Magic mushrooms may help with depression, say leading scientists
Active ingredient could allow sufferers to relive happier times, says team including former government adviser David Nutt
- guardian.co.uk, Monday 23 January 2012 20.00 GMT
- Article history
Magic mushrooms' active ingredient psilocybin enables users to experience more vivid recollections. Photograph: Peter Dejong/AP
A drug derived from magic mushrooms could help people withdepression by enabling them to relive positive and happy moments of their lives, according to scientists including the former government drug adviser, Professor David Nutt.
Two studies, for which scientists struggled to find funding because of public suspicion and political sensitivity around psychedelic drugs, have shed light on how magic mushrooms affect the brain.
Nutt, from Imperial College London, was sacked as a government drug adviser after claiming tobacco and alcohol were more dangerous than cannabis and psychedelic drugs such as ecstasy and LSD.
He believes prejudice and fear have prevented important scientific work on psychedelic drugs. Research began in the 1950s and 60s but was stopped by the criminalisation of drugs and stringent regulations which made the work costly.
"Everybody who has taken psychedelics makes the point that these can produce the most profound changes in the state of awareness and being that any of them have experienced," said Nutt.
The drugs had been used for millennia, he said, since psychedelic mushrooms grew in the Elysian fields of Greece. Aldous Huxley wrote The Doors Of Perception about the insight such drugs gave him into the life of the mind.
The studies, led by Robin Carhart-Harris, also of Imperial College, looked at the effect that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, has on the brain through the use of a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner. The first study on healthy volunteers, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), surprised the researchers. They had assumed the drug might increase activity in certain parts of the brain. Instead, it decreased it in the "hub" regions which link different areas.
"This loss of connectivity might mean consciousness is less constrained by inputs from the outside world via the senses, which could explain why people can imagine things very vividly," said Nutt.
The 10 men and five women who volunteered experienced changes in visual perception, extremely vivid imaginings and changes in their perception of time and of size and space.
The MRI scans showed lowered bloodflow to regions linked to the ego, the sense of self and personality.
A second study, to be published on Thursday in the British Journal of Psychiatry, gave volunteers cues to remember positive events in their lives such as their wedding or performance in a play. Their recollection became very vivid. "It was almost as if rather than imagining the memories, they were actually seeing them," said Carhart-Harris. "This could be very useful in psychotherapy, for instance in people with depression who find it very difficult to remember good times and are stuck in the negative."
The team are now hoping to do a further study which will involve giving psilocybin to depressed people who are undergoing psychotherapy, in the hope that it will allow them to relive times of past happiness.
The studies showed that psilocybin worked on the same areas of the brain as the SSRI antidepressants such as Prozac, as well as talking therapies and meditation as carried out by skilled practitioners. But the advantage over pills, the team believes, is that the positive effect could be long-lasting.
He didn't court controversy, but is happy to make use of it
Monday, 16 January 2012
He is one of the most vilified men in the highly vilified field of climate science, yet Professor Michael Mann is surprisingly jolly. Despite being the focus of a brutal campaign orchestrated by the fossil-fuel industry and senior politicians within the US Republican Party, Mann's cheery stoicism is positively infectious.
"I've been the focus for attack by those who deny the reality of climate change for so long that it almost seems like forever," the professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University says. "I'm a reluctant public figure, but I have embraced the opportunity to communicate the science."
Mann became a chief target of the climate change contrarians for being the outspoken author of an iconic graph of global warming science known as the "hockey stick" – the most politicised graph in science, according to the journal Nature.
It was the hockey stick that generated much of the opprobrium heaped upon climate scientists as a result of the "climategate" emails stolen from the University of East Anglia and leaked on to the internet two years ago. Indeed, many of the leaked emails were copies of correspondence between the UEA team in the UK and Mann and his colleagues in the US.
Mann believes the theft of the emails was not the work of a random hacker, but part of a sophisticated campaign. "It was a very successful, well-planned smear campaign intended ... to go directly at the trust the public had in scientists," he insists. "Even though they haven't solved the crime of who actually broke in, the entire apparatus for propelling this manufactured scandal on to the world stage was completely funded by the fossil-fuel front groups."
