Rachel Carlson
Appearances
Short Wave
Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
She does. She told me she felt like she was expressing herself differently. She changed the way she taught her classes. even ones she'd been teaching for years.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
But here's the thing, Gina. Researchers like Albert, they don't know exactly why Lori sees things differently. Is it because the drug altered her brain chemistry? Or was it the journey she took while she was on psilocybin? I called myself, like, the new Lori.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, you know, people often take psychedelics looking for some kind of experience that could transform their lives or change their outlook on everything. So if you're a scientist, how do you tell if the effect of a psychedelic is because of a change in brain chemistry or because of this spiritual journey? I spoke to Boris Heifetz. He's an anesthesiologist and neuroscientist who works at Stanford.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And he said it kind of boils down to one question.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And once I heard him say it that way, I couldn't get it out of my head.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So I went on my own journey, not like my stuffed animals are talking to me and I can't look directly into a mirror kind of journey. Not like that. But a reporting journey with lots of scientists who had lots of opinions.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Is it possible for researchers to separate those things when weighing their potential benefits? And does the difference matter?
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So psychedelic substances have been around for millennia in indigenous medicine. Okay. And in the late 1930s, this guy named Albert Hoffman first synthesized LSD. Then the actual term psychedelics was coined in the 1950s. Okay. Now, those drugs like LSD, psilocybin, and mescaline are called classic psychedelics. In the brain, they all activate something called the serotonin 2A receptor.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Serotonin is a chemical in our brains. It regulates things like sleep, mood, appetite. And at this specific receptor, classic psychedelics have these very powerful psychoactive effects.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, exactly. So in the 50s and 60s, psychedelics, both in recreational use and in research, are huge. But then, in the early 70s, the U.S. does this big crackdown on controlled substances, and that, coupled with tighter regulation on pharmaceutical testing, really shuts down most psychedelics research on humans. And the next big phase in neuropsychiatry in the 80s is super different. Yeah.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Boris told me the goal became to have sort of a one-size-fits-all mental health approach.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So Gina, this is when SSRIs come on the scene. Selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. They also target serotonin receptors. antidepressants like SSRIs work for about two-thirds of people who take them, but there were still some major problems. They don't work for the other third, even after trying multiple different drugs. Right. Which leaves a lot of people like just in the lurch. Yeah.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And I mean, there's other factors, too. You have to take them every single day. You have to be on them for at least a few weeks until you can even really feel a change. Yeah. And so there's this urgent need for alternative treatments for mental health conditions, which is why around 2000 or so, researchers start studying another drug called ketamine.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
You might know it as a recreational drug, but it's also been used since the 1960s as an anesthetic in clinical settings. So it's not a psychedelic. It's not a psychedelic, at least according to most people I talk to. Okay. But it can have these similar-ish effects depending on the dose. Like it can make people feel numb or give them this sometimes euphoric or dissociated feeling.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Hey, Gina. So psychedelics are being studied to treat lots of different kinds of conditions.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
That's David Olson, a chemical neuroscientist at UC Davis. He studies compounds like psychedelics. And so, Gina, to summarize all this history, David told me that once people started studying ketamine, they wondered what other kinds of compounds might have similar rapid effects. And remember all that research on psychedelics that got paused? Yeah. Yeah. OK. So that comes up again.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Right. So for the first question, this is really a challenge for all experiments. You want to make sure that you're testing one thing and then comparing it to a control or a placebo drug. To see if it's really the thing you're testing that causes an effect versus like some other factor. Right. And that's even harder when it comes to these drugs in particular.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Albert told me about a few ways researchers can address this problem. So one is to give people another drug called an active comparator. Usually it's one that can kind of mimic certain effects of something like a psychedelic without having to give people one.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Or another strategy is just to give everyone the drug, sometimes at different doses to see what's most effective. And then you can sort of parse out a threshold for what might work and what might not. Okay. So remember Lori?
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Every person in the study she was in got psilocybin. So they knew that they were going to get it. Lori told me she met with therapists before and after her treatments, and they were in the room with her over the course of her experience with psilocybin.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
That's Albert Garcia-Romeo. He's a psychologist and psychopharmacologist at Johns Hopkins University. Albert ran a study using a psychedelic called psilocybin. It's the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. And he wanted to see if it could help people who'd previously had Lyme disease.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, exactly. Most studies have some kind of therapeutic support involved. And for Lori, on that day that she got her first round of psilocybin, she walked into the room. It was very tranquil.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
And the light was dim. She said she felt like she was preparing herself for this big, important moment.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Exactly. And this doesn't take away from the study or what Lori experienced and the fact that she told me she felt so much better after. But it does mean when patients and studies do feel better, it's harder to say what helped them feel better. And then that can make it hard to know how to give other people that same experience. Here's Boris again.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah. So when I asked David this question, like, why does it matter? He reminded me that not everyone wants to trip or should trip depending on their medical history. For example, most professionals say that if a person has a family history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, they probably shouldn't use psychedelics or ketamine.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
So if researchers can figure out what matters, like if you don't actually need to trip to get these potentially positive effects, scientists could get more effective treatments for more people. So how are they going to try to settle that debate? Some researchers, like Boris and David, are asking, what happens if you remove the trip altogether? Whoa.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
They're doing this in really different ways, but they both hope it's going to bring us closer to answering the question. That'll be next time on the show.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Because you may not realize it, but Lyme disease often comes with lots of psychological symptoms in addition to all the physical ones. Lori Unruh Snyder is one of Albert's patients in that study. She's an agriculture professor. She got a tick bite. She got Lyme disease. But it took doctors four years to get to that diagnosis.
