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Magic mushrooms point to new depression drugs

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Magic mushrooms point to new depression drugs
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Magic mushrooms are ancient depression drugs

The terminology of the reports on these studies is always slightly amusing and slightly upsetting. I mean, even the 'investigators' themselves fail to acknowledge psilocybin, a substance that has been safely ingested for thousands of years as being "safe" for use in a clinical context. It's understandable, given the context of Western science/medicine...but still :roll:
 

Abstract:
PNAS said:
Psychedelic drugs have a long history of use in healing ceremonies, but despite renewed interest in their therapeutic potential, we continue to know very little about how they work in the brain. Here we used psilocybin, a classic psychedelic found in magic mushrooms, and a task-free functional MRI (fMRI) protocol designed to capture the transition from normal waking consciousness to the psychedelic state. Arterial spin labeling perfusion and blood-oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) fMRI were used to map cerebral blood flow and changes in venous oxygenation before and after intravenous infusions of placebo and psilocybin. Fifteen healthy volunteers were scanned with arterial spin labeling and a separate 15 with BOLD. As predicted, profound changes in consciousness were observed after psilocybin, but surprisingly, only decreases in cerebral blood flow and BOLD signal were seen, and these were maximal in hub regions, such as the thalamus and anterior and posterior cingulate cortex (ACC and PCC). Decreased activity in the ACC/medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) was a consistent finding and the magnitude of this decrease predicted the intensity of the subjective effects. Based on these results, a seed-based pharmaco-physiological interaction/functional connectivity analysis was performed using a medial prefrontal seed. Psilocybin caused a significant decrease in the positive coupling between the mPFC and PCC. These results strongly imply that the subjective effects of psychedelic drugs are caused by decreased activity and connectivity in the brain's key connector hubs, enabling a state of unconstrained cognition.
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Kind regards,

The Traveler
 
I guess magic mushrooms are non valid untill the psilocybin is "scientifically" extracted in a sterile environment amongst high tech laboratory equipment and placed into a nice round pill with some drug firms stamp on it. Thank god for pharmaceutical companies for protecting us from the "hidden Dangers" of eating something unsightly like a vegetable that comes from the ground. We can only hope that one day regular vegetables and meat will also be available in tablet form.

-Thank you pharma, we were truly lost untill you came to our rescue. One day we won't ever have to deal with the horror of "nature" ever again!! :lol:
 
The paradigm of giving out pills to patients is dead.

You need more than just a drug to give someone modeled after a psychedelic.

You need a psychedelic therapy house! Get with the times!
 
christian said:
I guess magic mushrooms are non valid untill the psilocybin is "scientifically" extracted in a sterile environment amongst high tech laboratory equipment and placed into a nice round pill with some drug firms stamp on it. Thank god for pharmaceutical companies for protecting us from the "hidden Dangers" of eating something unsightly like a vegetable that comes from the ground. We can only hope that one day regular vegetables and meat will also be available in tablet form.

-Thank you pharma, we were truly lost untill you came to our rescue. One day we won't ever have to deal with the horror of "nature" ever again!! :lol:
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Well to be fair that vegetable that comes out of the ground has twenty brothers and sisters that look similar enough to require an expert eye to tell them apart which can cause death within days if ingested, at least in my area. Even among known safe species of active mushrooms there is a startling variety in the gene expression and alkaloid composition. If I eat a mushroom and it cures my depression, all I know is that one specific mushroom worked. It's not repeatable or rigorously testable. That's what medical science really is - repetition and testing. It's not all shady business practices and conspiracies.
 
Actually what's funny is in the comments to that article (or the one just like it on CNN) one person began a huge rant about how LSD was much safer since it was synthesized in a laboratory whereas mushrooms are 'extremely toxic, having tens of thousands of toxic chemicals present in all species'. It was so ignorant it made my head hurt.
 
dromedary said:
christian said:
I guess magic mushrooms are non valid untill the psilocybin is "scientifically" extracted in a sterile environment amongst high tech laboratory equipment and placed into a nice round pill with some drug firms stamp on it. Thank god for pharmaceutical companies for protecting us from the "hidden Dangers" of eating something unsightly like a vegetable that comes from the ground. We can only hope that one day regular vegetables and meat will also be available in tablet form.

