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Compound found in the hallucinogenic tea ayahuasca can grow new brain cells
- sammalloy 6y agoOne of the strangest, open questions about ayahuasca, is how indigenous people in the Amazon managed to figure out the formulation needed to orally activate the DMT with MAOI, given the ~50,000 or more species of plants in that region.
- bagacrap 6y agolots of plants are made into tea, although most don't have a psychotropic effect. Seems entirely plausible that two separate teas were brewed and consumed which, in combination, caused quite a notable effect.
- CameronNemo 6y agoMAOIs have a mild effect on their own, based on what I have read.
- duozerk 6y agoNot so mild. The harmal alkaloids in question can induce full on psychedelic trips.
- CameronNemo 6y agoI find that hard to believe considering they do not contain any actual serotonin receptor affecting compounds. Do you have any sources or experience reports? I would be interested to learn more. Perhaps they make naturally occurring DMT or other hormones more effective.
- duozerk 6y agoMy apology for the late response; my "source" is the vivid trip I experienced taking a 4g seeds syrian rue tea (and nothing else; the trip was also accompanied by strong nausea, though there are ways to mitigate that). That included vivid open-eyes visuals. Beyond that, I'm struggling to find reports on erowid that do not include other substances but I can tell you there are tens of similar reports on the DMT nexus. Also, you talk about naturally occuring DMT, but be aware that there is absolutely no scientific proof that DMT is contained in any amount sufficient to provoke a trip in the human body, even with a MAOI; it's there, yes, but in minute amounts and almost certainly as a byproduct of the synthesis of something else. Maybe you're right on the other hormones, but if that's the case it's not due to the MAOI properties of harmals either, since we're not seeing people using pharmaceutical MAOIs tripping.
- soperj 6y agoSort of similar to how did the Chinese & Japanese get the right combination of aspergillus(which can cause all sort of skin & ear lesions, as well as ulcers in humans, and is also what is known as black mold) along with a yeast to produce sake.
- daenz 6y agoThe same way humans figured out how to harness any resource: accident + observation + attempts to reproduce + time
- Alex3917 6y agoLots of plants contain DMT and lots of plants contain MOAI. They probably found a weaker or less pleasant combination by accident first, and then once they knew what they were looking for kept experimenting until they found the best version.
- ta988 6y agoThere is no "best version" there are many reported with variations of the MAOI or DMT source and with other additives. Species of the Solanaceae familly, such as Brugmansia, being the most commons. But there are also some Ilex species containing caffeine for example.
- alextheparrot 6y agoI always love some of the “Letters to my lord” regarding willow bark (aspirin). > There is a bark of an English tree, which I have found by experience to be a powerful astringent, and very efficacious in curing aguish and intermitting disorders. About six years ago, I accidentally tasted it, and was surprised at its extraordinary bitterness One letter, which I couldn’t readily find, eventually reduced to “My lord, I had a tooth ache and was chewing on random things in the forest. Willow bark made me feel better” [0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.0033 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstl.1763.003...
- stevenjohns 6y agoConsidering other groups, at the time, were circumnavigating the world, forging steel and blasting each other with gun powder it’s not hard to believe that an equally intelligent and able group of people that put their attention to something else could figure out how to get high from a plant. Perhaps this is due to European destruction of the native history of the Americas - they’re seen as primitive groups with little social complexity. I think that if their histories were better preserved we’d be less surprised that they had an understanding of the native plants around them.
- sammalloy 6y agoThis is my thinking as well. There are surviving remnants of pre-Columbian pharmacopoeia for the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, as only three examples. I wonder if the ingredients and instructions for the brew were previously recorded in a similar manner, but then reduced to an oral tradition once religious people like Diego de Landa showed up and started burning anything that might have challenged the new gods.
- mensetmanusman 6y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tzompantli I have wondered if these skull walls were part of their methods...
- Guthur 6y agoNon of these actions are uniquely European or religious. You'll find similar outcomes throughout history and the world. Whether it's nationalism, communism, religion, tribalism or what ever. Us and them dynamics are constantly being created and exploited by various groups throughout our collective history.
- sebmellen 6y agoFYI I don't think you're getting downvoted because anyone disagrees, just because it's off topic. No one said such actions are uniquely European or religious.
- mceoin 6y agoOr perhaps they just listen for the right resonance on a full moon... (13:32) https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_cultures/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_dreams_from_endangered_...
- orange8 6y agoSame question, different scenario: A pregnant woman will often crave the foods that contain just the nutrients her body requires at the time. Has she figured out exactly what her body needs and what foods contain it?
- jml7c5 6y agoAFAIK the idea that cravings represent desires for specific nutrients has been largely debunked. Do you know of any material that supports the theory?
