667 Dr. Gül Dölen on Rethinking Psychedelics, New Applications (Autism, Stroke, and Allergies), The Neurobiology of Beginner’s Mind, Octopuses on MDMA, and The Master Key of Metaplasticity

This is a OPEN AI summary of the Tim Ferriss Podcast #667- visit www.TinyTim.blog for more AI summaries, or www.Tim.blog for the official Tim Ferriss Podcasts.

Dr. Glenda Dlen is an associate professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a world-leading researcher in psychedelics. Her laboratory has discovered a novel mechanism that could account for the broad range of therapeutic applications that psychedelics are currently being tested for. Building on this discovery, she has formulated the hypothesis that psychedelics may be the long-sought master key for unlocking critical periods across the brain. To test this hypothesis, she has initiated a nationwide collaborative effort to determine whether psychedelics reopen critical periods for ocular dominance plasticity, birdsong learning, anatomical plasticity in the barrel cortex, serotonergic neuronal regeneration, dendritic spinogenesis, and motor learning. If successful, this could dramatically expand the scope of disorders that might benefit from adjunct therapy with psychedelics.

Dr. Dlen is a renowned scientist who has done groundbreaking work in the fields of learning, memory, and autism. She designed her own major in college, which was a combination of neuroscience, philosophy, linguistics, art, and religion. She did this in order to gain a better understanding of the mind from different perspectives.

Philosophy of mind is the study of the nature of the mind. One approach to philosophy of mind is to consider what is a mind and what are the things that we count when we say this is what a mind is, this is what a mind is not. Another approach to philosophy of mind is to consider how we know mind. The theory of mind is an interesting concept in philosophy of mind which posits that we can only know mind through introspection.

The theory of mind is the ability to understand or have a concept of what somebody else might be thinking. It is a neurobiological process that is going on when you are playing poker, for example. It is something that we develop and get better at as we mature. The theory of mind is important for consciousness and for a full sense of knowing who you are.

The theory of mind is a behavior that allows humans to anticipate what other members of a social group might be thinking. Dr. Gl Dlen has observed this behavior in octopuses, which suggests that it is not entirely human-specific. This behavior likely evolved due to the selection pressures imposed by social living.

The octopus is a not a social species, but the larger Pacific stripe octopus is the only known social species of octopus. This octopus uses hunting behavior to anticipate where its food might hide. This suggests that theory of mind may have originated from a hunting behavior, rather than from social behaviors.

Dr. Gl Dlen became interested in autism while an undergrad, thinking it could be an example of what happens to someone's ability to have a fully conscious experience in the absence of or under conditions of impaired theory of mind. His PhD work focused on finding a therapy for autism, and he and others found that a biochemical manipulation could correct symptoms in mice. However, human clinical trials for the same therapy were largely unsuccessful.

Some people believe that psychedelics could be helpful in treating autism by restoring a biochemical imbalance and reopening relevant critical periods. However, it is not yet clear whether this is actually effective.

The prevalence of autism is skyrocketing, and it may be caused by a variety of factors, including people having children when they're older, exposure to BPA, or other unknown factors. Dr. Gl Dlen says that when she first started studying autism 20 years ago, it was very narrowly defined as a disease, with only a few genes implicated in causing it. However, the definition of autism has since been expanded to include the spectrum of autism, which has made it more difficult to determine the exact causes of the disorder.

The heritability of autism has dropped as the definition of the disease has expanded to include more and more non-classical symptoms. This makes it difficult for scientists to identify a unified cause of the disease. FMR1 seems to be a node for autism, with the protein it encodes regulating around 25% of all other autism-related genes.

Dr. Gl Dlen explains that there is no current genetic screening for autism because the causes of autism are so rare. He also discusses the reopening of the critical period, first proposed by Konrad Lorenz in 1935.

There is a critical period for social learning, during which teenagers are much more susceptible to peer pressure than adults. This period begins around 48 hours after hatching.

A critical period is a window of time where the brain is more flexible and able to learn from its environment. Scientists believe that understanding the mechanisms behind critical periods could help to reopen them for therapeutic benefit in adults. MDMA has a pro-social component that makes it different from other psychedelics, and scientists are studying whether it could be used to reopen critical periods.