-Thank you pharma, we were truly lost untill you came to our rescue. One day we won't ever have to deal with the horror of "nature" ever again!! :lol:
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Well to be fair that vegetable that comes out of the ground has twenty brothers and sisters that look similar enough to require an expert eye to tell them apart which can cause death within days if ingested, at least in my area. Even among known safe species of active mushrooms there is a startling variety in the gene expression and alkaloid composition. If I eat a mushroom and it cures my depression, all I know is that one specific mushroom worked. It's not repeatable or rigorously testable. That's what medical science really is - repetition and testing. It's not all shady business practices and conspiracies.
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I think this is true. I personally think psilocybin/psilocin are reasonably well known to work in underground circles. The issue is reliability of dosing.

I don’t know how far people are being taken in these recent clinical tests but I imagine they aren’t aiming to remove subjects from reality. Low dose experiences are a shock enough to the system for those not used to the psychedelic experience, imagine what happens to a newcomer and the fallout when they encounter an extreme experience following an unusually potent dose? This probably already happens but it is currently nobody’s responsibility but the person ingesting them, and they have probably done a fair bit of research and taken a calculated risk. To governments and the pharma business the need is to reduce risk and measurable dose is a good way to do this.
 
Glad for this thread. I was going to post a link to the same report, found on LiveScience

I'm personally VERY sanguine toward this report and this news. It makes sense for me regarding:

1) The Jill Bolte Taylor stroke experience, which suggests that such states (I'll avoid characterization/description) are due to DEcreasing activity in areas of the brain.

2) Meditation for promotion of such states. The results can be seen to suggest that calming/slowing the mind promotes such states, and that the states achievable with psychotropic drugs REALLY DO (perhaps) relate to states arrived at through meditation.

3) The discussion of the connection between the experimental results and ideas about "ego" (apparently not mentioned in the msnbc report, but is mentioned in the LiveScience report). The idea is put forward that quieting "the ego" would be an effect of psilocybin.

Maybe the day is not far away when society/science/government will admit that some psychotropic chemicals can have an EXTREMELY POSITIVE AND BENEFICIAL mental health effect (and "spiritual" effect)--which works by quieting "distractive circuits" and which allows for deeper and more accurate perception of reality.

....and the day of characterizing such drugs as "destructive" will be over.

I actually believe that turning point will herald a MAJOR societal change...
 
SWIMfriend said:
The discussion of the connection between the experimental results and ideas about "ego" (apparently not mentioned in the msnbc report, but is mentioned in the LiveScience report). The idea is put forward that quieting "the ego" would be an effect of psilocybin.
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-This sorta stuff really interests me. I also found the video about how ketamine works interesting , explaining how it seperates the mind from the body. It got me thinking: Maybe the ego seperates us from the higher consciousness for a reason, maybe that is why we exist for if we were able to remain fully connected to those realms why would we be in these earthly realms at all?? We turn to religions to try and make sense of this possibility, to comfort our delicate egos with something we'd rather hear even if it was at a cost to following a religion and giving clever people power over us, such being the power of fear of accepting the simple truth.Thus our ego serves to keep us protected from the simple realisation that we are spiritual beings -"we choose to believe what we want to hear,OR are forced to hear"...So, there is the reality, then there is our filters, then religion, and us.

-Our ego is therefore US, we are human because of EGO, without ego, would we only exist in hyperspace??:surprised
 
This made local TV news on the BBC. A friend of mine said he was pruning his shroom garden when it came on, and the coincidence was startling enough to encourage a quick mycelial brew.
 
christian said:
SWIMfriend said:
The discussion of the connection between the experimental results and ideas about "ego" (apparently not mentioned in the msnbc report, but is mentioned in the LiveScience report). The idea is put forward that quieting "the ego" would be an effect of psilocybin.
Click to expand...

-This sorta stuff really interests me. I also found the video about how ketamine works interesting , explaining how it seperates the mind from the body. It got me thinking: Maybe the ego seperates us from the higher consciousness for a reason, maybe that is why we exist for if we were able to remain fully connected to those realms why would we be in these earthly realms at all?? We turn to religions to try and make sense of this possibility, to comfort our delicate egos with something we'd rather hear even if it was at a cost to following a religion and giving clever people power over us, such being the power of fear of accepting the simple truth.Thus our ego serves to keep us protected from the simple realisation that we are spiritual beings -"we choose to believe what we want to hear,OR are forced to hear"...So, there is the reality, then there is our filters, then religion, and us.

-Our ego is therefore US, we are human because of EGO, without ego, would we only exist in hyperspace??:surprised
Click to expand...

