Psilocybin and Mental Health–Don't Lose Control

Hominids Lose Control

Psilocybin-induced stimulus control in the rat.

Although psilocybin has been trained in the rat as a discriminative stimulus, little is known of the pharmacological receptors essential for stimulus control. In the present investigation rats were trained with psilocybin and tests were then conducted employing a series of other hallucinogens and presumed antagonists. An intermediate degree of antagonism of psilocybin was observed following tre...

Starving honeybees lose self-control.

Impulsivity, the widespread preference for a smaller and more immediate reward over a larger and more delayed reward, is known to vary across species, and the metabolic and social hypotheses present contrasting explanations for this variation. However, this presents a paradox for an animal such as the honeybee, which is highly social, yet has a high metabolic rate. We test between these two com...

Mental Exercise and Mental Aging: Evaluating the Validity of the "Use It or Lose It" Hypothesis.

It is widely believed that keeping mentally active will prevent age-related mental decline. The primary prediction of this mental-exercise hypothesis is that the rate of age-related decline in measures of cognitive functioning will be less pronounced for people who are more mentally active, or, equivalently, that the cognitive differences among people who vary in level of mental activity will b...

Hyperhomocysteinemia: a million ways to lose control.

Elevated plasma levels of the amino acid homocysteine increase the risk for atherosclerosis, stroke, myocardial infarction, and possibly Alzheimer’s disease. In relation to vascular biology, many studies suggest that endothelial dysfunction contributes to the complex changes that occur within the vessel wall during hyperhomocysteinemia (HHCy). The underlying molecular mechanisms that are activa...