Entries Tagged 'Consciousness' ↓

Scientific American posted an article entitled “Psychedelic Healing?” about the potential medical and psychiatric benefits of a number of different psychedelics. While the staff of humemes does not support the widespread, unrestricted use of any psychedelic compounds, psychedelic research has been going for for nearly 50 years and has shown incredible signs of being effective in helping to curb or stop many different mental ailments. As discussed in Dr. Rick Strassman’s book DMT: The Spirit Molecule it has become increasingly hard for researchers to get their hands on a number of these compounds due to their legal status. It strikes me as odd that we allow our war on drugs to extend to only a certain number of compounds while so many others are left open to scrutiny and testing.

An excerpt from the article:

The past 15 years have seen a quiet resurgence of psychedelic drug research as scientists have come to recognize the long-underappreciated potential of these drugs. In the past few years, a growing number of studies using human volunteers have begun to explore the possible therapeutic benefits of drugs such as LSD, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, ibogaine and ketamine.

Much remains unclear about the precise neural mechanisms governing how these drugs produce their mind-bending results, but they often produce somewhat similar psychoactive effects that make them potential therapeutic tools. Though still in their preliminary stages, studies in humans suggest that the day when people can schedule a psychedelic session with their therapist to overcome a serious psychiatric problem may not be that far off.

Alan Watts was an author, philosopher, and one of the foremost experts on comparative religion. This is a video created for a speech he did. I don’t know that the visuals or the background music really add anything, but its a pretty awesome speech.

Jonah Lehrer, editor at large of Seed Magazine, announced today that his book “Proust Was A Neuroscientist” is now shipping. I’m excited about the book and pre-ordered it quite a while ago. I’m a big fan of Proust and have always loved reading interpretations of his dense, hyper-natural understanding of the sensory world. Both Clifford Pickover and Robert Anton Wilson have speculated in the past about his connection to the sciences and consciousness. On top of the book being about an exceptionally interesting subject, Seed Magazine has been such a joy to read since I subscribed last year and there is no doubt in my mind that Jonah is one of the reasons why this is true.

A comment about the book made almost 6 months ago by the man himself:

… my title is quite literal. I argue that Proust (and Whitman, Cezanne, Woolf, etc.) anticipated the facts of modern neuroscience. Their art expresses truths about the human mind - real, tangible, truths - that science is only now rediscovering. As you can probably guess, Proust was very prescient when it came to the neuroscience of memory.

I’ll post a review after I receive and read my copy, but you should all go out and buy the book today:

A post over at Distributed Neuron points to a journal article at Public Library of Science regarding research on THC, the most active mind-altering chemical in the marijuana.

From the journal article:

The fact that cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug has motivated a great deal of research aimed at understanding how it produces its psychoactive effects. Here I use the term psychoactive to describe the mild euphoria, altered perceptions, sense of relaxation, and sociability that often, but not always, accompany recreational cannabis use. Despite the difficulties inherent in working with lipophilic cannabinoids such as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the primary psychoactive component of cannabis, our understanding of the mechanism of action of these compounds at the cellular level has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. However, a complete understanding of how cannabis elicits its psychoactive effects would include an appreciation of its actions at the cellular and network level as well as an identification of the neural circuits perturbed. The cannabinoid field has now matured to the point where investigators can begin to relate the cellular mechanisms of THC action to the behavioral effects of cannabis.

THC research has been seriously inhibited by its legal status and while I don’t personally believe it will become legal in the US anytime soon, more research needs to be done. I think there is a possibility that more research may lead to some interesting findings and perhaps a new perspectives on what we classify as illegal, addictive, and unhealthy compounds.

I read a very interesting article in the New Yorker today regarding people in vegetative states. There tends to be slightly more interaction with the outside world by a person in a vegetative state than a person with a coma. Often their eyes will be open and may move around.

From the article:

For four months, Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records changes in metabolism and blood flow in the brain, and, on a screen in front of her, projected photographs of faces belonging to members of her family, as well as digitally distorted images, in which the faces were unrecognizable. Whenever pictures of Bainbridge’s family flashed on the screen, an area of her brain called the fusiform gyrus, which neuroscientists had identified as playing a central role in face recognition, lit up on the scan. “We were stunned,” Owen told me. “The fusiform-gyrus activation in her brain was not simply similar to normal; it was exactly the same as normal volunteers’.”

These types of articles always really interest me because they provide a degree of insight into the neurobiological basis of consciousness. Does the inability to interact with the world in a conventional manner an indicator of a lack of consciousness? If so, what does the facial recognition of loved ones and therefore some ability to recall memories indicate? We have much to learn about the human brain and people in these different states of consciousness.