Technology, evolution, HAR

[watersprite]

Interesting research which may lead to new understanding of autism and schizophrenia:

here

 

[Neonatal RRT]

Related: An interesting theory - The human brain doubled in power, very suddenly, 200,000 years ago. Why? - Big Think

 

[watersprite]

@Neonatal RRT
There is no way to prove that, but it is always compelling when someone finds something that might have a kind of double significance. In the case of magic mushrooms, they make people feel good and ooo maybe they made humans “special.”

A kind of anti-humanist wannabe claim that we need a substance in order to create art and culture?

I have nothing against the magic mushroom. Grew up in N. California and well…

 

[Tom]

Well then if it had been up to me I guess we'd still be living in trees, eat'in bananas. I could never eat mushrooms. Wrong texture.

 

[Tom]

I have to admit the idea is interesting, but wonder if it were true, why it would only happen once. These mushrooms presumably existed long prior to 200,000 years ago and still do today. Are we the only ones to have eaten them?

Now I know for a fact the Neuts on my property love mushrooms. But how many Neuts have you seen graduate from Harvard? How many have even been accepted?

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

A clue about importance comes at the end of the article with the statement about looking at non-coding regions. Many people have the naive view of one gene = one effect and that neglects the impact of pleitropic regulation, the effect upon diverse clusters of genes. Those silent regions can exert regulatory function even by their impact upon DNA supercoiling. some genes or even promotor regions are hindered from acting by supercoiling interfering with access to biomolecules. Action within a silent region can relax the supercoiling, allowing regions upstream or downstream to become active. I believe this was first seen in TMV, but I do not doubt that such may be present in eucaryotes. This type of modulation would have profound impacts upon the timing of development.

 

[watersprite]

Action within a silent region can relax the supercoiling, allowing regions upstream or downstream to become active. I believe this was first seen in TMV,

More on this and a link if you’ve can?

 

[watersprite]

@Tom I guess your neut’s HAR has their brains developing too fast for filling out university applications. Their religion forbids higher education? Or they’re too stoned all the time to bother.

@Gerald Wilgus (?) Maybe the researchers focused on R17, because it keeps the silent regions from complicating the results.

 

[Tom]

A clue about importance comes at the end of the article with the statement about looking at non-coding regions. Many people have the naive view of one gene = one effect and that neglects the impact of pleitropic regulation, the effect upon diverse clusters of genes. Those silent regions can exert regulatory function even by their impact upon DNA supercoiling. some genes or even promotor regions are hindered from acting by supercoiling interfering with access to biomolecules. Action within a silent region can relax the supercoiling, allowing regions upstream or downstream to become active. I believe this was first seen in TMV, but I do not doubt that such may be present in eucaryotes. This type of modulation would have profound impacts upon the timing of development.

I think its great you understand it to this level. I know I never could.

Unless maybe they come out with a book that explains it at a very simple level with analogies, etc. Something like '..so then the DNA comes out of the hole, goes around the tree and then back in the hole'.

 

[Richelle-H]

Okay, so back around the time I turned 30, I experimented with psychotropics, specifically LSD and Psilocybin, actually obtaining some spores of a Psilocybin strain and growing and consuming some from a kit.

I will state that the experiences did change me, but it is hard to quantify. I took both for the express purposes of doing just that. IT was however rather stupid of me to do both while I was alone and with nobody to keep an eye on me. That was mostly because of all the horror stories put out to discourage the use of Psychedelics. I have since figured that they were an early form of disinformation, but still it was incredibly rash of me to experiment on my own.

Even so, I believe my dangerous, unsupervised use of two powerful psychoactive drugs, made me the person I am today. Did not cure my autism, but I believe it opened some pathways that made my affect less bothersome to me and as a result less noticeable to others except in stressful situations. Not advocating here, nit even suggesting, this is just mere speculation on my part.

Now I never had any major hallucinations, some spatial and temporal distortions to be sure, and an alteration in the way my brain processed information (some slowing in verbal communication). I know this because I was even stupider driving and interacting with others while tripping. Hey, I was a lot less enlightened and did a lot of ill advised things back then (like going to see the first Muppet movie with a couple of friends and we all dropped LSD right before buying our tickets).

Now, having said all that. I am not quite convinced that Psilocybin is any sort of panacea for autism. Sure, it might help in making new pathways in the brain under the right conditions, but I think it might be a little hit and miss in its application. I took both psychedelics with focused, which was to get inside myself and unlock what I refused to examine. Not having a particularly stressful life and not having any distractions to interfere, I may have achieved my goal, but in retrospect it was a very dangerous thing to do on my own, but a lot cheaper in the long run than years of psychotherapy, which I have little use for because it is associated with bad things in my life.

