Posted on 10/14/2019 10:45:03 AM PDT by BenLurkin
In the 1950s, researchers stumbled upon a new class of drugs that provided relief for those suffering from schizophrenia. These drugs were known as antipsychotics and, as the name suggests, they reduced symptoms like hallucinations and delusions — primarily by reducing the levels of dopamine in the brain. This led clinicians and scientists to argue that dopamine was linked to the experiences of psychotic symptoms, and a concerted research effort ensued, seeking to solve the puzzle of why excess dopamine might produce hallucinations.
Although it was later shown that increasing dopamine could produce hallucinations, establishing a consistent link between them, it has not been clear why.
They achieved this by taking advantage of a simple fact: Your brain is lazy. It makes shortcuts to understand the deluge of information that bombards it daily. If you’re presented with consistent information, consistently, your brain adjust its expectations of reality in turn. This is the basis of Bayesian theories of how we perceive the world – that is, the brain makes inferences about the world around us based on statistics and probabilities on what is likely to occur.
[I]ncreasing dopamine made it more difficult for participants to adjust their perception — an effect comparable to how the hallucinators had struggled. Moreover, the extent to which participants struggled was strongly associated with the severity of hallucinations — but not with any diagnosis of schizophrenia. In other words, the difficulty appeared to be associated with a symptom, not a diagnosis.
Using brain imaging, the researchers also showed that an increased capacity for dopamine release, from a part of the brain known as the striatum (an area involved in schizophrenia), was associated with the severity of hallucinations. Together, these experiments showed that excess dopamine was associated with difficulty in accurately predicting reality.
(Excerpt) Read more at inverse.com ...
Poor you, ArGee! Happy Friday Eve!
Yes 11:30 PM is before EOD, so you should be safe for one more week!
I hope your Thursday is a good one, anyway! :o]
Thank you.
One weekend, I brought my camp cot, a pillow and a can of coffee to the office so that I’d meet my deadline. I was the only one in CONUS who met it.
Hey, y’all.
His job is perfectly safe. It’s his driving that’s the concern—nothing so eerie as a sense of paralyzing fatigue hitting you when you’re stopped on the freeway. It’s a case of when, not if.
How-DEEEE!
Well, we made it to Friday again.
Happy Friday, everyone.
Naturally, the temperature dropped yesterday. I say naturally because the heater in my car doesn’t work very well. Lately, like clockwork, cold Friday.
That Morning Floof looks like I feel!
Good morning.
Are you on your way away from sun and gators?
I hope your visit with your mum was enjoyable.
Yesterday, I picked up some more DVDs, but they aren’t the ones I really wanted. I seem to be in one of those “unsettled” moods again, and I hate those. Maybe it will be short-lived.
I went through that last year, when I spent the first almost three months driving with the windows down to keep the windshield from fogging up on the inside. It needed a new heater core. I still drive in the cold because I shop so early.
You have my deepest sympathy for your drive home.
FWIW, I downloaded the app for “The Chosen” and watched episode 1.
It was an interesting speculation about what many of the main characters of the Gospels might have been like without including any Gospel stories (yet). I found it interesting.
And then the ending scene just melted me, even though I saw what was coming. Still no Gospel stories.
I don’t know if there’s an app for Windoze but the first full episode is available on YooToob.
Mrs. ArGee thought it was too speculative. She also thought it was a tad anti-semitic. I thought it portrayed some blue-collar people who happened to be Jewish and weren’t the salt-of-the-earth types. Your mileage may vary.
I don’t believe I’ve heard of that movie/book/series, but it does sound interesting. Thanks for the review. Now I have to go check it out. ;o] (See what you made me do?)
It’s a crowd-funded series of Gospel stories.
Don’t let the crowd-funding fool you. From what I care about production it was very good. I’m sure a true-blue critic will explain the difference between what these people did and what Amazon Prime can do.
I just read about it on imdb, and I think it’s worth a look. Not out on DVD, though, which is inconvenient, but I can work around that! Thanks for the suggestion. I’ll let you know when I watch it.
Not everybody can be like Lot's wife.
I thought she was a plain sodium chloride type.
Nope, she was a pillar of the community.
You two guys are very punny.
I should live so long.
“Please pass the sodium chloride.”
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