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 ...
Yep, “That is your starter for 10” “Asia”.
Good Morning, O’Keeper of Kittens.
Surprised Kitteh sees more rain and is astonished it lasts so long.
Good morning.
It’s shower time, and maybe I can warm up a little.
The rain. It never stops. Isolation got nuthin’ on me! I’ve pretty much been quarantined since first getting CFIDS. The only thing I’m not prepared for is bare shelves when I shop.
Good morning. I had a hefty cat on my chest at 4:45 a.m. He must have worried that I would decide to have a lie-in until 5:00.
Yes, not quite an elephant on your chest, but when you’re sleeping it may as well be.
You’ve probably run out of bread when that happens.
Good morning. The boys are nagging me about not having the particular type of bread each one prefers. Turkeys.
I don’t even know whether the clearance bread outlet is open.
G’mawnin’. Do they have that crunchy, nutty, healthy bread at the clearance bread outlet? It’s called some-number-of-multigrain bread or something. Very tasty. Ezekiel bread tastes like cardboard—old, tough cardboard at that.
Walmart carries a brand called “Grandma Sycamore’s Home-maid Bread,” and the type I like is the sunflower seed and honey. Really tasty. I don’t buy bread often, but if I did, a few loaves of this would find their ways into my freezer. :o]
They have some kind of organic bread that costs over $2.00/loaf. We buy the stuff that’s $.79.
Good morning and Happy Wednesday from aboard Amtrak’s Maple Leaf service. I decided to avoid further contact with the denizens of New York City until someone asks for an in-person meeting.
It’s not so much the Coronavirus. Something that caused them to elect this clown of a mayor might rub off as the crowd of tourists thins.
Good morning. It’s Wednesday here, too!
I don’t know if this is organic, but I think it has no preservatives, but my choices were limited, and this looked the most appealing. I hope by the time pay day comes again that the supply chain is working well again and that people have adjusted to the fact that there is no reason for their panic. All the bread that was left was $3 and up.
I prefer inorganic food products to organic ;-).
Yep, Wednesday here, too, but a very wet one. I have to take a letter over to the mail drop and I don’t want to go out in the rain again. *sigh*
Life is.
I have no idea who our mayor is, here in Boring, Utah. Whoever it is, s/he keeps a low profile.
Our mayor here in Boring, NC, is Mike Alvarez. Nice guy, he’s been an effective, low-controversy mayor.
There’s a simple test to know if it’s really organic. If it doesn’t taste good enough to have cost that much, it’s organic.
Selena Zito (I think I got her name right) had a piece on Townhall.com yesterday about how Pittsburgh is handling the crisis. She described a mayor who is every bit the kind NYC needs.
I realize NYC may be a bit more complicated than Pittsburgh, but that doesn’t mean it needs a mayor who would rather run for President than get to work on the city’s needs.
It’s just that DeBlasio has a different concept of “the city’s needs,” just as, say, Joe Biden has a different concept of “the country’s needs” from, say, Donald Trump.
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