CWL

Open Your Mind to the New Psychedelic Science

‘The illegality of these drugs … is one of the greatest scandals in modern research’

Greg Miller over WiredScience writes an enticing piece on the development of psychedelic drug usage not just as a recreational activity but also for psychological health benefits. I picked out my favorite excerpts from the article but I recommend going over and reading the whole thing:

“Now that we’ve been able to start getting some evidence on the benefits, it changes people’s calculus,” said Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS), one of the meeting’s sponsors.

Doblin and MAPS have been battling regulators since the mid-80s to allow research and clinical trials with psychedelics. The recent revival of psychedelic science may be one sign their efforts are finally paying off.

Public attitudes towards illegal drugs in general may be shifting. A recent Pew Research Center survey, for example, found for the first time that more than half of Americans think marijuana should be legal. Baby boomers in particular, who may have hidden their stash while raising kids, seem to be loosening up in their old age, the survey found.

The interest in psychedelics may also have something to do with a growing sense of frustration over the lack of promising new psychiatric drugs in the pipeline. Many of the current drugs are based on compounds discovered serendipitously in the 1950s, and true innovation has been so hard to come by that many companies are giving up.

Meanwhile, people have been using hallucinogens for centuries, often in religious healing ceremonies, and yes, sometimes just for the hell of it. But just because they’re party drugs for some doesn’t mean they can’t be the subject of serious scientific inquiry. Or does it? After all, it didn’t end so well the first time around.

From its inception in 2010, the Psychedelic Science meeting has brought together an interesting mix of people. A record 1,800 of them attended this year. The prevalence of ponytails, nose rings and hemp accessories is predictably higher than at a typical science conference. There was also a tea lounge, a psychedelic art gallery, and a quiet room for anyone in need of riding out a rough trip.

“Absolutely some scientists would see the rainbow colors on the logo and the psychedelic art exhibits and say ‘that’s not real science,’” said Brad Burge, the communication director for MAPS. At the same time, some of the more mystically inclined devotees of psychedelics are averse to the scientific dissection of what they see as a sacred experience, Burge says. The conference isn’t for the folks at those ends of the spectrum.

Burge acknowledges there’s a tricky balancing act involved in hosting a forum for scientists who want their work to be taken seriously without excluding those who use psychedelic drugs recreationally. Even so, “we’re trying to get around the idea that there has to be a separation,” he said.

After all, this latter group helps fund much of the research through their donations to MAPS and other private organizations like the Heffter Research Institute and Beckley Foundation. Government funders like the National Institutes of Health are still skittish about psychedelic research.

—

Dráulio Barros de Araújo, a neuroscientist at the Brain Institute at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil, presented new findings from an fMRI brain scan study with 10 experienced ayahuasca users, followers of Santo Daime, a spiritual practice that uses the brew.

Araújo’s team found that ayahuasca reduces neural activity in something called the default mode network, an web of interconnected brain regions that fire up whenever people aren’t focused on any specific task. It’s active when people daydream or let their minds wander, for example.

The default mode network has been a hot topic in neuroscience in recent years. Scientists don’t really know what it does, but they love to speculate. One interpretation is that activity in this network may represent what we experience as our internal monologue and may help generate our sense of self.

Full Article

Citizen Science: Your Help Needed to Study Andromeda Galaxy

A group of astronomers is inviting the public to join their star-hunting team in a search of the bright Andromeda Galaxy.

The project aims to identify star clusters in our neighboring galaxy, also known as M31. All it takes to find the clusters in Andromeda is an Internet-enabled computer and a desire to help, said Anil Seth, the team’s lead investigator. “No special training is required,” he said.

The so-called “Andromeda Project,” which began Wednesday (Dec. 5), will generate the largest sample of clusters from a single spiral galaxy when it is completed.

Scientists expect the project could identify 2,500 new star clusters when finished. This would provide useful goalposts to chart how the galaxy, which is on a collision course with the Milky Way, formed and evolved.

“The general benefit is to better understand how spiral galaxies form,” said Seth, an assistant professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Utah.

“Andromeda is the nearest example of a [spiral] galaxy, except for the Milky Way,” he said. “We can study in detail things we can’t see in larger distances.”

