I caught a grasshopper gnawing on my bridgesii a couple days ago. It made wonder if said grasshopper had any sort of effects from the mescaline or other active alkaloids in my cactus. Not sure if insects even have the capability to process psychoactive alkaloids.

insects do not have the same sort of CNS as mammals, instead, certain alkaloids inhibit their motor function.

A study highlighting benzyme's answer was done way back when:

Spiders On Drugs

Scientists at the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) have turned their attention from the mysteries of the cosmos to a more esoteric area of research: what happens when you get a spider stoned. Their experiments have shown that common house spiders spin their webs in different ways according to the psychotropic drug they have been given. Nasa scientists believe the research demonstrates that web-spinning spiders can be used to test drugs because the more toxic the chemical, the more deformed was the web.

http://www.trinity.edu/jdunn/spiderdrugs.htm



^normal web



^mescaline web



^lsd web



^caffeine web



^benzedrine web



^sleeping pills web

~and finally~



^corona and marijuana web. HAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAH (the first 6 are real)

Ahh yes. No wonder I couldn't find it, it's a Canadian study. I was looking in the American Internets... Didn't want to attract attention to myself ya know?

Thank you Parshvak. As they say, there'e no me in tiam.

I believe that I need to post a correction to my original post, for I uncovered this relevant tidbit:

Spiders Love Cocaine

I was kind of hoping there might be a possibility that the grasshopper got something positive out of the experience more than food, but I guess him getting to live another day is good enough for me.

i saw a spider on my penis (plant) that i could have swore was tripping.

movement didn't seem inhibited.. if anything it was enhanced.

probably just a sober spider, but i had fun playing with him all the same (left him there, hoping he would forever more guard my plant from bugs, but i never saw him again)

this topic does beg a bigger question though

what about reptiles and birds or fish?

can any other species other than mammals has hallucinogenics effect them? are some types of mammals more heavily effected than others?

and most importantly of all what mechanism causes what happens to us to happen while to other animals it does not?

Well, we know that there are certain areas of the psychedelic experience that it would be next to impossible for most animals to experience.
The ego breaking and dissolving that occurs is thought to be caused by the damping of activity in the anterior cingulate cortex. This is the part of the brain that seems to do the hard work of processing the 'ego.' (This is often overactive in patients with depression, which is why psychedelics could be such a great antidepressant).

In humans, this area is far more developed then in other animals, so they realistically wouldn't experience as extreme a sense of ego-loss, simply because their egos are pretty large to begin with.

Most lower-order animals lack cerebral cortexes in the same way that we do, which is where most of the magic of psychedelia happens, so powerful subjective effects probably don't happen, since there isn't a whole lot of consciousness being in there to begin with.

Somatic responses, however, as evidenced by the spiders, probably still persist.

I've always wondered why science doesn't get a bunch of chimpanzees to trip and maybe put McKenna's 'stoned ape' theory to the test.

Blessings
~ND

It's been posted on the nexus before, but it's about jaguar singling out caapi vine in the jungle.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqGDv0KCJl8

some people theorize that ayahuasca was first discovered by watching jaguars eat the caapi vine..

amanita mushrooms and reindeer anyone?

Could you tell us more about this? From your explanation I would expect the ego of an animal to be smaller than ours...

Years ago I saw a beaver eat all the leaves off a morning glory plant. I assumed he would trip.

I was wandering the same thing this morning when I pulled a caterpillar off one of my acacias. Last summer on two separate occasions I had an ayahuasca vine get chewed up by squirrels. I can only hope they got something out of it.

Sure: the anterior cingulate cortex (the ACC) is part of the larger cingulate cortex, the closest to the front of the brain.

It has a number of different hypothesized functions, which include everything from error detection, to pain perception, to reward-based learning. It's role on conscious awareness is not very well understood, but it seems to have a role in modulating the conscious awareness of mental and emotional states.
In short, the 'you' that feels certain things is made aware that it is aware by the actions of the AAC. Patients who have had damage to the ACC will oftentimes exhibit symptoms similar to autism or schizophrenia, both of which are notorious for a blunted emotional affect and a dissociation from external stimuli.

The AAC also appears to have a role in mediating the degree to which you identify with the universe around you. When activity in the AAC is depressed (as it is on psychedelics), the brain identifies more closely with the world: things seems 'more important,' or 'personal.' Conversely, many people suffering from depression have overactive AACs, which might mean that they cannot identify with things external to themselves. To someone with an overactive AAC, the world would seem alternately 'wrong' or totally devoid of intrinsic meaning and value.

As a life-long depression suffer, let me tell you, there's a lot to that. With an overactive AAC, it's easy to ask 'what's the point,' because, to your brain, nothing really matters.

This brings us all the way back to psychedelic drugs, which studies at Johns Hopkins on psilocybin have shown will depress activity in the AAC. While on a serotonergic psychedelics, activity in the AAC (and the entire left hemisphere) is massively damped. One of the effects of this is a breakdown of the brains ability to adequately tell the difference between itself and the universe.

This sense of emotional oneness with the universe comes from a joint damping of the AAC and the posterior superior parietal lobe (PSPL, which does the hard work of physical orientation and figuring out where the physical body stops and the world begins).
That's why psilocybin might be such an effectively antidepressent.

The AAC is only very developed in humans, great apes, and (weirdly) cetations and elephants.

Blessings
~ND

Thanks for the explanation, but I don't really see the logic in this.
If the ACC is more developed in humans etc, this would mean our ego is bigger then the one of let us say a dog since the ACC seems to distantiate ourselves from the universe when overactive?
So in your previous post you meant that animal's ego are pretty small to begin with I guess?

I don't think that ego is quantifiable size-wise. It may be more complex to us, and less complex to animals. It's still a concept, and hard to attribute it to a certain area. Especially, since there is no "established" connection between error detection as a function, and ego as a concept. Error (as a detection of dissonance), is up to individual interpretation as to which high-level concept it belongs to. Just a thought.

I dunno about bugs but my bird is a bugger for the DMT:

The whole notion of quantifying the size of an ego is very thorny on a number of different grounds.

In his excelent book "I Am A Strange Loop," Douglas Hofstader (who uses 'souls' interchangeably with egos), talks about how, given the limits of their neural wiring, certain animals might have smaller souls then others.

Since the ego is, by definition a unitary thing, it's hard to objectively gauge it's size (since it's size, by definition has to be '1,'. You might be able to make the argument that all conscious beings experience the same intensity consciousness, but the amount of self-referential information that that consciousness can process is a decent measure of the size of the ego. (Eg: how aware of itself is something?)

The Neural: Keep in mind that error detection is only one function of the AAC. It has several more.

Blessings
~ND

Ive heard this about the Raindeer eating Amanita Muscaria's too, and the shamons wuld collect there urine. Also isnt catnip psychedelic for cats as well?