Drugs and the Brain
retrospectacle | December 19, 2007A commentary today in Nature, by Sahakian and Morein-Zamir, poses the question: if you could take a pill which enhanced attention and cognition with few or no side effects, would you?
But I ask, why wouldn't you?
Interest in potions and drugs which increase awareness and "brain power" has been around for thousands of years. Many natural compounds from ginseng to coffee to cocaine have been touted as a dubious panacea for a muddled mind. However in the pharmaceutical age, we are now in possession of agents which actually do enhance cognition through changes in neurotransmitter release. For…
aaronrowe | October 23, 2007I have heard a lot of stories about the aggressive behavior of people on angel dust, but this video is the first time that I have seen just how dramatic it can be. The guy is completely naked and smashes straight through a fence then tries to climb through the hole in order to evade police. It seems almost like the behavior of a comic book villain or the incredible hulk.
If you know of any similar footage, I would love to see it.
Don't forget to vote for Shelley!
aaronrowe | October 22, 2007
As our civil liberties are eroded under the guise a war on terror and men without rights are kept in secret prisons and sent to foreign jails for abuse, I worry that truth serums will once again become a staple of law enforcement and intelligence. They do not allow interrogators to extract reliable information, but neither does torture -- and yet the current administration is not opposed to those brutal methods.
I am not alone. Last year, The Washington Post published a fantastic article on this alarming topic. Even better, Alison Winter wrote a comprehensive history of truth serums that…
aaronrowe | October 18, 2007The October issue of Popular Science has several excellent articles about the mind. My favorite is a collection of five explanations of unusual or creepy sensations that are caused by neurological glitches.
Reporter Veronique Greenwood included short summaries of academic research about each of the mental malfunctions. I was pleased to see that she included the names and affiliatons of the researchers, but disappointed that she only identified one of the journals in which the research that she described appears.
After reading dense blurbs like these, I often want to know more.
It always…
aaronrowe | October 17, 2007
In recent years, pharmacutical companies have re-released several of their blockbuster drugs with a new twist. By carefully controlling the spatial arrangement of each atom in the active ingredient, chemists can increase the effectiveness of medications and sometimes prevent unwanted or horrible side effects.
Modafinil (provigil) is a treatment for narcolepsy. It also allows healthy people to stay awake for extended periods of time. Armodafinil (neuvigil) is a newer product that contains only one isomer of the drug.
Methylphenidate (ritalin) is a treatment for attention deficit…
retrospectacle | October 9, 2007[This is part of a series I'm doing here on Retrospectacle called 'Science Vault.' Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls of scientific publications to find weird and interesting studies that very likely would never be published or done today (and perhaps never should have.) I'll probably try to do it once a week (and if you have suggestions, please do email me with them.)]
Its been a few weeks since anything truly old and shocking as come across my plate as fodder for my 'Science Vault' series, but when I saw this paper, I knew I had to blog it.…
retrospectacle | September 25, 2007
One of the more, uh, interesting culinary experiences I have had in Asia was ordering fugu (pufferfish) sushi at a Japanese restaurant in China. A few moments after my order, a plate was sat in front of me that contained lots of fresh, white sushi slices...positioned just below the still-gasping decapitated fugu head. My dad was so disturbed that he asked the waitress to take the fugu head away while I happily chomped away at the delicious sushi. Well, at least I knew it was fresh!
The fugu, or pufferfish, is a delicacy in Asia (and particularly Japan) due to the dangers inherent in…
retrospectacle | September 13, 2007Saw this over at Wired Science a couple days back, an interesting article about an unusual, uh, herb called Diviner's sage which has hallucinogenic properties and could spark a new class of drugs. Reports of people curing themselves of depression and treating pain with this form of sage are common, however the likelihood of pharmaceutical-grade drugs from companies arising from it may be slim since it cannot be patented exclusively.
Research on hallucinogenic sage has been stop-and-go. In 2002, Bryon Roth and his research group explained how the potent drug plays games with the nervous…
retrospectacle | August 9, 2007Cone snail shells are beautiful, but their venom is a potent cocktail used to paralyze passing fish. The venom is a witch's brew of hundreds of novel compounds, many more than are found in snake venom (which has been used by science extensively as well). One compound in particular is a pain killer many times more effective than morphine.
