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Magic mushrooms can 'reset' depressed brain
BBC ^ | James Gallagher

Posted on 10/13/2017 5:48:34 PM PDT by BenLurkin

The study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, showed psilocybin affected two key areas of the brain. The amygdala - which is heavily involved in how we process emotions such as fear and anxiety - became less active. The greater the reduction, the greater the improvement in reported symptoms.

The default-mode network - a collaboration of different brain regions - became more stable after taking psilocybin.

Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, head of psychedelic research at Imperial, said the depressed brain was being "clammed up" and the psychedelic experience "reset" it.

He told the BBC News website: "Patients were very ready to use this analogy. Without any priming they would say, 'I've been reset, reborn, rebooted', and one patient said his brain had been defragged and cleaned up."

However, this remains a small study and had no "control" group of healthy people with whom to compare the brain scans.

Further, larger studies are still needed before psilocybin could be accepted as a treatment for depression.

(Excerpt) Read more at bbc.com ...


TOPICS: Health/Medicine
KEYWORDS: magicmushrooms; psilocybin
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To: be-baw

They cooked them down and used the water to make kolaid. I guess that was the original “purple drank.”

Lots of sugar.


21 posted on 10/13/2017 8:36:49 PM PDT by Bodleian_Girl (Check out James Wood on Twitter - it's great! @realjameswoods)
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To: Buttons12

Okay, then I’ll just say you’re a wigwam and a teepee!


22 posted on 10/13/2017 8:40:21 PM PDT by Rastus
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To: Bodleian_Girl

Obviously your druggie friends were more sophisticated than mine.

My experience in getting mushrooms was pretty strange. I wanted weed. It was summer in Michigan and supply was non-existent. I worked with a guy and his wife who were serious Buddhists. Only ones I’ve ever known who proselytized. They invited me and the missus over to chant with them, promising we would get whatever we chanted for

So I chanted for weed. The next day a friend stopped by and had scored some weed and mushrooms that he wanted to share.

It was a somewhat mind-blowing experience. After eating the mushrooms we went to see an on-campus showing of the Beatle’s Magical Mystery Tour, which really sucked, oddly enough. The walks there and back were very cool though. Patterns all over the landscape


23 posted on 10/13/2017 8:46:06 PM PDT by be-baw
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To: be-baw

When I took mescaline (a few times) it was tablet, IIRC. Also, IIRC, more physical oddities than acid. Like seeing someone’s arm melting Salvador Dali style.


24 posted on 10/13/2017 8:51:01 PM PDT by little jeremiah (Half the truth is often a great lie. B. Franklin)
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To: Rastus

When they tell me “Try this, it’ll reboot your limbic system,” they don’t get a second date.


25 posted on 10/13/2017 9:02:50 PM PDT by Buttons12
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To: dsrtsage

I think it’s still legal to buy spore kits for research purposes. You just can’t let them grow because it then becomes a schedule 1 drug like heroin.


26 posted on 10/13/2017 9:24:08 PM PDT by Karl Spooner
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To: be-baw
Only ones I’ve ever known who proselytized. ... promising we would get whatever we chanted for

Two things no Buddhist should ever do. I'll bet they were with Aum Shinrikyo, a weird Japanese Buddhist cult that mixes a number of traditions together.

27 posted on 10/13/2017 9:41:14 PM PDT by TigersEye (0bama. The Legacy is a lie. The lie is the Legacy.)
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To: BenLurkin

Uh. My one and only experience with mushrooms was in Jamaica with a tea. Puking on the back of a rented scooter at full speed is not a pleasant memory.


28 posted on 10/13/2017 9:42:41 PM PDT by lovesdogs
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To: BenLurkin

They can also make the walls start coming in around you like in a wedding in the ballroom of a hotel.


29 posted on 10/13/2017 9:42:45 PM PDT by Yaelle
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To: TigersEye

“’ll bet they were with Aum Shinrikyo”

I’m pretty sure they weren’t. I was managing a convenience store at the time, and they both worked there. He was the hardest working person I’ve ever seen in my life. His work ethic impressed my customers so much, he got hired away after just a few months.

By the way, and just so it’s clear, I’m pretty sure neither he or his wife were taking mind-altering substances.


30 posted on 10/13/2017 9:48:08 PM PDT by be-baw
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To: be-baw

I went with a group of friends to see 2001 Space Odyssey in a theater. We were all baked. At one point during the movie, one of the girls in our group turned to me and blurted out, “I love you,” then back to the movie. That was fun but the really trippy part was the stargate sequence. Whoa.


31 posted on 10/13/2017 9:52:33 PM PDT by sparklite2 (I'm less interested in the rights I have than the liberties I can take.)
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To: be-baw

OK, but I don’t know why their work ethic or non-drug usage would preclude them from being Aum Shinrikyo.

It was the chanting for specific things that made me suspect that FWIW. Tibetan Buddhism and most other traditions would specifically and strongly recommend against that. Proselytizing too.