My idea has always been that the job of evolution is to tend toward a brain that works well "in the world." There's NO REASON for evolution (natural selection) to make us "seers." As a result, we have brains that CAN see amazing realities--because those realities are simply matters of accurate perception--but we have an "ego layer" built on top, which makes us focus intently on "the world" and navigating it (and the associated "assumptions" inherent in that focus), and which drowns out, or veils, perceptions that might have a "deeper meaning" to a highly sentient mind.

IOW, we have to have much of our brain to help us fight, fuck, flee, and feed--but "seeing reality" would have to be a part of such a brain (because there's no reason to think that reality is or would be hidden). The "seeing reality" part is underdeveloped/unused because we're not made with the purpose to use it.

Techniques of developing "insight" therefore first recommend detaching oneself from fighting, fucking, fleeing, and "feeding" (material interests), and then add meditation to quiet down all the brain function that usually runs "ego stuff."

I'm really delighted to have the information from the article, to support all those notions I've developed on my own for a long time....
 
"There's NO REASON for evolution (natural selection) to make us "seers." "

Well, part of the problem there is with the term "seer"..what does that mean? These people spend time meditating etc, and most likely have higher levels of certain neurotransmitters like melatonin, pinoline etc which would make them more calm, peaceful..leading a less stressful lifestyle-which would decrease stress and and anxiety linked diseases. The healthy benifits of such states has been documented. That would be an evolutionary advantage.
 
To the contrary, if anything evolution does exactly that; primordial ooze had no senses, we have many. Pre-man did not have sapience and language, we have sapience and language. All of these are ways for life to find patterns in information and manipulate them into more varied forms. And as entropy increases the room for variation in forms increases. Meaning we need to be able to "see" aka observe more and more as time goes by.

Yes we're designed to reproduce and that's generally the main purpose of a creature. But why do we reproduce? So life can LIVE! The whole point of life IS life; in its myriad variety of forms. One could just as easily say the purpose of all of this evolution is to create a being that could taste and appreciate the exquisiteness of Nutella. And would one be wrong? Seriously?

And why does there have to be some kind of illusory division between "seeing reality" and "not seeing reality"? "Mundane" things such as mathematics/logic/sciences are every bit "seeing higher reality" as say meditation/trance/astral projection. It's reality whichever way you look at it. Reality itself has no seams, these divisions only appear when we assign names to "parts" of it.
 
Evolution doesn't care about ANYTHING--there is no intention in it, and no perceivable direction or goal. Evolution has been FAR more interested in beetles*, apparently, than primates (or humans).

Evolution is the "expression" of DNA--since DNA is essentially the only molecule that can reproduce itself--and it DOES--then the expression of life as we see it is an expression of all the venues in which DNA has created to reproduce itself...and that is all. Collections of DNA which express themselves more effectively than other collections of DNA will reproduce more, and out-compete other expressions of DNA.

As it stands now, an objective assessment will show that evolution can be BEST said to exist to promote bacteria. Did you know that the cells which "YOU" consist of are approximately 90% bacteria and 10% "human?" There are certainly more "individuals" of bacteria on the planet than of any other living groups (plants or animals--or both combined). There is likely more biomass of bacteria than of either plants or animals.** One could conclude, then, that the type of "seeing" that people do is among the things LEAST important expressions to creation, and that the robotically simple life of bacteria is the MOST important to creation.

*JBS Haldane's response to a question from a theologian about what could be inferred about the creator from his creation was "An inordinate fondness for beetles." This is because the number of species of beetles seem FAR out of proportion to any other species. There are about 400,000 species of beetles, comprising about 40% of all insect species. The only reasonable conclusion is that "god" loves and adores beetles more than any other animal.

** See here and here and here.
 
Safe reproducible doses and implicated biochemical and physiological responses is how medicine works (and how grant money is written). I'm just happy that more and more of these studies are being done, and I think we need stop lambasting them. If you look at one of the sponsors, it's the Multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies, more commonly known as MAPS. I think most of us agree the work they do isn't to bad.

Every study done, every trial conducted every survey taken has a trickle down effect. Universities around the country and world will notice such papers read them and see how it goes, walls will be broken down, dogma will be removed and insane laws will be repealed.

Sitting on a website twiddling our thumbs and complaining about how these studies are so silly and why of COURSE mushrooms are safe misses the point entirely. Sure, we realize that, but joe blow down the street doesn't. That's one reason to support these along with the interesting note that hey mushrooms actually DECREASE blood flow to the ACC. Who would have thought?
 
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