Andromeda Project

Artificial Brain Mimics Human Abilities and Flaws

Side Note: I recommend this fascinating article for anyone who’s been as interested in developments of the brain in the past couple of weeks or in general and the refreshing data about how our pattern recognition works and how it can lead to not only a better understanding of our own minds but also a better understanding into building more accurate artificial intelligence in robots. The accuracy and how natural the intelligence comes off is important if we are to have robots that work for and aid us, if we are to have extensions of what our technology can do with what we know about the human body and brain I think robotics is one way to go about it. It’s like using technology as a canvas and expressing our own biological makeup through it. In this article LS gets into a new software model that accurately replicates certain human-like mistakes with a very limited amount of virtual pattern recognizers. Excuse me for leaving the whole bit of the article I just found it too interesting to leave anything out.

Spaun, a new software model of a human brain, is able to play simple pattern games, draw what it sees and do a little mental arithmetic. It powers everything it does with 2.5 million virtual neurons, compared with a human brain’s 100 billion. But its mistakes, not its abilities, are what surprised its makers the most, said Chris Eliasmith, an engineer and neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada.

Ask Spaun a question, and it hesitates a moment before answering, pausing for about as long as humans do. Give Spaun a list of numbers to memorize, and it falters when the list gets too long. And Spaun is better at remembering the numbers at the beginning and end of a list than at recalling numbers in the middle, just like people are.

“There are some fairly subtle details of human behavior that the model does capture,” said Eliasmith, who led the development of Spaun, or the Semantic Pointer Architecture Unified Network. “It’s definitely not on the same scale [as a human brain],” he told TechNewsdaily. “It gives a flavor of a lot of different things brains can do.”

Eliasmith and his team of Waterloo neuroscientists say Spaun is the first model of a biological brain that performs tasks and has behaviors. Because it is able to do such a variety of things, Spaun could help scientists understand how humans do the same, Eliasmith said. In addition, other scientists could run simplified simulations of certain brain disorders or psychiatric drugs using Spaun, he said.

A brain with thought and action

Researchers have made several brain models that are more powerful than Spaun. The Blue Brain model at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in France has 1 million neurons. IBM’s SyNAPSE project has 1 billion neurons. Those models aren’t built to perform a variety of tasks, however, Eliasmith said.

Spaun is programmed to respond to eight types of requests, including copying what it sees, recognizing numbers written with different handwriting, answering questions about a series of numbers and finishing a pattern after seeing examples.

Spaun’s myriad skills could shed light on the flexible, variable human brain, which is able to use the same equipment to control typing, biking, driving, flying airplanes and countless other tasks, Eliasmith said. That knowledge, in turn, could help scientists add flexibility to robots or artificial intelligence, he said. Artificial intelligence now usually specializes in doing only one thing, such as tagging photos or playing chess. “It can’t figure out to switch between those things,” he said.

In addition, artificial intelligence isn’t built to mimic the cellular structure of human brains as closely as Spaun and other brain models do. Because Spaun runs more like a human brain, other researchers could use it to run health experiments that would be unethical in human study volunteers, Eliasmith said. He recently ran a test in which he killed off the neurons in a brain model at the same rate that neurons die in people as they age, to see how the dying off affected the model’s performance on an intelligence test.

Such tests would have to be just first steps in a longer experiment, Eliasmith said. The human brain is so much more complex than models that there’s a limit to how much models are able to tell researchers. As scientists continue to improve brain models, the models will become better proxies for health studies, he said.

Next up: a brain in real time

There’s one major way Spaun differs from a human brain. It takes a lot of computingpower to perform its little tasks. Spaun runs on a supercomputer at the University of Waterloo, and it takes the computer two hours to run just one second of a Spaun simulation, Eliasmith said.

So Eliasmith’s next major step for improving Spaun is developing hardware that lets the model work in real time. He’ll cooperate with researchers at the University of Manchester in the U.K. and hopes to have something ready in six months, he said.

In the far future, people may find Spaun’s humanlike flaws deliberately built into robot assistants, Eliasmith said. “Those kinds of features are important in a way because if we’re interacting with an agent and it has a kind of memory that we’re familiar with, it’ll more natural to interact with,” he added.

Eliasmith and his colleagues published their latest paper about Spaun today (Nov. 29) in the journal Science.

scinerds:

DNA ‘LEGOs’ Build a Mini Space Shuttle

A tiny space shuttle made out of DNA “LEGO bricks” shows how scientists could someday build new technologies on the smallest scales.

Image: DNA ‘bricks’ can self-assemble into complex 3D shapes such as a miniature space shuttle. Credit:Kurt V. Gothelf | Yonggang Ke et al

Single DNA strands became “LEGO bricks” that could assemble together by themselves into 102 individual 3D shapes. Harvard researchers manipulated the DNA coding of the bricks so that they could form solid shapes such as the tiny shuttle, honeycomb structures, and even “written” features on a solid base such as numbers and letters of the English alphabet.

