The brain mechanism underlying one of the most memorable catch phrases of the sixties - Timothy Leary's "Turn on, tune in, drop out" - has been pinpointed at long last.
Leary was an American writer, psychologist and proponent of the therapeutic and spiritual benefits of the drug. Now the mind-bending effects of hallucinogens such as LSD have been pinpointed at last.
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Dr Stuart Sealfon of Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, Jay Gingrich of Columbia University, and colleagues published their findings in the journal Neuron . The work sheds light on the longtime mystery of how hallucinogens distort perception and demonstrates a technique that could be used to understand the function of drugs which are widely used to treat psychiatric disorders without a full understanding of what they do in the body.
Researchers have long known that hallucinogens activate specific docking points - receptors - in the brain, called 5-HT2A receptors (2ARs), that are normally triggered by serotonin, a messenger chemical. However, a fundamental mystery has been why other compounds that turn on the same receptors are not hallucinogenic.
In their studies, the researchers compared in mice the differences between the effects of LSD and a nonhallucinogenic chemical that also activates 2AR receptors and found that the action of the hallucinogen also involves other proteins in another neurological pathway, revealing a new model of how it works:in effect, the receptors are like switches with two "on" positions.
Drugs like LSD make the receptor go into one "on" position, whereas non-psychedelic drugs turn on the receptor in a different way. The researchers wrote that "These studies identify the long-elusive neural and signaling mechanisms responsible for the unique effects of hallucinogens."
They also concluded that "The strategy we developed to elucidate [hallucinogen] action should be applicable to [central nervous system]-active compounds, with therapeutic potential in other disorders.
Thus, our findings may advance the understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders that have specific pharmacological treatments whose mechanisms of action are not fully understood."
― latebloomer (latebloomer), Saturday, 10 February 2007 22:07 (eighteen years ago)