- orange8 6y agoDebunked by whom and where. I'd be interested in getting your sources too. In terms of material supporting the theory, google "pregnant cravings nutrients" and you will get hundreds of results... https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5054961/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://familyandconutrition.com/food_cravings_pregnancy/ https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#1 https://www.webmd.com/baby/features/pregnancy-food-cravings#...
- UShouldBWorking 6y agoWhy are people trying to ruin the narrative that woman are mythical creatures with special inborn knowledge available only to them? Shesh!
- nondeveloper 6y agoAre you maybe thinking of pica? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pica_(disorder)
- lopmotr 6y agoSurely you'd have heard about it from friends or family if it was common for pregnant women to have cravings for nails and bottle caps and that their bodies need the nutrition from them?
- hx2a 6y agoThere was a relevant conversation on HN about this over a year ago that you might be interested in: How do people learn to cook a poisonous plant safely? https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333 https://www.bbc.com/news/business-48859333 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20874912 Bottom line, it is trial and error, an evolution of ideas and culture over many generations.
- BurningFrog 6y agoThe general answer to these questions is that before Industrialism, all of humanity lived on, or one mishap away from, the famine line. "How did my ancestors ever think of trying to eat X"? Well, they were dying anyway, so they didn't have much to lose. My main message is, you and me are so incredibly lucky to live in this era of wealth, health and progress. We should try to appreciate it.
- jbay808 6y agoAmazingly, this doesn't seem to be the case for most other animals.
- aristophenes 6y agoThis could probably be explained by the fact that most other animals have predators, and humans don’t (at least not successful ones). It is true of apex predators (that are not themselves killed by humans).
- ergwwrt 6y agoDepends where you live. Research what happened to the Aral Sea in the last 50 years..
- thelittleone 6y agoRecounting a tale from a Shipibo curandero (healer) with an unbroken lineage: It's a relatively new phenomena that the patient drinks the medicine. Traditionally, before Westerners, the curandero would drink alone in the presence of the patient. And earlier still the curandero drank a medicine derived solely from ayahuasca vine (banisteriopsis caapi). That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions. It was not needed for visions and to heal. Chacruna was added in the 1900s due to the impact of westernization in the region and the negative affect on the curanderos' natural connections. So it isn't necessarily that a formula of two plants was magically discovered at the very beginning. EDIT: add to this that when you cut the vine, a rich colored liquid / sap forms on the cut part. It tastes quite sweet. It's not a stretch to imagine the first person simply cut a vine, tasted it and decided to do an extraction in hot water.
- duozerk 6y ago> That is, the medicine did not contain chacruna (psychotria viririds) as it does today in order to bring about visions Indeed, but harmal alkaloids - those contained in b. caapi - are not only selective, reversible MAOIs but also full on psychedelics by themselves, as anyone having taken a significant amount of them (usually either through b. caapi or a peganum harmala seeds tea) could tell you. You get "visions" with them too.
- victorbstan 6y agoI thought “Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge” was a pretty good book.
- hyperpallium2 6y agoLike a needle in a haystack. But what if there are many needles, and this is just the one that was found?
- tt433 6y agoLots of monkeys banging away on typewriters, too
- hyperpallium2 6y agoAbout 3 keys gives over 50,000 combinations, so not really comparable, IIUYC. And once something is found, humans do hill climbing to refine.
- samatman 6y agoSo it looks like an O(n^2) search, to try all combinations of two plants where you have to get the intersection right. However, banisteriopsis caapi is orally active on its own: a brew of just the vine will change perception. So it's an O(n) search to find the ayahuasca vine, then another O(n) to find DMT bearing plants (there are several), which go with it. A typical preparation of the medicine will have a dozen or more plants in it, with two or three recognized as "active" by the standards of Western pharmacology. So it's plausible to imagine the curanderos adding a bit of this, a bit of that, as guided by the spirits (or intuition, whatever looked good, your choice), then hitting on the combination. This might sound like I'm being dismissive of what was most likely a directed search for medicinal plants, which isn't my intention. Just simplifying and glossing over that part, to point out that it's a two-stage discovery, and you don't need both plants in a brew to start using one of them.
- meowface 6y agoI'm also guessing any plant with a substance that acts as a MAOI would probably potentiate the effects of lots of other substances. So my guess is that it may not have taken that long for at least one person (or maybe multiple people independently) to discover that this plant seemed to alter the effects of other plants. Then at that point some adventurous people may have just started trying combining it with every other plant they knew about and every future one they discovered, including plants that they otherwise believed had no effect. They probably would've stumbled upon a lot of interesting combinations. And if they determined it had a strange ability to seemingly "unlock" "dormant" plants and if they spread that knowledge, maybe some people were trying it with absolutely every non-poisonous plant out there. And since DMT-bearing plants are pretty common (as you mention), multiplied across a whole society it may not have taken very long at all. And it would take just one MAOI plant for them to get the idea that other plants might have this unlocking ability, and just one DMT-rich plant to discover other plants might have similar effects, so maybe they iterated through combinations of MAOIs and serotonergics until they found one they felt had a good balance of maximal power and minimal undesired side effects. So the bottleneck might be the first instance of someone ever discovering any kind of MAOI plant (this vine or any other). After that barrier is passed, I suspect it might be almost inevitable that something like this particular combination would be found pretty quickly (just blindly speculating, but potentially within a generation or two?).
