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 ...
Well I did watch Good Morning America this morning.........Saw them bombing Kurds in Syria............
I just hallucinated an article about hallucinating.
Those were Kentucky Kurds.
I thought they looked kinda tall..................
Is this thread real?
No, I have not hallucinated the past two weeks, but ABCNNBCBS was playing some loud drivel at the airport.
hallucinations ... civil engineers have them all the time ... they see bridges and highways in open fields ...
“Well I did watch Good Morning America this morning.........Saw them bombing Kurds in Syria............”
Apparently from Kentucky 2 years ago.
The truth might be out there.
But I’m not going out there.
I’m waiting for it right here.
Well, to be fair, I still think Morgan Fairchild has a crush on me.
“They seemed less able to use experience to predict reality, and they paid too much attention to information that was uninformative.”
This is all too common among even “normal” people today.
Nah...She’s upstairs in my bedroom nekkid with a midget....
I’m about to saddle and ride my Unicorn upstairs to check on them.......
Rats. She has been visiting someone else, so now I know. I don’t have a unicorn. I bet that’s why she visits.
I see four guys and one is barefoot.
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