“Once we know how to compile the correct code of complex shapes and add it to the synthetic DNA strands, everything else is simple and natural,” said Yonggang Ke, a chemist at Harvard University. “Those DNA strands are like smart LEGO bricks that know exactly where to go by themselves.”

scinerds:

Citizen Science Time: Help Scientists by Sending Them Some Poop.. No Seriously

Stool Samples for Science: For Jack Gilbert’s next research project, he’ll be exploring a dark, mysterious place where thousands of unique species live, many of them unknown to science. He’ll be collecting samples of those species, cataloging them and trying to understand how they live.

Image: Enterococcus faecalis, a bacterium species that lives in the human gut. A new project is looking for volunteers to donate stool, skin and mouth samples for a study about the bacteria that live in human intestines. Credit: USDA

He’s not heading out on an expedition to the seafloor, a deep cave or anywhere else to do it, however. The specimens will be coming to him, by mail, in the form of thousands of scrapings from people’s skin, mouths and stools.

“Of course it’s gross, but science and helping people is more important than our sensibilities,” Gilbert, who normally studies marine bacteria at the University of Chicago, told TechNewsDaily.

Want to send Gilbert a bit of you? Simply visit his study’s crowd-funding page and order a $99 kit to participate.

It’s a project whose time has come, says Lita Proctor, who coordinates the Human Mircobiome Project for the National Institutes of Health. She said DNA-analyzing technology — and social media — are finally ready to handle the task, which is being called the American Gut Project.

Ultimately, Gilbert and 28 other U.S. university researchers participating in the American Gut Project hope they can persuade 10,000 people to send scrapings. From those submissions, the researchers hope to learn more about how bacteria, health and diet are related. “How does the Atkins diet affect gut bacteria populations?” and “What bacteria do thinner people tend to have?” are the kinds of questions they should be able to answer, Gilbert said.

As long as they can gather enough volunteers, they plan to publish their first results sometime in 2014, he added.

scinerds:

Our Brain Can Do Unconscious Mathematics

What is nine plus six, plus eight? You may not realise it, but you already know the answer. It seems that we unconsciously perform more complicated feats of reasoning than previously thought – including reading and basic mathematics. The discovery raises questions about the necessity of consciousness for abstract thought, and supports the idea that maths might not be an exclusively human trait.

Previous studies have shown that we can subliminally process single words and numbers. To identify whether we can unconsciously perform more complicated processing, Ran Hassin at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his colleagues used a technique called continuous flash suppression.

The technique works by presenting a volunteer’s left eye with a stimulus – a mathematical sum, say – for a short period of time, while bombarding the right eye with rapidly changing colourful shapes. The volunteer’s awareness is dominated by what the right eye sees, so they remain unconscious of what is presented to the left eye.

In the team’s first experiment, a three-part calculation was flashed to the left eye. This was immediately followed by one number being presented to both eyes, which the volunteer had to say as fast as possible. When the number was the same as the answer to the sum, people were quicker to announce it, suggesting that they had subconsciously worked out the answer, and primed themselves with that number.

In the second experiment, participants were subliminally shown a sensible or nonsensical sentence such as “I drank the coffee” or “I ironed the coffee”. The sentences were presented to the left eye until the people highlighted that they had become aware of any of the words in the sentence. People noticed words in sentences that didn’t make sense more quickly than in those that did, which suggests that the sentences had been unconsciously processed.

“You’re integrating information from lots of different places,” says Hassin. “People thought you needed consciousness for this.”

“This study provides convincing evidence that people can perform complex rule-based operations unconsciously,” says François Ric at the University of Bordeaux, France. “This could change the way we think about how our brains work and what reason is.”

Since arithmetic and reading might work at a level below conscious awareness, the study adds support to the idea that such reasoning may not be a uniquely human trait. “This is consistent with the idea of there being a continuum between animal and human reasoning,” says Ric.

Journal reference: PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1211645109

frontal-cortex:

Pamela Itkin-Ansari’s Research Report

“We are interested in identifying the master regulators of growth control in pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA). We found that the transcriptional repressor Id3 is profoundly upregulated in human PDA.

