent researchers such as the "father of LSD" Albert Hofmann have for long defended their usefulness in psychotherapy. But still it's good to see that the same line of thought keeps reappearing once and again in spite of the institutional demonization of psychedelics. As reported by News Daily today, Franz Vollenweider and Michael Kometer, argue that drugs such as LSD or Psylocibes (magic mushrooms) have a lot of potential in psychotherapy, with the additional advantage that they would be used only for short periods, at low doses in combination with psychotherapy.
Psychedelics can give patients a new perspective -- particularly when things like suppressed memories come up -- and then they can work with that experience.
Mental illnesses...... are serious, debilitating, life-shortening illnesses, and as the currently available treatments have high failure rates, psychedelics might offer alternative treatment strategies that could improve the well-being of patients and the associated economic burden on patients and society.
But Big Pharma surely prefers to have them taking their mostly useless (and potentially harmful) products for life, regardless of outcome.
There are a couple of news items that overlap in their conclusions: quality of life is crucial in determining our positive or negative state of mind. One is about pigs: an experiment demonstrated that pigs living in rich environments consider an unknown new sound suggestive of something positive, like a treat, while those living in a poor quality environment, thought of the new sound as likely to mean something rather negative or useless. In other words: they are driven towards optimism or pessimism by their quotidian reality. Full story at Science Daily.The other one is about people. Researchers, studying 300,000 people from around the globe, found that having good friends and neighbors enhances survival by 50%. Having few friends is as harmful, it seems, as being alcoholic or a heavy smoker, and more harmful than being obese or not exercising. They warn that our modern lifestyle rather tends to destroy such crucial social networks so important to our well being. Full story at BBC.
New research confirms that breastfeeding (by contrast to formula feeding) increases the IQ of children even in the challenged case of a particular minority polymorphism, which, according to this new paper, is actually the diplotype that shows greater and not lowest influence of breastfeeding on IQ.Colin D. Steer et al, FADS2 Polymorphisms Modify the Effect of Breastfeeding on Child IQ. PLoS ONE 2010. Open access. BackgroundBreastfeeding is important for child cognitive development. A study by Caspi et al has suggested that rs174575 within the FADS2 gene moderates this effect so that children homozygous in the minor allele (GG genotype) have similar IQs irrespective of feeding method.Methods and Principal FindingsIn our study of 5934 children aged 8 years, no genetic main effect with IQ was found for rs174575. However, an interaction with this polymorphism was observed such that breastfed GG children performed better than their formula fed counterparts by an additional 5.8 points [1.4, 10.1] (interaction p = 0.0091). Interaction results were attenuated by about 10% after adjustment for 7 factors. This study also investigated rs1535, another FADS2 polymorphism in linkage disequilibrium with rs174575, together with performance and verbal IQ, finding similar results although effect sizes were generally reduced.Conclusions and SignificanceThis study did not replicate the findings of Caspi et al. In contrast to their study, GG children exhibited the greatest difference between feeding methods such that breastfed children performed similarly irrespective of child genotype whereas formula fed GG children performed worse than other children on formula milk. Further studies are required to replicate these findings.
Figure 1. Unadjusted means for Full-scale IQ at 8 years for breastfeeding (yes/no) and child FADS2 genotypes with 95% CIs (N = 5045 (A) and 5099 (B)).
There has always been a lot of discussion on why do we sleep. Now Boston researchers have found that it's when neurones get most of their food, showing very high levels of adenosine triphosphate (ATP), dubbed the "cell currency" of energy transfer, up to 3-4 times the normal levels.When the experiment's rats had their sleep delayed by several hours this peak of ATP did not happen.The neurones show in sleep period this high level of activity but brain's activity overall drops down. So I understand that their activity is selfish and relatively isolate unlike that of wake time, when they are working hard for the whole system to function properly.Source: Science Daily.I wonder: if sleep is neurones' lunch time, does that mean that dreams are their play time?