The venom apparatus consists of a muscular venom bulb which pushes venom from a gland down a long duct to a chitinous tooth (the pink thing). The tooth is like a little barbed harpoon, which becomes soaked in venom and jabs into prey. Venom is quickly…
retrospectacle | July 27, 2007 Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), currently the most common childhood-onset behavioral disorder, is nothing if not controversial. Nearly every aspect of ADHD from diagnosis to prevalence to medication, and even its mere existence, is disputed by at least one 'concerned' group. And honestly, who could blame parents for being hesitant to medicate their young children, especially since medications come with risks? However, ADHD is a very real (and prevalent) disorder which has discrete neurochemical and, as more and more research is suggesting, genetic causes. It has been linked…
retrospectacle | February 22, 2007Fetal alcohol syndrome---where the developing fetus is exposed to high levels of ethanol in the womb---has far-reaching negative effects on neural development. Now environmental and biological factors of parental alcohol abuse might also retard brain growth, according to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry.
Many studies have shown that alcohol-dependent men and women have smaller brain volumes than non-alcohol-dependent individuals. It is widely believed that this is due to the toxic effects of ethanol, which causes the alcoholic's brain to shrink with aging to a greater extent…
retrospectacle | January 16, 2007A recent study published in J.Neuroscience by Stanwood et al. may help explain the long-term neurological effects associated with cocaine use while pregnant, the so-called "crack baby syndrome" which was of great concern in the 1980s. Prenatal exposure to cocaine is known to cause a range of cognitive impairments ranging from attention deficits to severe emotional problems to mental retardation. However the precise way that cocaine abuse disrupted proper cognitive development was unclear.
Stanwood et al reported that prenatal cocaine exposure in pregnant rabbits caused a long-lasting…
retrospectacle | January 9, 2007Watching the movie "The Good Shepherd" got me thinking about something: are truth serums real? And if so, has any been proven to work? There was a scene in TGS where a prisoner who was believed to be lying was administered LSD. Now obviously THAT wasn't a real truth serum (unless you want to hear about the innate truth of teacups or something), but if the CIA was using LSD they were likely using other candidates as well.
Lets just assume for a moment that there existed some potion that extracted the truth from people, rendered them unable to lie when questioned. Wouldn't that negate free…
retrospectacle | December 31, 2006Most people who have known a drug addict, or have watched Trainspotting or ER, know that one of the more insidious parts of addiction is the need for more and more drug to achieve a "high." This leads the addict into a spiral of drug-seeking behavior, and brain changes, which lead to the person just trying to feel normal again. Why is it that, over time, opiate drugs lose their rewarding effects? Until recently, the molecular mechanism behind "why" was unknown, but a new study published in Nature (subscription required) this month explains that has to do with the decrease of a certain…
retrospectacle | September 6, 2006For many years, psychiatry has relied on the pharmacological usage of lithium (Li+), alone or in combination with other anti-depressants, as a treatment for bipolar disorder, depression, mania, etc. This, despite the fact that very little is known WHY Lithium works, let alone HOW.
The actual prescribed "dose" of lithium is not a pure metal, but rather as lithium "salts": lithium carbonate, lithium oxybutyrate, lithium sulfate, among others. In 1949, Australian physician John Cade discovered that the administration of lithium salts (lithium urate) in animals resulted in a tranquilizing effect…
retrospectacle | July 18, 2006Phenomenal timing, seeing as the FDA recently decreed that smoked marijuana held no medical benefits, and was hazardous. This is just one more neon sign making me wonder why cigarettes, proven to cause cancer, are legal while marijuana, which has no cancer link, is stubbornly prosecuted.
CNN reports on a study conducted by UCLA which examined the lifestyles of 611 Los Angeles lung cancer patients, 601 head and neck cancer patients, and 1040 people without cancer. They found no elevated risk of cancer, even in the heaviest of pot smokers. A 20-fold increase of lung cancer was found in people…
retrospectacle | June 21, 2006The Midwest has been hit hard by the heroin/fentanyl overdoses. For more on the background see this; in a nutshell, drug dealers have been lacing heroin and cocaine with the dangerously powerful painkiller fentanyl. CNN reports tonight that 47 people, part of the Mickey Cobra's gang, were busted in Chicago in connection with fentanyl trafficking. (More below......)
Assistant U.S. Attorney Gary Shapiro alleged that the Mickey Cobras gang marketed its drugs to take advantage of the deadly heroin's notoriety, selling products with names such as "Max Pain," "Lethal Injection," "Fear Factor," "…
retrospectacle | June 9, 2006Cocaine abuse is a major public health issue, with estimations of as high as 1% of the US population over 12 as abusers. Addiction to cocaine, and most substances for that matter, results in physical modifications in your brain which are persistant, and detrimental to many mental fuctions like learning. During and following cocaine addiction, changes occur in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens (NAc), which is important in natural reward pathways. It is a key player in the reinforcement of drug-taking.
A recent brief communication in Nature Neuroscience (Martin et al. 2006) describes…