What Ecstasy Does to Octopuses

[steven36]

Despite their wacky brains, these intelligent animals seem to respond to the drug in a very similar way to humans.

 

A Californian two-spot octopus

 

 

When Gül Dölen first gave ecstasy to octopuses, she didn’t know what to expect.

 

Dölen is a neuroscientist at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine who studies how the cells and chemicals in animal brains influence animals’ social lives. Ecstasy, also known as MDMA, interests her because it’s known to make people feel more sociable, more interested in others, and less defensive. The same effects also occur in rats and mice—the animals that Dölen usually studies.

 

But octopuses are very different creatures. They’re clearly intelligent and their behavior is undoubtedly sophisticated, but their brains have a completely different architecture than those of mammals—for one thing, they’re shaped like donuts. “It’s organized much more like a snail’s brain than ours,” Dölen says. With such a dissimilar anatomy, she wondered whether these animals would respond to drugs in unpredictable ways. And to find out, she needed a way of assessing how sociable an octopus is.

 

She and her colleague Eric Edsinger put five Californian two-spot octopuses individually into the middle of three connected chambers and gave them free rein to explore. One of the adjacent chambers housed a second octopus, confined inside an overturned plastic basket. The other contained an unfamiliar object, such as a plastic flower or a Chewbacca figurine. Dölen and Edsinger measured how long the main animal spent in the company of its peer, and how long with the random toy.

 

This is exactly the kind of setup that neuroscientists use to test social behavior in mice, but Dölen had no idea whether it would work with octopuses. “It might be that they are so smart that the kind of task we’d use for a mouse would be boring to them,” she says. “Maybe they’d take one lap around the chambers and stop.” Fortunately, that wasn’t the case. The free-moving individuals thoroughly explored the chambers, and from their movements, Dölen realized that individuals of any sex gravitate toward females, but avoid males.

 

Next, she dosed the animals with ecstasy. Again, there’s no precedent for this, but researchers often anesthetize octopuses by dunking them in ethanol—a humane procedure with no lasting side effects. So Dölen and Edsinger submerged their octopuses in an MDMA solution, allowing them to absorb the drug through their gills. At first they used too high a dose, and the animals “freaked out and did all these color changes,” Dölen says. But once the team found a more suitable dose, the animals behaved more calmly—and more sociably.

 

With ecstasy in their system, the five octopuses spent far more time in the company of the same trapped male they once shunned. Even without a stopwatch, the change was obvious. Before the drug, they explored the chamber with the other octopus very tentatively. “They mashed themselves against one wall, very slowly extended one arm, touched the [other animal], and went back to the other side,” Dölen says.

 

“But when they had MDMA, they had this very relaxed posture. They floated around, they wrapped their arms around the chamber, and they interacted with the other octopus in a much more fluid and generous way. They even exposed their [underside], where their mouth is, which is not something octopuses usually do.”

 

But most octopuses, with some exceptions, are solitary hermits, and Jennifer Mather from the University of Lethbridge isn’t convinced that ecstasy is making them sociable. Instead, the drug might just mess with their ability to detect the chemical cues of potential mates. “There’s no proof that it is anything more than attraction,” she says.

 

Harriet de Wit from the University of Chicago, who has studied ecstasy’s effects on animals, has other concerns. “It’s an innovative and exciting study,” she says, but it’s unfortunate that the duo always tested the octopuses first after a dunk in normal salt water and then after an ecstasy bath. In pharmacology studies, scientists normally mix up the order in which animals receive the drug and the saline control. Without that counterbalancing, it’s hard to say why the octopuses were behaving differently the second time around: Was it because of the ecstasy, or simply because they had become familiar with the arena, the plastic toy, or the other octopus?

 

Dölen admits that the study is just a pilot, and one with a very small sample size. “We would obviously want other people to try and repeat it in a much larger group of animals,” she says. “But we wanted to publish it, because there really aren’t established protocols for delivering drugs to octopuses or doing social tests with them.” She hopes that her findings will encourage more neuroscientists to study these beguiling animals.

 

 

She’s not the first to make such a call, either. In 1964, the English zoologist J. Z. Young wrote a book called A Model of the Brain, in which he encouraged scientists to study the brains of a wide variety of species, octopuses included. “We could say the octopus brain is totally different to a human one, but we need this synapse or this neurotransmitter,” Dölen says. “We could write down a list of these minimal building blocks of complex behavior.” And that’s what she and Edsinger have started doing.

 

They knew that ecstasy works by causing neurons to release serotonin, a signaling chemical that affects our mood. The drug does that by sticking to a protein called the serotonin transporter, or SERT, which neurons normally use to suck up the chemical. Ecstasy’s presence reverses that flow, creating a massive, mood-altering dump of serotonin.