If depressed, your chances of survival are best without pharma.Of course, depression as such increases your chances of death but most commonly used drugs do too and none of them reduces the mortality rate.Oswaldo P. Almeida et al. Depression, Antidepressant Use and Mortality in Later Life: The Health in Men Study. PLoS ONE 2010. Open access.
Fig. 3. The mortality hazard ratio associated with the use tricyclic antidepressants (▴), selective serotonin inhibitors (SSRIs)(▪), other antidepressants (x) and all antidepressants combined (⧫) is shown in the figure.
It's all about a filter we have in our heads, it seems: the thalamus. What schizophrenics and healthy highly creative people share is low density of dopamine receptors in the thalamus, which act as filter for incoming information. Normal people have many more of such dopamine receptors, filtering a lot of inputs and are hence less sensible but also more stable. Highly creative people and schizophrenics have less and hence filter little, what makes their brains to process much more information for good or bad.Örjan de Manzano et al., Thinking Outside a Less Intact Box: Thalamic Dopamine D2 Receptor Densities Are Negatively Related to Psychometric Creativity in Healthy Individuals. PLoS ONE 2010. Open access.Also discussed at Science Daily. It is interesting because it gives some adaptative meaning to the genetics and epigenetics behind schizophrenia, as being highly creative is surely an adaptative trait.I wonder if it offers some hope of treating schizophrenia by positivizing this attribute instead of mere chemical straight jackets, that is all psychiatrists can offer now. I've just seen too many lives ruined by this plague and the horribly arrogant and highly inefficient psychiatric handling of it. It is also interesting because in the latest paper on Neanderthal genetics (Green 2010), they have found that some of the genetic regions exclusive to our species, H. sapiens, are related with mental conditions such as schizophrenia and autism, suggesting that maybe these traits offer also great potential rather than just a handicap (in which case they would have been selected against long ago, I presume).
At least in birds.That's what Catalan researchers (in association with British and Canadian ones) have found among passeriformes: that migratory species have systematically smaller brains than resident ones. This seems to be caused because big brains with high exploratory behavior (pretty similar to our concept of intelligence) could be even dangerous for species that change space so often.In the words of lead researcher, Daniel Sol:For birds that travel a lot, exploring their surroundings produces more costs than benefits since the information which is useful in one place is not necessarily so in another. It also exposes them to more dangers. For these reasons we believe that for these species, their innate behaviour can be more useful than learned behaviour.
I find this association of brain size with what I'd call curiosity, intelligence, for what else is the ability to study your surroundings to exploit them optimally and maybe even creatively manipulate them, as do some birds such as crows.
More information at:
Just a psychological curiosity, I guess, but one that called my attention. The so-called reward-driven individuals demonstrated at tests that they are more motivated to win in general and that they win more often than their "normal" peers. However a paradox was found: when there was a monetary prize, the "normal" players actually improved their performance, making the "winner" type win less and perform more like the rest. Full story at Science Daily. This suggests to me that "reward-driven" could be a misnomer and that in fact we are before a personality type that is more "success-driven", with or without reward. This may have its rewards (in form of unexpected or hidden prizes and in the open rewards they also get, even if at lower rate) but it may also be costly in terms of energy spent (both mental and physical and even economic resources maybe). I do hence suspect that both phenotypes are in dynamic equilibrium.
I have mentioned before that environmental stress such as pollution, parental violence, mother-child separation, etc. are in fact behind most mental disorders, from low intelligence to schizophrenia and even Alzheimer syndrome.While the effect is environmental and hence not really genetic but epigenetic, there is a gene that seems specially associated, known as BDNF (in particular polymorphism Rs6265).It was already known that:
When normal mice are exposed to chronic stress (simulated by confinement in a wire mesh restraint), there is a significant retraction in the projections, or dendrites, of some of the neurons in the hippocampus, which shrinks in overall volume as well.
