Rats at a rave

The illegal recreational drug ecstasy, also known as X, or MDMA (an abbreviation of its chemical formula), is popular in the rave scene and is used to induce euphoria and enhance the experience of dancing and loud music. The drug is considered relatively safe by the average raver due to its short term effects, despite having received publicity for various dangers identified by scientific research.

Ecstasy pills

The most widely known (undesired) effect of the drug is overexertion and sweating, leading to the ecstasy user drinking large amounts of water and being in danger of hyponatremia (the depletion of solutes from the blood plasma), which can eventually lead to cerebral edema. The drug has also been known for causing “holes in the brain”, Parkinsonian tremors, and permanent brain damage from single use, however these claims have been discredited* and retracted from the literature (1). Some research has shown that the drug may not be as toxic as once thought when used in moderation, but that does not address whether environmental effects could change the action of the drug and potentially make it more dangerous than a “traditional” toxicity study might suggest.

Research conducted in Italy and published in 2006 (2) has shown that not only does the drug enhance the rave experience for the user, but this works both ways, with the loud music physically enhancing the effect of the drug. Rats were given various doses of MDMA and treated to a surely exciting 4 hours of white noise at 95 dB (the loudest level permissible in Italian night clubs) while electrocortical activity in their brains was monitored by electroencephalography. Controls were conducted with rats treated with saline instead of MDMA, as well as both treatments without sound. ECoG monitoring was repeated over 5 days without administration of the drug or sound in order to study long term effects. The ECoG “spectrum power” was taken to be indicative of higher neural function in rats.

The data showed that a low dose of MDMA combined with sound caused decreased ECoG spectrum power significantly different from control, but no significant effect when MDMA was administered without sound. A high dose of MDMA combined with sound produced a dramatic effect that lasted for 5 days, while all other treatments had no long term effects. This powerful data shows a synergistic relationship between exposure to loud noise and the effect of MDMA on higher neural function, and suggests that higher doses only have long term effects when combined with loud noise. The authors do not suggest a possible mechanism for this effect, but they do warn that the drug may be more dangerous than commonly thought since most ecstasy users combine the drug with loud music.


* As a side note, some legislation around ecstasy was driven by the above mentioned discredited “findings”, which is disconcerting. An example is the RAVE act (3), introduced in 2002 by current Democratic VP candidate Joe Biden as part of the War On Drugs, which allows the law to shut down clubs and raves if ecstasy use is suspected to occur on their premises. The drug is still a dangerous one, but one would hope that laws would be revised after research they were based upon is discredited, which they were not.


References
1. Ronald Bailey: “The Agony of Ecstasy Research”. ReasonOnline.
2. Michelangelo Iannone, Stefania Bulotta, Donatella Paolino, Maria Zito, Santo Gratteri, FrancescoS Costanzo, Domenicantonio Rotiroti (2006). Electrocortical effects of MDMA are potentiated by acoustic stimulation in rats BMC Neuroscience, 7 (1) DOI: 10.1186/1471-2202-7-13
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAVE_Act

Why dream?

We all know what dreaming is, experiencing sensations such as images and sounds during sleep that we usually cannot control. Lucid dreaming is when the dreamer is aware they are dreaming and can sometimes alter their actions and the dream world. Anxiety is the most common felt emotion during dreams. Dreaming is associated with the REM (Rapid Eye Movement) stage of sleep. We go through ~4 cycles of REM sleep. All the muscles in our body are paralysed apart from the muscles in your eyes hence the name.

But why do we dream at all, nearly all mammals and birds appear to do it. Suggesting it must be evolutionary beneficial but how? Some people have thought dreams were messages from god or predictions of the future. Early psychologists like Freud were interested in dreams and their meanings. He believed dreams were wish fulfilment. Your unconscious mind doing things your conscious mind does not allow it when you are awake, but your ‘superego’ sensors your dreams. Part of this is symbolism, items and events represent what you really want. Freud has said not everything is a symbol, ‘sometimes a cigar is just a cigar’. He thought if you understand what they meant and resolve the deep arguments within yourself then all is well. I have never thought this made evolutionary sense…how many psychoanalysists were there in cavemen times to help them by charging +£60 to listen to them speak? Not many I would assume but I have no data on the matter.

