I apologize if this has already been posted (I posted it in another thread but felt it deserved more attention).

http://www.youtube.com/w...ure=youtube_gdata_player

Nice vid. MAPS is such a good organisation. Love their work.
I am curious to see if they will be able to come up with the evidence of psilocybin being a memory enhancer as he says in the end.

thinking creates new brain cells (connections).

benzyme, can you please expand on that comment? I'm interested in whether you are agreeing with and supplementing Sanchez-Ramos' findings, or dismissing his research, or something else entirely.

As stated in the lecture, the only part of the brain where neurogenesis has been found to occur is in the hippocampus and sub-ventricular zone. My understanding is that neuroplasticity in other parts of the brain is effected by long-term depression and long-term potentiation of synapses.
Any neuroscientists care to elaborate?

I found this part of the talk most intriguing. Mice given constant psilocybin both associated and dissociated stimulus-response behaviors more quickly than others. Possible implications: enhanced memory, quicker learning, etc, with regular small doses of psilocybin? Of course, most of us are not mice.

I really think this may be related to how psilocybin can deprogram society from a person. I really feel mushrooms have helped me to see beyond the labels and associated thinking I had lived with my whole life. It's been truly priceless.

I'm also very interested in the effects on dementia, and old age cognitive decline. If I make it to 85+ I plan to be a trippin old fool!

what i stated was common knowledge.new dendritic connections are made by cognitive and critical thinking, a reason i've also said that simply exercizing critical thinking will alter your awareness of what's really going on in this mad world.

But has anyone actually done research on the growth of dendrites in critical thinkers compared to non-critical thinkers? This is slightly tongue in cheek, but if you have a study in mind I'd love to see it.

Mr. Peabody, that is a great connection. It is a strange thought that psilocybin can in a sense desocialize humans. It brings to mind the question of how beneficial socialization of different sorts actually is. As you say, many labels and associations seem to blind us rather than elucidating true relations. However, aren't labels and associations a necessary component of social interaction? It seems futile and hypocritical to contend that we ought not live in social community, so it follows that labels and associations are necessary for normal human life. Does the current scale of human interaction play a causal role in the negative effects of labels and associations by forcing us to compartmentalize more and more as our phenomenological world expands? After all, we surely did not evolve in the niche that we have built the world into.
Or is the tension between society and individual inherent in any language-using species?

I would question whether labels and associations are a necessary component of social interaction.

Benzyme, this presentation talks about new brain cells, which is quite different from forming new synapses. In other words, the presenter speaks of mitotic divisions.

are mushrooms the only psychadelic that does this , or we can also count on ayahuasca , lsd and dmt to do the same ?

otherwise soon i'll need to be growing mushrooms , as i am lacking a lot of braincells due to much substance abuse in my past , so probably mushrooms will help me

also salvia has nothing to do with 5ht , so will salvia be helping in any way ?

That's a very interesting point. I wouldn't go so far as to say it completely got rid of my biases and tendency towards labels. The main thing is the change with politics. I see many people, when it comes to politics, are blind to the downfalls of their group, or clan they associate with, while being blind to the good parts of the competing group. For much of my life, I believed I thought for myself and only now do I realize I haven't. I had lived with this blind followership, which is easy to do because of our biology, so I merely went along with my party. I think there are benefits, but on the whole, group think is a lower form of consciousness. You're right, it comes from our evolution, and it served a purpose at a time. I see the progress of humans needing to leave this behind. If our country is any indication, and the gridlock it faces, I think it's true. Although, probably the major thing wrong with it now is how we elect leaders.

I have noticed a change in my consciousness after starting college some years ago. I don't know if it's new synapses, cells, or what, but there's a definite change for the better. If nothing else, exercising the brain leads to a more efficient and flexible mind.

There hasn't been a study like this done on other psychedelics. The reason 25i was used is because for one it's legal and for two the receptor binding on it is is really really high.

If I had to guess though I would say yes. The psychedelic mind state, at least for me, has been very good at breaking down old ways of thinking, de-conditioning if you will, and helping me to form new ideas and thought patterns. This test on mice to me is just confirming what a lot of us already know from first hand experience.

I mean, psychedelics helped me recently to give up smoking and helped me to examine how I was treating my wife and family and strive to be a better husband and father. And there's many reports of psychedelics helping other people to overcome addiction and form new life habits.

As to saliva, no it's not a psychedelic in the classical sense of the word and has more in common with DXM, Ketamine, and PCP (dissociatives). Which isn't to say that this class of drugs can't be beneficial but they're outside of the scope of the study.

this is a slightly tongue in cheek search

like I said, it's common knowledge (did you not know about it?)
the brain creates new cells on its own, this isn't a magical property attributed exclusively to psilocybin.
I don't think psilocybin magically creates a shift in global perspective in its users either, not everyone changes how they see the world. it's up to the user to integrate what ever he/she gets out of the experience.

But again, benzyme, you confuse synaptic plasticity with nerve cell division (the latter stopping few days after birth). The dogma is that nerve cells do not divide and thinking most certainty does not create any new nerve cells.

(btw, if you saw the presentation, the guy demonstrates more dividing neurons in the newborn mouse, not synaptic strengthening)

Sure but this video demonstrates that psilocybin promotes brain cell growth. What you're saying is akin to arguing that a plant can grow with little nutrients in the soil therefore discovering that fertilizer promotes plant growth isn't a big deal, because the plant was growing just fine without it.

