Over 60% of volunteers in a rigorous trial funded by the American government said that one magic mushroom session gave them a full mystical experience and several months of happiness. Magic mushrooms are also known as psychedelic mushrooms. The researchers, from John Hopkins University, Baltimore, wanted to find out what the neurological mechanisms and effects of psilocybin were. They were exploring psilocybin as a possible therapeutic compound. Psilocybin is the hallucinogenic agent found in magic mushrooms.

The research was funded by the U.S. National Institute of Drug Abuse and the Council on Spiritual Practices.

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Neuroscientists have proposed a simple explanation for the pleasure of grasping a new concept: The brain is getting its fix. The “AHA” of comprehension triggers a biochemical cascade that rewards the brain with a shot of natural opium-like substances, said Irving Biederman of the University of Southern California. He presents his theory in an invited article in the latest issue of American Scientist.

“While you’re trying to understand a difficult theorem, it’s not fun,” said Biederman, professor of neuroscience in the USC College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

“But once you get it, you just feel fabulous.”

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Feeling and seeing belong together. I’ve said so for years.

From Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B – abstract (my clarifying additions):

People see with feeling (something I’ve been saying for 20 years). We ‘gaze’, ‘behold’, ‘stare’, ‘gape’ and ‘glare’. In this paper, we develop the hypothesis that the brain’s ability to see in the present incorporates a representation of the affective (emotional) impact of those visual sensations in the past (meaning you don’t actually “see” – you FEEL + SEE). This representation makes up part of the brain’s prediction of what the visual sensations stand for (meaning = emotion+visual stimulus) in the present, including how to act on them in the near future (based on how we feel about what we see, we act accordingly). The affective prediction (emotional interpretation) hypothesis implies that responses signalling an object’s salience, relevance or value do not occur as a separate step after the object is identified (seeing = FEELING + SENSUAL INPUT). Instead, affective (emotional) responses support vision from the very moment that visual stimulation begins.

You see AND feel – never see alone. Your visual signals pass through and interact with the emotional parts of your brain – so OF COURSE you’d attach feeling to visual stimulus. I’ve said it for many years and every Rapid Eye Technician knows it from experience. Nice to see that someone is considering doing some solid science about our hypothesis and experience.

Whether finding your way through an unfamiliar neighborhood to a friend’s house or deciding on a political candidate, your brain is adept at adapting. It can make decisions based on incomplete information and update those decisions based on new information.

The nature of such sophisticated decision making in the cerebral cortex, which is responsible for high-level processing, has been “poorly studied and little understood,” according to Wako Yoshida and Shin Ishii of the Nara Institute of Science and Technology. Now, however, in an article in the June 1, 2006, Neuron, they describe experiments that enabled them to tease apart how different regions of the cerebral cortex process uncertain information and integrate it into decision making.

In particular, their aim was to analyze subjects’ navigation through a virtual maze, to explore how different cortical regions function in solving “partially observable decision-making problems.”

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A wealth of evidence has shown that small amounts of carbon dioxide can provoke a panic attack (PA) in certain anxiety-prone individuals.

The Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE) recently published a study showing that inhalation of carbon dioxide (CO2) triggers emotional distress and a panic response in healthy people. The researchers wonder if panic is an inborn survival-oriented response. The results may better our understanding and help prevent some emotional disorders.

A wealth of evidence has shown that small amounts of carbon dioxide can provoke a panic attack (PA) in certain anxiety-prone individuals – like those diagnosed with panic disorders (PD). Panic may be an inborn behavioral response to a metabolic distress – like the triggering of a CO2 level monitor in the brain.

To test whether CO2 effectively controls emotional states, the research team of the Academic Anxiety Center at the University of Maastricht, the Netherlands (Griez et al) conducted a study in healthy volunteers breathing increasing amounts of CO2.

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