Brain Studies: Perspirings and Neural Plasticity at the ‘Circle Hall Congress’ in San Diego, Calif.
The San Diego Convention Center auditorium was crowded with about 1000 brain scientists for the symposium called “Perspirings and Neural Plasticity”.
The drugs were part of a presentation at the world’s largest meeting of brain scientists. That’s a recent development.
Dendrites form connections through small protrusions known as dendritic spines. And in mice that got psilocybin, the size and number of these spines increased by about 10%, which allowed cells to form new connections.
“You can see the connections form in a day when we give mice a single dose of psilocybin,” she says. “And then they can last more than a month” – which is the equivalent of many months in a human.
Long-term effects of drugs have been demonstrated by the use of DMT, which is a hallucinogen. In contrast, most existing psychiatric drugs need to be taken every day.
Tales From The Synapse: Interviews with Natasha Mason, Phenotherapist, and Psychedelic Neuroscientist
Knudsen says that it can be quite overwhelming for people. You need to be prepared for that, and also with them while they are in the experience.
She says that people will say ” wow this was amazing” when they have been in her lab. “And you ask them, ‘Well, would you like to come back next week for another session?’ They say thank you, but not thank you.
And in 2016, a pair of studies published by prominent researchers “really piqued everyone’s interest,” says Dr. Joshua Gordon, who directs the National Institute of Mental Health.
But the effects found in large studies of psychedelics have been much less dramatic than in some of the earlier, smaller studies, Gordon says. Some companies have overstated their benefits, he says.
Hello and welcome to Tales From The Synapse, a podcast brought to you by Nature’s careers section, in partnership with Nature Neuroscience. In this series, we speak to brain scientists from all over the world about their lives, their work, and the impact of their work.
The person is namedNatasha Mason. I work in the department of psychopharmacology at the university. There is a small pretty town in the south of the Netherlands.
And yeah, and I have been living here for for eight years doing research and studying the effects of cannabis, and also psychedelic drugs on brain and behaviour.
So this is similar, but perhaps has more of a focus on the neural mechanisms of drug effects and how they alter behaviour, via understanding how they are working in the brain.
As well as that, it is more of a fundamental level. There is also a high need, of course, for effective pharmacological treatments for mental health disorders.
And here, I am interested in both sides of the story. So both the therapeutic effects, and the potential negative effects. And when it comes to negative effects, it is how we can mitigate them.
So cannabis, the most widely used illicit drug in the world. And also psychedelic drugs, which are, yeah, they have a long history, but their use and interest in them is is also growing. I have different interests in these two drugs. I am interested in the effects cannabis has on people.
I think this is really interesting because I believe it can have both positive and negative outcomes. So recreational users tend to use cannabis for the relaxing or the euphoric effects.
So here tolerance can be seen as kind of a maladaptive thing, and that you have to use more of the drug to get the high that you want. And this can go down to, you know, this is where addiction dependence can come in.
This would be seen as a positive effect here. So I am very interested in understanding the brain mechanisms underlying this occurrence of tolerance.
A neuro-imaging approach to the behavioural effects of cannabinoids in the brain: What has neuroimaging taught us about the effects of cannabis?
If you are prescribed cannabis daily, then you have to use the drug regularly, but you also have to perform day to day tasks, like driving to work or the store.
Legal people may take a blood sample, and say, “okay, you have cannabis in your blood, you were driving under the influence.”
So finding a way to measure behavioural tolerance. Which one was actually impaired by the drug at that time and who was not? Because currently, blood or what we use with alcohol, like a breathalyzer, is not enough because it doesn’t consider these other factors.
The brain function can be looked at with the use of an magnetic resonance machine. And while they’re laying in the scanner, what we do is actually we vaporize either cannabis or placebo, into a balloon, with kind of a long straw on it, basically.
And we found that in order for people to feel high, or for people to show an impairment and behaviour, or/and also to show this brain response, these concentrations in blood half to surpass a certain threshold.
So what has neuroimaging taught us about the effects of cannabinoids on the brain? And here I would actually say that that neuro-imaging still has so much more to teach us.
So if you can prescribe the dose of cannabis to people that induces a therapeutic effect, but doesn’t surpass this threshold to induce the high or the behavioural effect, you know, then they can go about day-to-day after operations without having these kinds of side effects in that regards.
People had developed tolerance. They were not experiencing the subjective high of the drug nor the behavioral impairment of the drug.
When recreational users start developing tolerance it can get a bit riskier, so a more clinical use is useful. They start using more of the drug.
So I’ve always been interested in how drugs affect the brain and behaviour. And in America, when you say that, they said, “Okay, you should be a pharmacist.” So I said that I would be a pharmacist.
I began studying the pharmacy and worked in various stores to gain experience. And here, yeah, (as well as arguably getting a little bit bored with the job) I was also confronted with the fact that the patients coming in, a lot of the conversations were revolving around complaints about their drugs actually not working.
opiates were one of the drugs that stuck out. Not complaining that the drug wasn’t working, but you could kind of see a deterioration in some people that, you know, becoming more dependent on the drug.
And I became very unenthused with this career choice, I didn’t want to go to school to study. The drugs that were not effective were not good choices for people.
And so during my studies, I started looking into alternative treatment options. And here is where I came across the kind of preliminary research into psychedelic drugs. My journey began there.
And reading that, you know, one administration of a psychedelic drug could induce long term reduction in symptoms. To me, that was fascinating. I didn’t hear about that in my classes. It was also that I was getting to think that this could fix the problem, versus the substances we have right now are just sort of like aband aid, just reducing the symptoms, but not actually addressing the underlying problem.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00470-x
Cannabinoid system: how can we use cannabis responsibly if we’re allowed to do it in the Netherlands, if you’re interested?
This is commonplace in the US, and I think it’s called a research assistant or something. I was really desperate. I would have not been allowed in the Netherlands for that reason.
And so I did the Master’s so I can do the internship. did my internship actually on cannabis. The project turned into a PhD and also some psychedelic work, which was ongoing at the time.
That was turned into a position as an assistant professor. I am going to stay around as long as possible. It’s a very lovely group to work with. We’re able to conduct some really interesting studies.
The endocannabinoid system is involved in a lot of processes. So appetite, pain, moods, memory, age, general activity of the nervous system, and THC acts on cannabinoid receptors located throughout the brain.
The areas where high densities of thesereceptors are found correspond to things such as attention, memory, and motor movements. This is where you get the high from.
So yeah, people notice when you smoke cannabis, you really experience a wide range of effects. The receptor are located throughout the body, and are implicated in a lot of processes.
The system is involved in many processes. We’re just beginning to understand how the system is working and interacting and so appetite, pain, mood, memory, maybe some inflammatory processes but from my understanding, we’re just beginning to understand how the system is working and interacting.
So because of its involvement in a wide range of processes, the therapeutic potential, you know, to activate this system and, and correct these processes when there’s a paraments. I think that is where it is. But I’m not sure how explored it currently is actually.
The drug is one of the most widely used drugs in the world. I think it is crucial to understand the consequences of this use.
So we know that developmental age when you start using cannabis, depending on the age you start using cannabis, one can assume that this would have alter the impact of that.
How can we help people who are going to continue to use cannabis, when there are potentially negative consequences? We are unable to stop that. I don’t say we should. But we should be putting work and research into understanding how to use the drug responsibly, and how to help people do that.