I mean, you're right, this isn't some magical property but it does show us new things about the brain, as well as what role serotonin and serotonin-like molecules may play in learning and conditioning/de-conditioning.

But you're coming off like there's nothing to see here and we shouldn't be thrilled that there's a new scientific discovery that shows the benefits of entheogenic usage. I for one am thrilled, these molecules need to be studied and understood rather than demonized and mystified.

This opinion is outdated. There is definitly cell division going on, even in adult brains. However this does not mean that these findings are not of great significance for us. Proving that tryptamines (and maybe other psychedelics) facilitate regenration of neurons would be amazing and may catch the attention of many neuroscientist. This would be a first biological explanation of the beneficial effects of psychedelics to a human being. All we have until now is: "Most of the consuments feel that it has a positive impact on them and it seems to help us in certain therapies."
"Tryptamines cause the growth of new neurons." would be a big step ahead!

for some reason

" MAPS does not nessarily endorse the content of this presentation "

why , do have to even mention this in the beginning of the video , raises few concerns , if you're a little skeptic as i am

is it time to cultivate mushrooms and become a genius ?, could continued use make me a super intelligent alien ?, these are some things that come to my mind , or should i just continue with ayahuasca and become an alien anyway ?

in anycase i am still on the road to elusis and report my adventures into these realms from time to time

yessssssss , a new reason , develop my mind , attain my full potential , develop my brain to full capacity , maybe if i continue to consume mushrooms everyday i'll have so many braincells , my forehead might explode and my brain matter might require new organic containers to fill the extra braincells with , and i might end up having thousands of heads with my braincells continuing on an everdividing regeneration scale , is it possible ?

If I understand right (from what the presenter says in the beginning), this wasn't officially funded research but rather the doctorate thesis of one of the presenter's interns.

To me, the brain cell addition is little more than novelty at this point in time. What matters is the cognitive enhancement, shown by faster learning. I know, one study is by no means definitive, but this result supports something I've intuitively known since I began taking mushrooms.

There's no way to know for sure, since I can't go back and redo college without mushrooms, but my grades had a very sharp improvement after I began taking mushrooms. I noticed I learned difficult concepts much quicker and easier. I've taken three years of math now, my lowest grade was a B+ in Calculus 1. Around then began my mushrooms, and since that quarter I have had nothing but solid A's. I'm talking 95+% A's. That includes classes such as Differential Equations, Vector Calculus, and Probability and Statistics. I'm not trying to brag, but I had really thought about this before the video. It's not like I'm a genius now, but more like my brain is a well oiled machine.

So my subjective experience supports the claims made in the video.

Yes, there is strong supporting evidence for natural adult neuronal cell division in the hippocampus, olfactory bulbs, cerebellum, and subventricular zone, and here is some evidence for neurogenesis in the primate neocortex. http://www.princeton.edu/~cggross/Science_286_548_1999.pdf

The gist of Infundibulum's point actually holds though, since the great majority of neurogenesis is completed within 20 years of birth. Neurogenesis after this seems to be mainly in a memory forming capacity. (including of course both implicit and explicit memory) This is not to denigrate the incredible potential of the human mind, which speaks for itself on this website.

In any case, I completely agree that it would be a big step forward to correlate tryptamines with an increase in the rate of neuronal change.



I am aware of and agree with the hypothesis that you are referring to. That it might be called "common knowledge" is not really relevant to a scientific discussion.

Please also note Infundibulum's point that you are confusing dendritic connections with cell divisions, or at least not making it clear that you are talking about two very distinct physical changes.

Furthermore, the search that you provided, or at least the first page, is also irrelevant to my question: has anyone compared dendritic growth in critical versus non-critical thinkers? It was tongue in cheek because we're not going to kill humans and slice up their brains to check out their dendritic growth, and I'd be interested in someone's take on what makes a mouse's thought more critical. (maybe we can collect all the ones that try to escape their cages?)

I suspect psychological-level evidence is the closest we'll come to showing that critical thinking increases our capacity for though in general at this point in time. After all, critical thinking is a behavioral measure- we'd need to correlate brain structure with psychological data before even being able to interpret the implications of increased dendritic connections or neurogenesis.

Back to the topic, go Mr Peabody! That is really amazing anecdotal evidence for exactly the sort of changes in brain function that the original video is interested in, and it is very exciting to me personally.

My understanding is as follows:

'Brain cells' consist of neurones and neuroglia which are like the 'glue' between neurones and are much more numerous.The key differences between these 2 are:

1.neuroglia are less electrically excitable;

2.neuroglia dont form synapses;

3.neuroglia retain the ability to divide;

4.neuroglia subserve a single process.

Neuroglia consist of 2 broad types, macroglia and microglia ,a division based on size and on embryological origin.The macroglial cells are:

1.Oligodendrocytes- make the myelin sheaths;

2.Astrocytes-these 'sit' around blood vessels and maintain the chemical environment around neurones;

3.Ependymal cells-these line the ventricles and are concerned with secretion/excretion into the cerebrospinal fluid.

The microglia- these 'clear up' areas of damage in a similar way to certain peripheral white blood cell types (phagocytosis).

Each cell type looks different and has its own staining charcterisitics.

Any neurogenesis taking place in the CNS (ie making 'new' NEURONS) will be taking place as a result of the maturation of pre-existing stem cells rather than a de novo process.