Left: healthy neuron, right: stress-damaged one,
SNPediaRef. A. Magariños et al., Effect of brain-derived neurotrophic factor haploinsufficiency on stress-induced remodeling of hippocampal neurons. Hippocampus 2010. Pay per view.Some thoughts on allele distribution:The best researched SNP in humans within this gene seems to be the already mentioned rs6265, whose likely ancestral variant GG is very dominant among people of recent African ancestry but less so among Eurasians. Eurasians have greater frequencies of the AA allele (not detected in Africans) and the heterozygous AG allele (only at very low frequencies in Africa), which would seem to have been affected by a marked selective sweep early on in human/hominin history. The AA allele seems to be quite negative for motor learning and favors introversion, however it also seems to provide resistence to depression and to some neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson syndrome. This variant is most concentrated in East Asia. However all Eurasians have some of it and much more commonly the heterozygous AG allele, which has similar influences but not the depression resistance benefit.
As most of the effects of this genetic variant seem negative (at best we could consider it to be neutral possibly, according to the described effects), I am in principle inclined to blame a founder effect for it. However, if the A allele has similar protective effects as the lack of one copy of the gene in the mice of the experiment (as the depression and neurodegenerative resistance may suggest), it might have been favored by selection in stressful conditions of some sort. This however is not at the moment demonstrated in any way and I mention only as a hypothetical scenario B.
New research finds that what really characterizes psychopaths is not lack of fear or empathy but their extreme quest for rewards, no matter what because they get much higher levels of dopamine for rewards such as drugs or money. J.W. Buckholtz et al., Mesolimbic dopamine reward system hypersensitivity in individuals with psychopathic traits. Neuroscience 2010. Open access. Nicely synthesized at Science Daily. This is important in itself for psychology, psychiatry and neurology. But what I read really makes me think that we live in a psychopathic society, where such psychopathic greed has replaced the basic human values of cooperation and social justice. If you think about it, the psychopath is the ideal capitalist individual: without emotional or social attachments (which they are unable to feel) and only focused on profit (monetary rewards) and consumerism (product rewards).The fact that the psychopathic tendencies also exist, maybe to lesser degree, among normal, well adjusted, people, albeit irregularly and not so exaggerated, should make us all think what we really want: a human society or a psychopathic society based on the greed of liberal economics.
Interesting this article at Science Daily. There seems to be two different types of personalities, those who strive for excellence and those who strive for fun. Oddly enough they are similarly productive, it all depends on the motivation. For the first type (achievers), when something is presented as challenging or are motivated by subliminal messages of excellence and accomplishment, they work better... but when something is presented as fun, they are just not interested and fail. The other type (enjoyers), maybe more common, do exactly the opposite thing: they will perform well when something is presented as fun but will feel demotivated when it's presented as a competition for excellence. Again, with the wrong motivation, they just lose interest and do worse. As a decided member of the club of anti-competitive enjoyers, I perfectly understand this type: Excellence? That's boring. Fun? Then I will give my best. As the co-author of the research, Dolores Albarracín, suggests: enjoying life is not a bad goal. But placed in a competitive environment we will unavoidably feel disenchanted and, almost willingly, allow ourselves to "lose". We just want some other kind of game, one that is, simply put, enjoyable and not just demanding. It's not that we are worse: we are just not interested in winning just for the sake of it. First of all it has to be emotionally gratifying. That's what communism (well understood) is about: destroying alienation and making work and production again something cool, not just the worthless competition of of the living dead that is today.
Researchers from Rockefeller University (USA) have found that single exposure of rats to a 30 minutes stressful episode caused widespread methylation (an epigenetic phenomenon) in the hippocampus, a brain area known to be involved in several mental disorders like depression.and schizophrenia. Repeated exposition to the same stressful episode day after day did not cause further methylation, suggesting that the animals adapt. Fluoxetine (Prozac) was only somewhat efficient in removing this epigenetic mark.Lead researcher Richard Hunter said:There was a thought that the genome project would reveal all in neuropsychiatric disease, but that has proven not to be the case. Epigenetics has become much more interesting because it allows us to look at how gene expression is changed by environmental events, explainable in part by histone modifications.