The hockey stick graph appeared to demonstrate how world temperatures had remained fairly steady for several hundred years before shooting up at the end of the 20th century, just like the straight blade jutting out from the shaft of an ice-hockey stick (the analogy doesn't quite work with a curved field hockey stick).
The original study was published in Nature in 1998. Within five years, Mann had become the focus of an orchestrated campaign to undermine the entire field of climate science by rubbishing the hockey stick – a term coined by a colleague rather than Mann himself. Republican Senator Jim Inhofe picked up the hockey stick to beat climate science, famously declaring in 2003 that "global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people".
Mann became the target of Freedom of Information requests and was served with a subpoena by Republican Congressman Joe Barton demanding access to his correspondence. This was followed with a further subpoena from Ken Cuccinelli, the Republican Attorney General of Virginia, and yet more FOI requests from industry front-organisations, notably the American Tradition Institute.
Climate contrarians argued that Mann and his colleagues were concealing their research methods because they had something to hide. In reply, Mann insists that he has been as open as he can about data and methodology, but the aim of these requests has more to do with intimidation than openness. "What they are trying to do is to blur the distinction between private correspondence and scientific data and methods, which of course should be out there for other scientists to attempt to reproduce.
"I think it's intentional and malicious. It's intended to chill scientific discourse, to intimidate scientists working in areas that threaten these special interests," he says. "It's the icing on the cake if they can also get hold of any more private correspondence that they can mine and cherry pick. It's a win-win for them." Why an obscure graph published in a scientific journal should enrage so many people has been the subject of much internet conspiracy (or genuine scientific debate, depending on your point of view).
The original 1998 hockey stick study by Mann and his colleagues did in fact emphasise the tentative nature of estimating past temperatures before the invention of accurate thermometers.
Faced with a lack of formal temperature records before the 19th century, they attempted to use "proxy records", such as ice cores, tree rings and changes to coral reefs. Because of the nature of the approach, their graph showed large error bars, which were drawn even wider apart the further back in time they went.
Many, indeed most climate scientists have argued that the hockey-stick graph is not central to the case for the role of man-made pollution in exacerbating global warming, and the prospect of dangerous climate change. But it has nevertheless become the iconic smoking gun for both sides of the debate, showing either that we are living through unprecedented temperature increases, or that we are being duped by the biggest scientific hoax in history.
"When we first published our Nature article in 1998, we went back six centuries," Mann says. "A year later we published a follow-up going back 1,000 years with quite a few caveats. In fact, the caveats and uncertainties appeared in the title, and the abstract emphasised just how tentative this study was because of all the complicating issues.
"It's frustrating that to some extent all of that context had been lost and the result has been caricatured. Often the errors bars are stripped away, making it appear more definitive than it was ever intended."
But if the aim of the climate contrarians was to browbeat Mann and his ilk into submission, then it clearly hasn't worked. He is publishing his own book on the hockey stick controversy later this year and he shows every sign of continuing the battle. "Scientists have to recognise that they are in a street fight," he warns.
A popular target: What critics say...
"Dr Mann's hockey stick graph is based on suspect data. Others have shown that random numbers can be put into Mann's algorithm, and they always produce a hockey stick graph."
Ken Cuccinelli, Virginia's Attorney General who wants to prosecute Mann for fraud.
"How many more times does it need to be shredded and splintered before the eco zealots who gather to froth and foam at warmist sites like Real Climate accept that their flimsy theory has been falsified beyond credibility?"
James Dellingpole, Blogger on the hockey stick graph
A life in brief
Born 28 December 1965
Education Undergraduate degrees in physics and applied maths, University of California at Berkeley, MS degree in physics, Yale University, PhD in geology & geophysics, Yale University.
Career In 1998 Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes compiled the "hockey stick graph" of global temperatures since 1400, based on analyses of ice cores, tree rings and other historical data, which showed a sharp rise in the late 20th century. A version of the graph in 1999 showing temperatures from 1000 featured prominently in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Third Assessment Report in 2001.