Psychedelics may have the ability to reopen critical periods in the brain, including the social critical period. This could have implications for treating conditions like autism.

Psychedelics may have the ability to reopen critical periods in the brain, which could potentially be used to treat a variety of conditions.

Autism is a multifactorial disease with a variety of possible causes. One potential cause is an inability to capitalize on a critical window during development. Psychedelics may be able to reopen this window and help the individual with autism.

Psychedelics may be able to help restore vision by reopening visual critical periods. The same may be true for autism, where pairing mGluR therapy with a psychedelic could help restore the ability to learn from the social environment.

Psychedelics can reopen critical periods in the brain, allowing for easier adaptation to new environments. This is likely because the brain is already built to adapt to new environments, making it easier for psychedelics to tap into this ability.

The idea that deprivation can reopen critical periods has been suggested as a possible explanation for why it is easier to learn a new language in a country where it is not the dominant language. This theory has not been proven, but there is some evidence to support it. Additionally, religious practices that use deprivation techniques may be tapping into a similar phenomenon.

The use of psychedelics to alter consciousness or induce mystical experiences may be due to the reopening of critical periods. This explanation provides a way to answer questions about what consciousness is and what mystical experiences mean.

The octopus study challenges the idea that we can only understand what psychedelics are doing in humans. What it says instead is that we haven't really learned anything about what are the generalizable principles? What are the motifs? What are the rules governing those circuit level rearrangements that enable complex behavior?

Alexander Shulgin is an elder in the field of psychedelics, and he believes that it is important for researchers to take psychedelics themselves in order to understand their effects. However, this view is not shared by the author, who believes that studying the effects of psychedelics in animals can also be informative. The author also discusses the idea of "plasticity" and how it is used by different people in different ways.

Psychedelics are not psychoplastogens, drugs that induce plasticity. This terminology is inaccurate and confusing, and should be abandoned. Psychedelics do not cause the robust changes in neurons that lead to addiction.

Metaplasticity is the ability to induce plasticity (change in response to stimuli) in the brain, and this ability declines with age. Ketamine may have applications in studying visual processing, as it affects the NMDA receptor, which is involved in learning and memory.

The NMDA receptor is a fast neurotransmitter receptor that is usually blocked by magnesium. It is thought to be a natural coincidence detector that can detect when two neurons are firing at the same time. This is why ketamine and PCP interfere with memory. The composition of the NMDA receptor's subunits changes over development, making it more or less likely to induce synaptic plasticity when glutamate binds to it.

The original understanding of a metaplastic change was that it would be a change in the subunit composition of the NMDA receptor that would enable baby receptors to induce plasticity more readily than adult receptors. However, recent research has suggested that the metabotropic glutamate receptor (mGluR) may be more implicated in autism, and that using a psychedelic to increase metaplasticity may be a potential treatment for this condition.

Allergies may be caused by the immune system being left 'jobless' without parasitic infections to fight against. The brain then assigns a threat to the allergens (e.g. dog proteins), and reopening the critical period for the learned threat could help to treat allergies.

The idea that psychedelics could be used to treat allergies by unlearning the association between allergies and dogs is an interesting one, but it is not yet proven. more research is needed to determine if this is a viable treatment option.

The definition of what a psychedelic is has been broadened to include anything that causes an altered state of consciousness, altered perception of time, space, body, or self. This includes ketamine, PCP, LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT, MDMA, and ibogaine.

Psychedelics have therapeutic effects that are not yet fully understood. Some evidence suggests that the antidepressant properties of psychedelics may be blocked by serotonin receptor antagonists. Psychedelics that have primary binding at NMDA receptors, serotonin transporters, serotonin 2A receptors, kappa-opioid receptors, and other receptors all show some therapeutic effect. The commonality across all of these psychedelics may be downstream of the receptor, such as regulation of the extracellular matrix.

The mechanisms of psychedelics are not well understood, but it is thought that they work by "resetting" receptors in the brain. This resetting is thought to enable the reintegration of more sensitive receptors that are able to induce plasticity.

LSD's effects last a long time because it binds to the serotonin 2A receptor and locks it into place. This prevents the receptor from signaling through the normal G-protein coupled signaling pathway and instead triggers beta-arrestin, which tells the cell to remove the receptor.