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Why The Trip Complicates Psychedelic Research
Yeah, and even after she took a course of antibiotics for treatment, she told me she still didn't feel like herself at all.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
A component moving through the ground. I imagine she's talking about drumming here. Drum roll.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Wait, wait. Okay, I just have to say, I'm taking bachata dance classes right now, and I am so intrigued by how few men have rhythms. So I'm very curious how this drumming works. These crabs have a rhythm. All right, what are the four stages of this courtship dance?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
That's amazing. I mean, a guy who can dance and has rhythm definitely is sexy. So I would be drawn to this drumming crab.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Hard transition. We're going from seismic vibrations during crab courtship to growing chicken nuggets in a laboratory. Why are people trying to grow chicken nuggets at all?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Chicken muscle. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I love me some chicken muscle.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
I mean, I feel like I've heard stuff like this elsewhere. I assume there are other researchers trying to grow meat in labs. What makes these particular chicken nuggets so special?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Hello, hello. Welcome. Thank you for having me. Okay, tell me what I am learning about today.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
So from crab courtship to chicken muscle to drugs without the trip, such as LSD. I mean, why, Rachel, would I ever want to take a drug like LSD but not have the psychedelic effect? Like, what's the whole point?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
Wait, so I don't get it. These researchers, they just like chop off the trippy part of the LSD molecule? Okay.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
OK, but what are the chances people would actually start taking these drugs anytime soon?
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
We love a Rachel reported series, don't we? Thanks, Elsa. It's so fun having you here.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
The crabs are cheering you on. Oh, I love it. Maybe they'll dance with me and have more rhythm than the guys in my class. Let's hope so. We can only hope.
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Good Vibrations: How Fiddler Crabs Mate
All right, guys, to start us off, tell me all about these fiddler crabs that apparently do not fiddle.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
And after marathons, they saw that myelin decreased in the runners' brains, especially in the areas of the brain that are important for things like motor coordination, like how we move our bodies, and sensory processing. So after a marathon, there's less myelin. Is that a bad thing?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
You're listening to Shortwave from NPR. Hey, Short Wavers, Regina Barber here. And Rachel Carlson. With our biweekly science news roundup featuring Juana Summers of All Things Considered.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
But there are some neurological diseases where myelin decreases and doesn't return to normal. Carlos thinks studying runners could help us better understand these disorders, like multiple sclerosis.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Another neuroscientist in the field, Yannick Poitelot, Told us the kind of scans the researchers took makes it hard to say, like, for sure that running caused the change in myelin. But he says that this study was really exciting. It's one of the first to show that human myelin could be used as an energy source. And he thinks it could inspire lots of new work in the field.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah, it was miso. Okay, the paste created from like fermented soybeans or grains. It's used a lot in Japanese cooking. And part of the study is in service of astronaut nutrition. Like how do we make their diets more delicious, more nutritious, more diverse?
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
So how did this miso make its way into space? Well, Juana, it almost didn't. I spoke to Maggie Koblenz and Josh Evans, who published their study in the journal Ice Science this week. And Josh reminded me that, like most fermented things, have a really strong smell. And this fact almost stopped them from getting the experiment into space.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah, it did. When it came back to Earth, it tasted nuttier than the miso from the same batch fermented on the ground. Interesting. Why do they think that happened? So they don't know for sure. It could have been like radiation. It could be microgravity. It could be a combination of all of this. But the leading hypothesis is that it was mostly temperature swings inside the space station.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yep. Plus, we're talking about fermenting food in space and what it does to its taste.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah. So this was a big mystery that perplexed researchers for a while. Like basically bats emerge from their caves like around dusk all at once. There can be hundreds, thousands or even millions of bats in a group all funneling out together. And for the most part, they don't crash into each other.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Yeah, lead researcher Aya Goldstein said one big innovation was tiny microphones.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
ISS scientists used to put microphones in front of the caves to measure the sounds of bats emerging, or they would have like a few bats in captivity. But none of this really got to an individual bat's perspective while in a densely packed group.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
So they found that when the bats were like very densely packed, their calls were shorter, higher pitched, lower in volume and more frequent. And all of this essentially allows a bat to hear its own call echoed back instead of disappearing in like the ruckus of other bat sounds.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Bat behavioral ecologist Rachel Page at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, who wasn't involved in this work, said that this was a major advance in the field.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
I'm intrigued, y'all. All that on this episode of Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
Thanks for joining us, Juana. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for letting me come back. You can hear more of Juana Summers on Consider This, NPR's afternoon podcast about what the news means for you. This episode was produced by Burleigh McCoy and Mia Venkat. It was edited by Jeff Brumphill and Christopher Intagliata. Tyler Jones checked the facts. Kwesi Lee and Jimmy Keeley were the audio engineers.
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Could Running Change Your Brain?
I'm Rachel Carlson. And I'm Regina Barber. Thank you for listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.