Magic mushrooms, hiccup rhythms and meteorites
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This is a Triple J podcast.
Hello. Welcome to another episode of Science with Dr. Carl in your podcast feed. This week, we meet Erin from Wollongong, who is studying for an exam in a couple of weeks' time. She texted in wanting to know a little bit more about her subject matter when it came to a particular question in psychology. That's where Dr. Carl comes in. Plus, we talk meteorites, muscle building, space junk, and plenty more. I'm Lucy Smith. Let's get into it. What does that mean, Dr. Carl, when you kind of hit the wall, when you run out of ideas and it literally feels like your brain's just hit a wall?
It comes, I think, I'm not sure, from the popularity in running where people would go for a run and then they'd gradually work their way up. This is back in the old days. And back then there were very few people who actually did long-distance running apart from professional athletes. And running and jogging came in and people suddenly realised that they could run for four kilometres or five and then when they went to six... They had nothing. They were just totally out of energy and the metaphor came in of hitting the wall. If somebody can possibly give me a better origin on that term, please ring on 0439757555.
See, you no longer hit a wall with the triple J text sign.
No. I still haven't got a good way of remembering the 0439. Four is a square and three then leads to three squared, which is nine. Kind of weak. Getting closer. We'll get something.
I like that. You've got your way of remembering things.
We all have different ways of trying to work out little hooks. And memory is one of these weird things that actually defines who you are because without your memories, you're no longer you. And this can be very distressing for people who are relatives with people with Alzheimer's disease where they suddenly don't recognise their daughter or son. That's scary. Okay, onwards.
Let's stay on the brain, okay? We've got Xander in Newcastle here. Xander, what's your question for Dr Karl?
Hey, I was just wondering what magic mushrooms do to the brain.
Ah, there's a whole bunch of articles on that in the Scientific American, and you can download them for free online. Scientific American. And what we see is a whole bunch of, and they've done MRI scans and functional MRI scans, we see flooding of waves of electrical activity and metabolic activity across the brain. But going from that to saying, oh, you're taking this sort of hallucinogenic or that, we haven't been able to do that. And also working out why you've got this sudden insight that the universe smells of turpentine. And why would that insight come flooding into your brain? You know, you don't know. So we definitely do not know what they do to your brain. They have been thought to be able to help in some cases of PTSD, and that's post-traumatic stress disorder.
And we're not too sure exactly why it helps, but it does for some people, but not everybody, help. Sorry, got a better answer?
No, well, we've gotten a text from someone saying, I know a lot of people microdosing for anxiety and depression right now have heard they help brain entropy and new neural pathways.
That can help. So we've just actually been mapping the human brain. There was a study that came out last year where they looked at the MRI scans of people of various ages and they found that you start off being relatively inefficient from nought to nine with your brain, but you're making all sorts of connections all over the place and then you gradually shift over to being more efficient but less widespread. And then as you go through life, you then start at later stages going to something like an airport hub. So if you want to go from, say, I don't know, Toowoomba to Broken Hill, you have to go... into either Brisbane or Sydney. And so you've got to use the hubs. And in your early days, you can make connections all over the place.
But in the later days, you tend to have to go through hubs. So we're gradually learning about the brain. Watch this space. I'm sorry, Xander.
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