Sasha Shulgin was a very prolific biochemist who is known for creating or resurrecting hundreds of different psychedelic compounds. He was also a very dedicated self-experimenter who was famous for his "tasting parties." Dr. Gl Dlen agrees with Sasha on the importance of self-experimentation and says that they both share a "human-centric" approach to their work.

This is a summary of a lecture given by Sasha Shulgin, a chemist who is known for his work with psychedelic drugs. He explains how these drugs can be used to alter the brain and consciousness, and how this can be used to study neuroscience.

Psychedelics have the potential to create a sense of "the noetic property" or the feeling that one knows the true truth. However, this can be dangerous for scientists, as it can make it difficult to be objective. Therefore, experiments with psychedelics are often difficult to justify.

Psychedelics may help to reopen the critical period for motor recovery following stroke, according to new research. This could potentially help the 400,000 patients in the United States who have debilitating, lasting impairments because of stroke.

Indigenous people have been using psychedelics for centuries, and there is a growing body of evidence that these substances can be used to treat a variety of mental health conditions. However, psychedelics are not well understood and there is a need for more research to explore their mechanisms of action and to develop new tools for use in Western treatment paradigms.

The therapeutic effects of ibogaine are context-dependent and involve more than just the molecule. The importance of elements like face painting and social touch in the ibogaine experience cannot be understated.

The therapeutic use of psychedelics is likely to continue to develop over the next ten years, with a greater focus on finding the right context for each condition.

The therapeutic potential for psychedelics is huge, but the devil is in the details in terms of identifying the right context and figuring out how to get activation of the right neural circuit.

The critical period window for psychedelics is much longer than previously thought, and this could have major implications for how these drugs are used therapeutically.

The idea is to use psychedelics to help people relearn motor skills after a stroke, in a more playful and less goal-oriented way. This approach is inspired by how children learn motor skills, and it is hoped that it will be more effective than current rehabilitation methods.

Dr. Gl Dlen is a scientist who has observed the difficulty that young scientists have in obtaining funding for their work. She attributes this to the fact that the funding has become much more conservative over time. She decided to start her own lab in order to continue her work on her own terms.

Dr. Gl Dlen was feeling discouraged after applying to the NIH 17 times without success. However, her department was supportive and she decided to try a few more times. She eventually succeeded in getting a grant, and attributes part of her success to being conservative in her grant writing.

Dr. Gl Dlen talks about how she became interested in marine neuroscience and how she took a risk to do an experiment with octopuses that ended up being successful. She talks about how the success of the experiment revived her sense of play and joy in science. When asked about how she thinks about risk taking moving forward, she says that she doesn't want to oversell how big of a risk it was for her to do the octopus experiment, because it was something she was curious about and she had a collaborator who was also interested.

The author discusses how funding constraints and the focus on selling and marketing in the tech industry has killed motivation for scientists to pursue discovery-based, curiosity-based science.

Crisis has forced people to become more conservative, which has limited exploration into new areas like giving octopuses MDMA. Dr. Dlen believes that if more taxpayer money was invested into science and technology, there would be more world-changing technologies.

The United States has long understood that investing in science is an investment for the future. However, other countries are now investing more in science and technology, and the US may fall behind if it does not change its tax structure to reinvest in science. Dr. Dlen recommends the book "Invisible Women" to better understand how ignoring data about women can have costly consequences.

In this conversation, Tim Ferriss and Dr. Gl Dlen discuss three books that have had a big impact on them. The first is The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber, which covers the topic of psychedelic use in other cultures. The second is The Immortality Key by Brian Muraresku, which is about the elixirs of Midas and other ancient cultures. The third is Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber, which deals with the bureaucracy of academia.

In this initial conversation, Dr. Gl Dlen and Tim Ferriss discuss a variety of topics related to science and technology. Dr. Dlen shares some of the ground-shifting stories she expects to come out in the next few years, and Ferriss expresses his interest in pursuing these questions further. They also mention the importance of challenge dominant beliefs and taking risks with science. Finally, they mention dolenlab.org as the best place to find Dr. Dlen's work.

667) https://tim.blog/2023/04/19/gul-dolen/