Serotonin-glutamate complex implicated in hallucinogenic action

CSETI at home is much better - not that I'm not into scanning radio frequencies too, it's just that any actual aliens or other forms of life might not even be extant on those frequencies. N'est pas! Like that ain't bleedin' obvious to all and sundry anyway.

Early days in home supercomputing....early days...

Uhh, yeah, that drug research program is in development right behind "SETI@homeAloneInTheDarkWithEyeMaskOn"

Since when does animal testing prove anything worthwhile; how exactly do they tell if a mouse is schizophrenic - do they ask it if all its sensory input all appears to be converging towards meaning exactly the same thing, a meaning which happens to co-incide with well-known conspiracy theories.

There's certainly been studies on biochemistry since at least the 60s to compare various psychedelics effects to what is happening at that level in diagnosed schizophrenics; I remember reading through a bunch of them during an abnormal psychology essay research (a degree path I went on to 'chuck', precisely because of animal-testing in the biology part of it), and they all had concluded that although the effects behaviourally could appear similar, they couldn't find chemical evidence to back it up.

I haven't read much on it since, but I find the comparison between the terrible states of madness and the joyous insightful states that characterise psychedelics best summed up in The Doors of Perception where Huxley writes about if you begin in the wrong way, then all of what you see is going to fall into line with your initial assumptions;

this is why 'set & setting' are so important when taking drugs, because your expectations and state of mind and health, and your surroundings, are going to determine the kind of experience you have.

That said, anyone who is naturally more sensitive to their environment and their own, and others, unconscious and thoughts also, are more likely to be considered 'mad' in un-natural and brutal and shallow settings, whereas raised in different environments they are far less likely to be so considered.

Examples? - well consider if your parents and the company they keep, and education they send you through, are all ok with such ideas as biodynamics, spiritualism, Eastern religions, art as a career path, and so forth; as opposed to if you are brought up in the kind of situation where such things are considered insane. And you happen to be say for example, able to see auras. In the former scenario you'd be welcomed, in the latter you get taken to the doctor, labelled insane, and put on psycho pills - maybe not in every case that'd happen, but as Ronnie Laing put it - in many cases, those labelled schizophrenic turn out to be the sane ones in a family of the unreasonable. Their family consider them mad because they don't wish to admit to the truthful insights the other family member has about them.

This then leads to confrontations and other problems, then the true origins of the problem become lost in the reactions to the confrontations. The 'mad' person is then able to be 'treated' for being violent or in some other way acting-up.

Chemistry, natural or induced, merely opens up the reception to greater amounts of data - if the data sources are corrupt, the experience is going to be negative and harmful. 'Normal' reality - coping in it - necessitates shutting-down of the kind of awareness reached on psychedelics; some people are not able or willing to do that.
It shouldn't be expected of anyone to have to do that, but there's few lifestyles in this world that support a fully realised, or potentially realised, beingness.
Even a monastic choice does not always cut it.

It would be a fine thing if a drug research version of folding@home was released; it's a distributed client - runs on a computer or console and allows your machine to be put to use in calculations involving protein-folding research. Computer modelling of actual human systems is far more worthwhile than animal testing.
Unless these already exist for drugs research in that area, and I haven't heard of them?

Im not sure if there are any mGluR2 specific antagonists. I won't try it any time soon, I mean is it really worth it to find even weirder aliens?

You would have to watch out for PTZ-induced seizures with this kind of combo, I would think, due to antagonizing group I mGluRs or activating group III mGluRs. But hey, go for it.

Somebody should try it...

Hey James - When I read the study I thought that this was the first description of this particular receptor complex- I had never heard of it before, are you sure this receptor complex has been shown before?

What you will find in the "unique cellular responses" is interesting. They are looking at the same gene induction as in the earlier Gingrich paper (c-fos and egr-2, as a reminder hallucinogenic 5HT2A agonists increase both c-fos and egr-2 expression, whereas non hallucinogenic 5HT2A agonists only increase c-fos expression). What they found was that c-fos induction was not affected by co-treatment with an mGluR2/3 agonist, but that egr-2 expression was blocked by this agonist. This agonist also blocked the behaviorly relevent head twitch induced by hallucinogens.

I was wondering what an mGluR2 antagonist would would do to the psychedelic experience.