We are now studying Id3 interacting genes in order to identify optimal targets for drug discovery efforts for PDA.” (SanfordBurnham.org)

Above : Id3 (green) is strikingly upregulated in murine pancreatic intraepithelial neoplasia (mucin, red) and in human pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDA)

Men and Women Can’t Be “Just Friends”

Side note: This title is actually a bit, no, very misleading. The study does indeed show that men think of romantic or sexually beneficial relationships from friends more often than women, but the conclusions that can be reached in this study could also be a smoking gun showing just how effective our culture is at molding our minds to a gender binary. Which reminds me of the answer I gave someone who had asked about how men should approach women, because my suspicion is that men can be “Just friends” with women, but our culture is so assertive and conditioned to striving for these types of relationships that we easily forget. Plenty of media and outside advertisement subconsciously and most times very obviously altering our behavior to pay more attention to our sexual desires as men and for women to be the “wholesome” weak-links that need us. While women on the other hand are suggested and most times even forced into that image. Sure men will have that natural urge, but these urges alone are not enough to merit this behavior because this urge can be easily controlled, those that can’t control it tend to be those who are more heavily influenced by that gender binary culture and the behavioral patterns that come with it. Just a thought, but read on for the study and make your own conclusions.

Can heterosexual men and women ever be “just friends”? Few other questions have provoked debates as intense, family dinners as awkward, literature as lurid, or movies as memorable. Still, the question remains unanswered. Daily experience suggests that non-romantic friendships between males and females are not only possible, but common—men and women live, work, and play side-by-side, and generally seem to be able to avoid spontaneously sleeping together. However, the possibility remains that this apparently platonic coexistence is merely a façade, an elaborate dance covering up countless sexual impulses bubbling just beneath the surface.

New research suggests that there may be some truth to this possibility—that we may think we’re capable of being “just friends” with members of the opposite sex, but the opportunity (or perceived opportunity) for “romance” is often lurking just around the corner, waiting to pounce at the most inopportune moment.

In order to investigate the viability of truly platonic opposite-sex friendships—a topic that has been explored more on the silver screen than in the science lab—researchers brought 88 pairs of undergraduate opposite-sex friends into…a science lab. Privacy was paramount—for example, imagine the fallout if two friends learned that one—and only one—had unspoken romantic feelings for the other throughout their relationship. In order to ensure honest responses, the researchers not only followed standard protocols regarding anonymity and confidentiality, but also required both friends to agree—verbally, and in front of each other—to refrain from discussing the study, even after they had left the testing facility. These friendship pairs were then separated, and each member of each pair was asked a series of questions related to his or her romantic feelings (or lack thereof) toward the friend with whom they were taking the study.

The results suggest large gender differences in how men and women experience opposite-sex friendships. Men were much more attracted to their female friends than vice versa. Men were also more likely than women to think that their opposite-sex friends were attracted to them—a clearly misguided belief. In fact, men’s estimates of how attractive they were to their female friends had virtually nothing to do with how these women actually felt, and almost everything to do with how the men themselves felt—basically, males assumed that any romantic attraction they experienced was mutual, and were blind to the actual level of romantic interest felt by their female friends. Women, too, were blind to the mindset of their opposite-sex friends; because females generally were not attracted to their male friends, they assumed that this lack of attraction was mutual. As a result, men consistently overestimated the level of attraction felt by their female friends and women consistently underestimated the level of attraction felt by their male friends.

Men were also more willing to act on this mistakenly perceived mutual attraction. Both men and women were equally attracted to romantically involved opposite-sex friends and those who were single; “hot” friends were hot and “not” friends were not, regardless of their relationship status. However, men and women differed in the extent to which they saw attached friends as potential romantic partners. Although men were equally as likely to desire “romantic dates” with “taken” friends as with single ones, women were sensitive to their male friends’ relationship status and uninterested in pursuing those who were already involved with someone else.

I highlighted this part towards the end of the snippet because I wanted to again point out that this may be because of men’s misogynistic mindset that is largely attributed to our traditional culture that has been having trouble with keeping with the times. I believe we [men] are more willing to act because we are given more entitlement and power over women and this gives us an extreme overdose of unnecessary confidence in our sexuality despite how messed up and possessive it is in reality.

Full Article

Evidence for Ancient Life Throughout the Land

New research suggests that Earth’s early microbes may have been widespread on land, despite the fact that the ozone layer had not yet formed.

There is evidence that some microbial life had migrated from the Earth’s oceans to land by 2.75 billion years ago, though many scientists believe such land-based life was limited because the ozone layer that shields against ultraviolet radiation did not form until hundreds of millions years later.

But new research from the University of Washington suggests that early microbes might have been widespread on land, producing oxygen and weathering pyrite, an iron sulfide mineral, which released sulfur and molybdenum into the oceans.

“This shows that life didn’t just exist in a few little places on land. It was important on a global scale because it was enhancing the flow of sulfate from land into the ocean,” said Eva Stüeken, a UW doctoral student in Earth and space sciences.

Goat Mountain Astronomical Research Station