Neuroscientists have also tried to explain why we dream. The great neurobiologist Crick (yes I do mean the on and only Crick) put forward the theory of reverse learning as a reason for why we dream. This theory says we dream to forget! The theory says we take in too much info in during the day so at night we erase these memories. Otherwise they would become damaging to you. This theory has little experimental support. It doesn’t explain why newborns sleep and spend so much time in REM (assuming they are dreaming). Also why do dreams have a story if they are simple a deleting mechanism? Why not simple flashes of sound and images, or has our brain come to make sense out of this, what function could that have. Lloyd et al. (unpublished) criticises it by showing more dreams are experienced when revising and yet much of the information stays. He suggests dreams are either a way of rehearsing or organising the information. But he fails to explain why dreams usually have little to do with what has been learnt. But it is clear information is not being forgotten.

Dreams have also been seen as a way of solving problems. Are you in fact thinking during dreams and coming up with ideas? This seems hard to grasp – you are actually thinking but have no control. Kekulé figured out the structure of benzene through dreaming of snakes biting its tail making a ring. Lloyd et al. also provides evidence of this. The subject woke up from a dream with the answer to chemistry homework that they were unable to solve beforehand. However there is no evidence people who do not pay attention to dreams have more difficulties in life than those who do.

It is hard to figure out what is going on with dreams, we cant figure out what memories are on the molecular level let alone how dreams arise and what function they have.

Just remember you do not know you are dreaming in non-lucid dreams then how can you prove you are not dreaming right now! (warning the devil is in me)

Your brain is weird

If you thought quantum mechanics was weird, you haven't seen weird yet.

It's common knowledge that the human brain is probably the most complex system that evolution has produced to date. For (as far as we can tell) the first time in evolutionary history, life is able to turn its curiosity right back at itself and ask the most ridiculous questions ever asked on this planet: "How did I get here?", "How can I make green pigs?", and most importantly, "Why am I even asking questions?". The very endeavour seems almost paradoxical; we are trying to use brains to figure out how brains work.

Absurdity aside, the weirdness goes far beyond just boring philosophy, and well into the realm of useful things (i.e. science). Neuroscientists have been peering into the brains of unsuspecting mice, monkeys, and even humans, and as with pretty much any hard scientific problem, all they have come up with is just more and harder questions. Here are some of the weird things going on inside your brain:

• There are an estimated 10,000 different types (or sub-types) of neuron. We, of course, have no clue how the diversity arises, but our best guess is that the mechanism is something analogous to the V(D)J mechanism in antigen receptor diversity of the immune system. Also, there appears to be some sort of selection mechanism, once again much like in the immune system, whose function we have very little clue about.

• Your brain is a mosaic of euploid and aneuploid neurons (aneuploid cells have more or less chromosomes than the "normal" 23 pairs). Depending on the region of the brain, aneuploidy varies from 10% up to 50%. Aneuploidy has generally been associated with diseases such as Down's syndrome and cri-du-chat syndrome, but since studies on mice brains in 2001 by Rehen et al., all evidence has shown that there are aneuploid neurons in healthy mammalian brains. Only vague speculation is provided as to why this is the case, and it is generally that differential levels of gene expression between cells increases the complexity of the brain, contributing to behavioural variability.

• LINE-1 retrotransposons seem to play a significant role in neuronal differentiation. L1 activity is kept at bay in neural stem cells by Sox2, but its downregulation seems to trigger several events that bring about differentiation. Subsequently, L1 insertion sites seem to be most commonly found near or in genes related to neuronal function, even though insertions are generally uncommon. This suggests that L1 insertion may be regulated and that neuronal development may lean heavily on insertion events.

These are just a few of the extremely unusual properties of brain cells. You can read about the above in more detail and discover even more neuronal weirdness in Muotri & Gage (2006). We still, of course, have no clue whatsoever where that bloody engram is.