Source: Science Daily.Research paper: Richard G. Hunter et al., Regulation of hippocampal H3 histone methylation by acute and chronic stress. PNAS 2009.
I'm feeling intellectually saturated right now and don't feel like writing or even reading too much at the moment. However there are some interesting news I think I should mention. Therefore I'll just make a quick reference here... by the moment.Genes:Some of these news come from the new PLoS ONE issue:D. López Herráez et al. have found several evolutionary markers that seem to define short height in Pygmies (as an adaptative response to low iodine diet) and cartilaginous tissue that may correlate with "racial" differences as shown in facial traits (facial features are largely defined by cartilages). G. Resink et al. explore the parallels and differences between genetic structure in Sahul and language families. This report is also discussed at Dienekes' blog. Also I have been reading Subramanian's paper on Penguin DNA and molecular clock (thanks to German again) but, sadly, it is not as clarifying as the press release would suggest. I need to re-read it in order to make up my mind. Brains:At Science Daily we are informed of the fact that larger brains are not necessarily correlated with greater cognitive power, that bees and dogs can essentially understand the same things about their surroundings.Also at SD, it is mentioned that IBM has managed to recreate with supercomputers the wiring complexity of a cat-like brain. Chaos:For those interested in Chaos theory and fractal geometries (I love it but also beats me), New Scientist deals with the three dimensionalization of the classical Mandelbrot Set, gallery included. .
Hobo Girl at Anthroforum points me to new research on how semi-inheritable epigenetic alters the psyche. The source being at Technology Review.It reviews two recent researches:In Feig's study, mice genetically engineered to have memory problems were raised in an enriched environment--given toys, exercise, and social interaction--for two weeks during adolescence. The animals' memory improved--an unsurprising finding, given that enrichment has been previously shown to boost brain function. The mice were then returned to normal conditions, where they grew up and had offspring. This next generation of mice also had better memory, despite having the genetic defect and never having been exposed to the enriched environment.
Nevertheless they lost the epigenetic improvement after few months of lack of stimulation. In a second study, researchers found that rats raised by stressed mothers that neglected and physically abused their offspring showed specific epigenetic modifications to their DNA. The abused mice grew up to be poor mothers, and appeared to pass down these changes to their offspring.
This happened to some extent also when the epigenetically altered rats were fostered by other not stressed or violent rats. .
Research by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences has discovered that newborn human babies can perfectly detect and synchronize the beat in music. This trait, probably related to the origins of music, appears to be uniquely human, as our closest relatives (chimpanzees and bonobos) do not seem able to synchronize their behaviour with rythmic sounds. More at Science Daily. It makes you think because we typically consider the most uniquely human traits stuff like logic, speech or even the famous precission peg of our hands or even walking upright on two legs. But this issue of music and rythm would appear to be more "primitive", maybe just because it's so intuitive, rather than merely logic (though in Antiquity music and maths were often studied together). .
This seems to be a clear case of nurture and not nature influence in intellectual capabilities. A recent study by UC Berkeley's neurophysicists, on which I've read at Science Daily, reports that, all else equal, children growing in poor households have frontal lobes that are not really functional.Kids from lower socioeconomic levels show brain physiology patterns similar to someone who actually had damage in the frontal lobe as an adult...
(...)
It's not just that these kids are poor and more likely to have health problems, but they might actually not be getting full brain development from the stressful and relatively impoverished environment associated with low socioeconomic status: fewer books, less reading, fewer games, fewer visits to museums.
(...)
These kids have no neural damage, no prenatal exposure to drugs and alcohol, no neurological damage. Yet, the prefrontal cortex is not functioning as efficiently as it should be. This difference may manifest itself in problem solving and school performance.
New skeletal finds at Gona, in northern Ethiopia, show that H. erectus females had already very wide hips, needed to deliver big brained childs. The find is dated to some 1.4 million years ago.
From left to right: top view of the pelvises of Lucy (an Austraolpithecus), the new Gona H. erectus find and modern human.
Source: BBC: Human ancestros born big brained.
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