- mikro2nd 6y agoOne of the strangest open questions about Tomatoes is: How did indigenous people in Mesoamerica look at a small, green, somewhat poisonous and awful-tasting berry and think, "I'll bet I could make something of this if I give it a few hundred generations of selective breeding." Same question, really.
- KronisLV 6y agoI mean, it seems no less interesting to me when you put it like that. Sure, the process might have been a bit ad hoc at times and they might not necessarily have known about the particulars of what they'd end up with, but the history of farming and agriculture seems pretty interesting!
- throwaway_pdp09 6y agoMAOIs are not uncommon. Just off the top of my head, tobacco plants and st. john's wort. If this is credible, and I'm not saying it is, a decent list https://www.botanical-online.com/en/medicinal-plants/depression-natural-mao-inhibitors https://www.botanical-online.com/en/medicinal-plants/depress... [0] Anyway, they're not rare. [0] that list looks a bit dodgy, how much maoi is in turmeric for example?
- comeondude 6y agoThe author of Cosmic Serpent asked this question. They replied “the plants told us”
- throwaway9980 6y agoDMT. This explains how Joe Rogan unlocked the galaxy brain.
- baldfat 6y agoI always see these hallucinogenic articles and think wow why is everyone advertising for hallucinogenic usage. I don't drink, not a single drug besides caffeine and never smoked but there is an appeal to use hallucinogenic for health reasons is crazy to me. I am too square I guess.
- melq 6y agoThis is a weird take. I hesitate to accuse you of not reading the study, but calling it an 'article' makes it seem like you just read the headline. The fact that there's a compound that has such a profound effect on the nervous system is certainly an important discovery, regardless of where that compound is found. For context, when I was in undergrad ~10 years ago, it was accepted as fact that a person only ever had the amount of neurons they were born with, and that new neurons could never be produced endogenously. In any event, the authors of this study certainly aren't advocating that anyone start using illegal drugs.
- dylan604 6y agoI read much less of calling it an article as a slight than just the fact the GP has noticed hallucinogens in the news lately, which is true. News tends to equate their lumping of words into sentences into paragraphs as news articles. It stems way back to the times of the printed news paper.
- rriepe 6y agoExactly. It hasn't been this big of a meme since the 60s.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- Turing_Machine 6y agoRight. This is Nature, arguably the most prestigious scientific journal in existence. It's not some "Increase Your Brain Cells With This One Weird Trick" clickbait article on Taboola.
- throw93 6y ago>> Then behavioral analysis was performed as previously described during 10 days, and finally, animals were “sacrificed” on day 31. Is “sacrificing” a common practice after test is finished? I’m probably not supposed to be bothered by this, but still kinda feels sad. On the other hand the discovery is fascinating. I guess it’s all part of the deal.
- natchy 6y agoAs long as the animals are eaten then it's a lot better than factory farming IMO. I think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered.
- nitrogen 6y agoI think people would eat meat less regularly if they see the animals butchered. I don't think this holds. It's pretty obvious that a Thanksgiving turkey or a rotisserie chicken used to be a whole animal, but we still eat those. Also, you really wouldn't want to eat lab animals, especially ones that have been subjected to pharmaceutical testing.
- viraptor 6y agoThere's a difference between obvious they were butchered and seeing them butchered. E.g. while I'm ok eating a chicken, I'm not sure I'd want one murdered and gutted as I watch, then immediately fried. It's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life.
- nitrogen 6y agoIt's likely different for people who grew up on a farm and know it as normal life. I've mostly just seen pictures of cows being butchered, but I did watch a rooster die when it had to be shot. It's not ideal. I still eat meat and will continue to do so until lab-grown alternatives are nutritionally and culinarily indistinguishable, and IMO what humans do for food is far more humane than what most of nature does.
- giantg2 6y agoI guess this could be a good treatment for people who have severe symptoms. Or maybe they can find a way to prevent the hallucinations or create a similar drug without those effects. Otherwise, it seems like the person would be injected every other day and lose most of that day to side effects.
- giantg2 6y agoWhy is this downvoted?