 

Octopuses have their own version of SERT, and Dölen and Edsinger showed that it’s just a 50 percent match to ours. Despite these differences, the specific bit of the protein that sticks to ecstasy is almost identical in both species, which is why the drug affects both. “We weren’t expecting it to have quite so much overlap,” Dölen says.

 

“Octopuses really are the best example we have on Earth of a second intelligence,” says Robyn Crook, a neuroscientist from San Francisco State University. We last shared a common ancestor with them around 800 million years ago, and their brains have evolved independently from ours. And yet Dölen’s study showed that our brains have a few extreme similarities, from the molecular level to the behavioral one. It strengthens the idea, Crook says, that “there are only so many ways to make an intelligent brain.”

 

Source

[Matrix]

lol who goes to work and thinks of giving MDMA to an octopus ?

 

second question who is monitoring MDMA stocks at this place ?

 

last question is there any positions vacant there lol just joking 😁

[xpkRAKE]

It sounds pointless and cruel to me.

[mp68terr]

It's not about being useful or not...

You make the experiment. Is there a 'significant' difference compare to controls? Yes, you publish. You get funds. You continue your experiments...

[steven36]

36 minutes ago, mp68terr said:

It's not about being useful or not...

You make the experiment. Is there a 'significant' difference compare to controls? Yes, you publish. You get funds. You continue your experiments...

The world is nuts they be like that is  cruel to animals but give me some,  humans experiment with with taking this kind of stuff all the time,  that's why they gave it to a octopus instead of a human they already know what it does to humans ,so giving it too a human would not tell them anything they dont already know.  Some people eat octopus i tired it before  .

 

The octopus freaked out like a human when they take too much and they had a good time at a lower dose like a human does .. Humans think there the only intelligent beings on earth when there not .There the most stupid, even the smallest brain thing on earth  if you put a pill of  Ecstasy down for it to eat it want take it. only way they will take if you force it on them or put in some food or something. That should tell you something about humans. Only humans are stupid enough to digest it to begin with.  Humans take this crap and expect people not research to see what it does . If they don't research how will ever see does it have any value at all? 

[mp68terr]

About the research. The 'problem' with humans is that they can speak, express themselves and maybe think too much, making the research complicated. Animals are more convenient, just measure a parameter and you're done. Weird response, let's change the dosage. Then measure simple/direct parameters, like the time octopuses spent in the room with the other octopus. Easy, then just do the math (statistics) .

[steven36]

42 minutes ago, mp68terr said:

About the research. The 'problem' with humans is that they can speak, express themselves and maybe think too much, making the research complicated. Animals are more convenient, just measure a parameter and you're done. Weird response, let's change the dosage. Then measure simple/direct parameters, like the time octopuses spent in the room with the other octopus. Easy, then just do the math (statistics) .

They run  studies  in Humans as well .

Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies

 

MDMA Studies Sponsored by MAPS

https://maps.org/participate/participate-in-research

 

There testing to see  if will it cure PTSD (Post-traumatic stress disorder)  ,  also one place is  testing it  for startle response.

 

 

Quote

There is considerable previous human experience using LSD in the context of psychotherapy. From the 1950s through the early 1970s, psychiatrists, therapists, and researchers administered LSD to thousands of people as a treatment for alcoholism, as well as for anxiety and depression in people with advanced stage cancer. MAPS' completed and future research conforms to modern drug development standards, and will help guide the development of additional research into the risks and benefits of LSD-assisted psychotherapy.

https://maps.org/research/psilo-lsd

 

The risk must of outweighed the benefits,  because now days LSD  is no longer used for these things , If they don't run studies they  never know . I took LSD back in the day it didn't cure me from wanting to drink . I stop taking Psychedelics back in the 1990s . I no longer drink, so it's in remission , but still  i crave a drink once a alcoholic always and alcoholic there is no real cure.  When I stop drinking the last time was years after the last time I fired on Acid.

[Syona Gooep]

It appears that corrupt allopathic medicine (psychiatry division) is really desperate to latch on to any "scientific" research finding, no matter how unlikely it applies to humans, as long as it confirms their false concocted dogma of serotonin as the happiness chemical.

 

A sizable volume of sound research studies demonstrated that increasing serotonin and tryptophan either with drugs or supplements (not food because food's unlikely to significantly raise tryptophan or serotonin in the brain) is linked to brain dysfunction, stress hormone release, cognitive deficits, inflammation, impaired blood circulation in the brain, hypertension, cancer, and other less than "happy" effects - https://www.supplements-and-health.com/tryptophan-side-effects.html

 

The "serotonin-happiness" mantra, just like the mechanistic simplistic "chemical imbalance" idea, are almost entirely all-too convenient inventions of the medical-pharma business, which allowed them to sell their highly profitable antidepressant drugs, such as SSRIs, while causing massive human destruction. And for agents of the natural medicine industry to sell tryptophan and 5HTP supplements. Because of the vast propaganda of both industries almost everyone repeats their disinformation on serotonin, antidepressants, etc as if it were the truth.