32 posted on 10/13/2017 9:54:58 PM PDT by TigersEye (0bama. The Legacy is a lie. The lie is the Legacy.)
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To: dsrtsage; Mr. Mojo

You can get them where I live

Folks grow them for bonnaroo

1200-2000 a pound

150-200 an ounce

20 a gram

I hear they are hard to grow

Has to be really dark etc

And the closet shrooms are not as potent as the real deal outdoors

Cattle and horse feed fungicide has about wiped them out

They were ubiquitous when I grew up in Deep South in the 70s

I took plenty including Kesey style “tests” ....in high school and at Ole Miss and in the mountains out west etc

Concerts and water skiing and so forth

I have known all my life there are positive attributes to some hallucinogens as well as psychotropic downsides....big downsides

Very few folks here understand it......I was more of the Prankster mold and admired early stellar travelers like Kesey and Stewart Brand in particular

Intelligent inquisitive folks

I hated tripping with goofy along for the ride types who were just silly but they usually navigated as well as folks like me searching

This is nothing new.......folks have used mind altering so called insights forever

Timothy Leary’s dead.
No, no, no, no, He’s outside looking in.
Timothy Leary’s dead.
No, no, no, no, He’s outside looking in.
He’ll fly his astral plane,
Takes you trips around the bay,
Brings you back the same day,
Timothy Leary. Timothy Leary.

Leary was an egotistical sexual predator frankly ...a charlatan

It’s funny though on a pretty conservative forum a fair number of folks who’ve tripped

I know a buttload of conservatives down here who’ve tripped

Some who still do

In their 60s

I have a friend I’ve known since 1966 in grade school

A neurologist.....very bright....trips once a year at a time of his choosing just to keep his mind open to more learning he claims...he’s 64

Goes to deer camp in the summer when no one is there just he and his wife

I’m not advising it don’t get me wrong but I know what I felt and how it transformed me in some ways...ways I appreciate


33 posted on 10/14/2017 1:00:52 AM PDT by wardaddy (Virtue signalers should be shot on sight...conservative ones racked and hanged then fed to dogs)
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To: sparklite2; Mr. Mojo

Actual mescaline was in my opinion the best tripping agent

Less frenetic than Sidney and more colorful and fluid.

Sidney could drag on....and there is good acid and then there is bad acid....not always brown

We had a contact through a guy whose brother was in Quicksilver in some capacity and worked with Nick Sand who made Orange Sunshine which was top shelf like Owsley and Scullys stuff

Then windowpane and blotters ..

I had two friends very bright who crafted some at Millsaps college in 1974....preppie hippies and we all dosed to try it out and man it was pure as hell thankfully but rocket fuel micrograms .....I’d wager north of 1000 mikes or 3-4 times normal orbit octane

We held on tight for about 12 hours and all went though a serious climb peak and come down phase

I remember our girlfriends who did not trip...not many girls did then..showed up and we all ran not wanting them to see us so pie eyed

Mushrooms were over much faster which I liked plus I felt they were more natural.....

Coincidentally I’m listening to Dark Star as I type...isn’t that funny

And I’m so old now....


34 posted on 10/14/2017 1:12:18 AM PDT by wardaddy (Virtue signalers should be shot on sight...conservative ones racked and hanged then fed to dogs)
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To: dsrtsage
Amanita muscaria
Found in season in the forests of the Pacific Northwest - Seattle, Tacoma, Bellingham / Olympic Peninsula / Kitsap Peninsula - no need to find some desert.
35 posted on 10/14/2017 3:16:17 AM PDT by PIF (They came for me and mine ... now it is your turn ...)
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To: Mr. Mojo

Roger that. It was definitely “performance enhancing”.


36 posted on 10/14/2017 4:48:58 AM PDT by equaviator (There's nothing like the universe to bring you down to earth.)
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To: be-baw

I don’t think they were sophisticated but this was the summer of 1980 in the south and getting high was what a lot of people were doing.

I was only there because on of my childhood friends was dating an older guy, so that was his circle, but not mine thankfully.


37 posted on 10/14/2017 8:01:08 AM PDT by Bodleian_Girl (Check out James Wood on Twitter - it's great! @realjameswoods)
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To: BenLurkin

More “treatment” bullshit.

Chemical warfare on the brain is neither healing nor medicine. It’s inflicted torture without addressing the initial cause of the hormone imbalance which wrought the depressive state in the first place.


38 posted on 10/14/2017 8:53:28 AM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus-)
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To: Seruzawa

Exactly.


39 posted on 10/14/2017 8:58:03 AM PDT by logi_cal869 (-cynicus-)
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To: wardaddy
I know a buttload of conservatives down here who’ve tripped...

Yep. Singing Sweet Home Alabama all summer long.

40 posted on 10/14/2017 12:25:30 PM PDT by Bodleian_Girl (Check out James Wood on Twitter - it's great! @realjameswoods)
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