- temp0826 6y agoFunnily, drinking ayahuasca often actually has a reverse-tolerance effect (ayahuasqueros tend to be incredibly sensitive to its effects)
- thelittleone 6y agoIt is possible. You simply drink extract of the vine in small doses. As westerners we are a little obsessed with the hallucinatory effects which comes from the chacruna (leaf). The spirit of the medicine comes almost entirely from the vine. A drop of extract of banisteropsis caapi in water in the morning often provides more gentle results without the hallucinations.
- giantg2 6y agoWhat type of dose do you get in ayahuasca? The 2mg/kg from the test seems like a substantial amount. If the hallucinations come from another plant, then why does the paper say DMT is classified as hallucinogenic?
- realce 6y agoThe Hallucinations do come from DMT, but many MAOIs present their own sensations and properties that are more "emotional" instead of hallucinogenic. They were the first anti-depressants available after all!
- samatman 6y ago
- lambdaloop 6y ago...in mice. Mouse brain architecture is still quite different from ours. Although it's an enormously useful animal to study for basic neuroscience principles, the specific neuroscience results don't replicate cleanly in primates. I would wait until replication in primates (human or non-human) before drinking ayahuasca to grow brain cells.
- pazimzadeh 6y agoThen again, most of what we know about genetics and a lot of immunology (i.e. Toll-like receptors) comes from fruit flies.
- ethn 6y agoIf this was a correlation study I could agree with you but more accurately I would instead posit that no hypothesis is confirmed. But this is a study about a deterministic mechanistic action. We know that DMT binds with sigma-1 receptors (S1R) which is known to promote neurogenesis, such as fluvoxamine (in addition to many other SSRIs) in humans; we further know that the medication causes neurogenesis in humans, as do other medications with S1R affinity[0]. We then know that DMT does as well, we then measure that neurogenesis is observed in mice due to the same exact mechanism as SSRI's (i.e. medications with S1R affinity) in humans. Perhaps at some point we should realize deterministic action in the context of the mammalian brain over human exceptionalism. [0] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20373470/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20373470/
- lambdaloop 6y agoThank you for the context! I looked briefly through the review that you cited. Maybe I missed something, but it seems that the neurogenesis claims are based on cell cultures? I'd still like to see some human evidence of this effect to be fully convinced, but still that this story fits in this broader context does help convince me that this is likely true in humans.
- a20eac1d 6y agoDo you know if Psilocybin causes the same or similar neurogenesis? And if it does, how?
- someonehere 6y agoI remember reading somewhere that if you’re willing to put up with feeling like you’re on the edge to falling into hell for a few days, you can remedy yourself out of depression. I wonder if this puts some weight behind that assumption people have been talking about.
- 7demons 6y agoSome of the depression engulfed people already on the edge to hell. They are willing to take a risk.
- pgt 6y agoWe know that psilocybin alleviates depression by reducing inflammation in the brain, but how? My pet theory is that given the antiviral properties of fungii, psilocybin cubensis kills off undiscovered viruses in the brain stem, allowing inflammation to recede. (Psilocybin also triggers neurogenesis.)
- mleonhard 6y agoCan you please link to some information about this?
- p1anecrazy 6y agoThere is none.
- mleonhard 6y ago> We know that psilocybin alleviates depression by reducing inflammation in the brain Do you have information about this?
- cannedslime 6y agoMore neurons != better brain. Im skeptical. I am not saying that DMT isn't an interresting subject. I have never tried it myself but a guy I know who has done it ALOT is totally into alternative medicine, including MMS! So I doubt that it makes you any more intelligent. Why is DMT shilled so much today? Its shilled everywhere.
- legel 6y agoTLDR: Biomedical scientists from Spain recently found that DMT (plant-derived drug in Ayahuasca) can massively improve memory and learning, through the birth of new neurons (i.e. neurogenesis). From this research, it was wonderful to discover: -Neurogenesis is an effective treatment for clinical depression -Diseases like Alzheimer's and Dementia kill neurogenesis Could DMT become like a coffee of the future?
- vmception 6y agoOne of my issues with psychedelics is the noise! I don’t mind the visuals and unfiltered and distorted perceptions and my other senses engaged, but the unfiltered hearing is the worst for me! I like the distorted additional sounds but it’s combined with just unfiltered sound that I can’t turn off! pls fix
- pankajdoharey 6y agoJust curious, What is unfiltered hearing/sound? Do people perceive more sounds than usual on these substances?
- vmception 6y agoYour brain actively filters everything. What you hear, what you see, what you smell. This is on the fly encoding, and that can be disabled on these substances. Also the encoder itself can be affected, which is where things get fascinating. But yes, staying on the subject, the world isn't that silent.
- elbear 6y agoMaybe a strong dose is not necessary. I read that many people microdose psilocybin.
- potatoman22 6y agoWhat psychedelic did you get this feeling with? I've tried a few but have never noticed noises sounding weird.
- codeulike 6y agohttps://twitter.com/justsaysinmice https://twitter.com/justsaysinmice
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]