Awards In 2007, Mann and hundreds of other scientists who contributed to the IPCC report were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize
Right now, innovation across the technology sector is at risk because of legislation making its way through Congress -- so I've added my name to Mozilla's efforts to protect the Web and ensure that it remains a thriving platform for innovation that's open and accessible to all. Will you join me? http://mzl.la/vEF76z
The publication of these photos marks the second time this week that Google Maps has revealed satellite imagery raising interesting questions. On Tuesday, Google released photos of parts of Iran showing possible nuclear facilities.
Below, see the satellite photo of the Kumtag Desert
World's most powerful laser to tear apart the vacuum of space
A laser powerful enough to tear apart the fabric of space could be built in Britain as part major new scientific project that aims to answer some of the most fundamental questions about our universe.
Due to follow in the footsteps of the Large Hadron Collider, the latest "big science" experiment being proposed by physicists will see the world's most powerful laser being constructed.
Capable of producing a beam of light so intense that it would be equivalent to the power received by the Earth from the sun focused onto a speck smaller than a tip of a pin, scientists claim it could allow them boil the very fabric of space – the vacuum.
Contrary to popular belief, a vacuum is not devoid of material but in fact fizzles with tiny mysterious particles that pop in and out of existence, but at speeds so fast that no one has been able to prove they exist.
The Extreme Light Infrastructure Ultra-High Field Facility would produce a laser so intense that scientists say it would allow them to reveal these particles for the first time by pulling this vacuum "fabric" apart.
They also believe it could even allow them to prove whether extra-dimensions exist.
"This laser will be 200 times more powerful than the most powerful lasers that currently exist," said Professor John Collier, a scientific leader for the ELI project and director of the Central Laser Facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Didcot, Oxfordshire.
"At this kind of intensity we start to get into unexplored territory as it is an area of physics that we have never been before."
The ELI Ultra-High Field laser is due to be complete by the end of the decade and will cost an estimated £1 billion. Although the location for the facility will not be decided until next year, the UK is among several European countries in the running to host it.
The European Commission has already this year approved plans to build three other lasers that will form part of the ELI project and will be prototypes for the Ultra-High Field laser.
Due to sited in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Romania, each laser will coast around £200 million and are scheduled to become operational in 2015.
The Ultra-High Field laser will be made up of 10 beams, each twice as powerful as the prototype lasers, allowing it to produce 200 petawatts of power – more than 100,000 times the power of the world's combined electricity production – for less than a trillionth of a second.
The huge amounts of energy needed to produce a laser beam of this strength is stored up over time before it is fired to produce large laser beams several feet wide that are then combined and focused down onto a tiny spot, much like sunlight through a magnifying glass.
At the focal point, the intensity of the light will produce conditions that are so extreme they do not exist even in the centre of our sun.
It will cause the mysterious particles of matter and antimatter thought to make up a vacuum to be pulled apart, allowing scientists to detect the tiny electrical charges they produce.
These "ghost particles", as they are known, normally annihilate one another as soon as they appear, but by using the laser to pull them apart, physicists believe they will be able to detect them.
It could help to explain the mystery of why the universe contains far more matter than we have been able to detect by revealing what so called dark matter really is.
Professor Wolfgang Sandner, coordinator of the Laserlab Europe network and president of the German Physics Society, said: "We are taught to think of the vacuum as empty space, but it seems even a true vacuum is filled with pairs of molecules that come into our universe for an extremely short time.
"An extremely powerful laser should be able to pull these particles apart and keep them in existence for longer.
"There are many challenges to be over come before we can do that, but it is mainly a matter of scaling up the technology we have so we can produce the powers needed."
The Science and Technology Facilities Council, which provides funds for Britain's involvement in major science facilities including the Large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva, has marked out the ELI as a key area it wants to focus on.
Scientists at the Centre for Advanced Laser Technology and Applications at Rutherford Appleton Laboratories in Dicot, Oxfordshire, are already developing technology that will be essential for producing such powerful lasers.
The Centre is thought to be one of the prime candidates for where the Ultra-High Field laser could be located, but it faces competition from sites in Russia, France, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic.
As well as offering new insights in to undiscovered realms of physics, scientists say the ELI lasers will also produce new laser based treatments for cancer and medical diagnostics.
Dr Thomas Heinzl, an associate professor of theoretical physics at Plymouth University, said: "ELI is going to take us into an uncharted regime of physics. There could well be some surprises along the way."