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That Thing In Your Head: Interesting Articles on Pharmacology, Neuroscience, Psychology, Psychopharmacology, and Biochemistry

Our general attitude towards the rest of the biological world has been problematic ever since religion made us master over our surroundings. This latest plague is just payment for and a reminder of where we go wrong.

“Our social system has become so disconnected from nature that we no longer understand we still are a part of it. Breathable air, potable water, productive fields, a stable environment—these all come about because we’re part of this elaborate system, the biosphere. Now we’re suffering environmental consequences like climate change and the loss of food security and viral outbreaks because we’ve forgotten how to integrate our endeavors with nature.”

Yes, another article about the troubling relationship humanity has with the natural world.
 
A couple of months ago Twitter was all abuzz about the Internal Monologue and how some people don't have it. It's really fascinating when you start asking people. People who have it are shocked that there are some who don't and those who don't have it have no clue what you mean. I wish I could turn mine off. It can get loud in my head sometimes.

https://mymodernmet.com/inner-monologue/
Not a scientific article. But has some links.
 
Nice one. Yeah, that's interesting. I actually hadn't heard of this being absent in some people. I just assumed all humans went on like this.

Mine's an external monologue half the time. :D

Thanks for posting that.

I just realised....this whole thread has been an inner-external monologue, until you came through. ?


Nice one @Soop!
 
So, through another forum I frequent, I came across this website which I haven't fully gone through as there is a lot of material there.

I was introduced to it by a young girl who treated symptoms of her Asperger's with MDMA and later psilocybin. Her inability to read emotions or to express her own, for example.

The website is her friend's. Her friend was involved in self-treatment as well, but I haven't gotten into her story yet.

Why I personally find this extremely interesting is that I myself used MDMA and psilocybin to treat depression and social anxiety I suffered in my teenage years.
With absolute success, I should like to add. It was like a switch. The MDMA turnt off the depressive mental state and the psilocybin allowed me to integrate the new mental state into my life.

Anyway, the site is the story of how some young people took treating their minds into their own hands.

The publisher of the site seems to be writing mostly about her experiences with psilocybin. They seem extensive. Way more times than I've ever even dreamed of. Anyway, for those who don't know, psilocybin is the most active alkaloid in some mushroom species. It's a psychoactive substance (like caffeine, alchol, meth, etc) that works primarily on a subset of serotonin receptors in the brain. It stimulates neuroplasticity and new neural connections which is the basis for its therapeutic benefits.
Psilocybin is hydrolysed into psilocin in vivo and it is the psilocin that actually reaches the seretonin receptors, mimicking serotonin, which is a base neurotransmitter that regulates mood, appetite, sleep, and other things in the human body.

Anyway, give it an eye. Learn something new. ;)

https://beyondtheparallax.com/
 
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...and physics, because as I always jokingly say, "My God is physics". Never mind the fact that matter and its behaviour on a quantum level is the basis of all existence.

Panpsychism is a school of thought interested in studying the potential for conciousness in all existence. That is to say, all matter, down to the electron. It's an interesting concept. The field of quantum physics is turning up examples of electron behaviour that may indicate concious choice on part of the electron in terms of its manifestation.

“Was there a distinct moment when Earth went from having no life to having life, as if a switch were flipped? The answer is ‘probably not.’”


Electrons May Very Well Be Concious
 
The Psychedelic Times have published an interview with Dr Davit Nutt, a British professor who was sacked from the UK government's Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs because he wouldn't go along with the prohibitionist moral panic of the ruling classes and is famous for showing that horseback riding is more dangerous than MDMA use and that alcohol is the most harmful drug in use.
Poor guy has many smart things to say but has been pissing into the wind for years.


As I was getting into this kind of work, I was realizing that drug laws didn’t seem to bear a lot of relationship to the harms of drugs, and that the harms were often not to do with the drugs but to do with the laws.

Alcohol Alternatives, Vaping Nonsense, and Comparative Drug Harms: Interview with Professor David Nutt
 
This is super interesting. Using virions to induce the production in vivo of hyper-interleukin-6 which is genetically engineered and doesn't occur naturally allowed crippled mice suffering from spinal cord injury to walk again.
Apparently the process used allowed the regeneration of motor neurons that don't normally regenerate.


Layman's Article:
Designer Cytokine Makes Paralyzed Mice Walk Again

“Thus, gene therapy treatment of only a few nerve cells stimulated the axonal regeneration of various nerve cells in the brain and several motor tracts in the spinal cord simultaneously,” points out Dietmar Fischer. “Ultimately, this enabled the previously paralyzed animals that received this treatment to start walking after two to three weeks. This came as a great surprise to us at the beginning, as it had never been shown to be possible before after full paraplegia.”

Journal Article:
Transneuronal delivery of hyper-interleukin-6 enables functional recovery after severe spinal cord injury in mice

Spinal cord injury (SCI) often causes severe and permanent disabilities due to the regenerative failure of severed axons. Here we report significant locomotor recovery of both hindlimbs after a complete spinal cord crush. This is achieved by the unilateral transduction of cortical motoneurons with an AAV expressing hyper-IL-6 (hIL-6), a potent designer cytokine stimulating JAK/STAT3 signaling and axon regeneration. We find collaterals of these AAV-transduced motoneurons projecting to serotonergic neurons in both sides of the raphe nuclei. Hence, the transduction of cortical neurons facilitates the axonal transport and release of hIL-6 at innervated neurons in the brain stem. Therefore, this transneuronal delivery of hIL-6 promotes the regeneration of corticospinal and raphespinal fibers after injury, with the latter being essential for hIL-6-induced functional recovery. Thus, transneuronal delivery enables regenerative stimulation of neurons in the deep brain stem that are otherwise challenging to access, yet highly relevant for functional recovery after SCI.
 

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