Just one person's experience and nothing more, and while both articles are interesting, they do not really mean much to one my age. I could posit that my earlier use could be an underlying cause for the seizure I had back in the middle of 2020, but I just shrug at that possibility. The human brain is too complex an organ to fully understand, much as we struggle to do so.

I think Lao Tzu was onto something in advocating naturalness, spontaneity and freedom from social conventions and desires. Did drugs do that? I cannot say! I just know with certainty that I would not be the same person without the experience.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

@Tom I guess your neut’s HAR has their brains developing too fast for filling out university applications. Their religion forbids higher education? Or they’re too stoned all the time to bother.

@Gerald Wilgus (?) Maybe the researchers focused on R17, because it keeps the silent regions from complicating the results.

Sometimes the focus is because you have the tools that allows you to measure activity. Until recently understanding the impact of silent regions, including palindromic sequences thought to be junk, only occurred when alterations created defects, an indirect method, at best. I enjoy learning about genetic regulation, and at one time did research, contributing to the understanding that the site of action of a genetic regulator may be independent from the site of recognition for it to act. This was the gene N in bacteriophage lambda. N is required to allow genetic transcription to proceed beyond a stop point on the DNA. That is its site of action. But, to be able to act, N had to be bound with the polymerase at the promotor site, far downstream from the site of action. I just wish I was good enough to continue such work.

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

More on this and a link if you’ve can?

A meta analysis is here. Possible Roles of DNA Supercoiling in Transcription - Madame Curie Bioscience Database - NCBI Bookshelf One may infer that there can be a cascade of effects driven by structural alterations of the DNA/Chromatin.

 

[watersprite]

@Gerald Wilgus thanks, added that to my reading list.

Spoiler: “rambling”

This is an aside (sorry it is how my brain works lol) but I wonder if anybody has looked/at researched how many points are being lit each time an area activates? Not just in the area but in the whole brain.
Because I for example was given an abnormally large amount of education, travel, physical exercise, and other privelages, did my brain develop more thoroughly, boosting me into a higher HFA.

Also, if we are not normal and I say that with doubt, then how are they establishing normal?
These genetic differences we have could be as normal for humans as others, historically, couldn’t they? Presently they occur less often than “normals.”
Is this a case of us being labeled as less-than because of being a minority or because of not meshing with the dominant social behaviors, bonds, etc.?

 

[Gerald Wilgus]

@Gerald Wilgus thanks, added that to my reading list.

Spoiler: “rambling”

This is an aside (sorry it is how my brain works lol) but I wonder if anybody has looked/at researched how many points are being lit each time an area activates? Not just in the area but in the whole brain.
Because I for example was given an abnormally large amount of education, travel, physical exercise, and other privelages, did my brain develop more thoroughly, boosting me into a higher HFA.

Also, if we are not normal and I say that with doubt, then how are they establishing normal?
These genetic differences we have could be as normal for humans as others, historically, couldn’t they? Presently they occur less often than “normals.”
Is this a case of us being labeled as less-than because of being a minority or because of not meshing with the dominant social behaviors, bonds, etc.?

You will need to learn a little about the syntax/shorthand of molecular genetics. Any questions and I will be happy to help.

About your rambling . . . I believe that there is a great diversity in human cognition, and in part because of the structure of the modular brain. After my experiences I can never accept that different modes of thought are less than. Normalcy is the framing of those who would stigmatize people for not meeting their arbitrary values. However, I think, like language acquisition, there is an inborn facility by most people to understand social constructs, and those of us without that facility are ignored at best, but more likely to be marginalized. I wonder if the normals doing that marginalization realize the mental illness they create?

 

[Au Naturel]

@Neonatal RRT
There is no way to prove that, but it is always compelling when someone finds something that might have a kind of double significance. In the case of magic mushrooms, they make people feel good and ooo maybe they made humans “special.”

A kind of anti-humanist wannabe claim that we need a substance in order to create art and culture?

I have nothing against the magic mushroom. Grew up in N. California and well…

The fungus is among us?

 

[Au Naturel]

Okay, so back around the time I turned 30, I experimented with psychotropics, specifically LSD and Psilocybin, actually obtaining some spores of a Psilocybin strain and growing and consuming some from a kit.

I will state that the experiences did change me, but it is hard to quantify. I took both for the express purposes of doing just that. IT was however rather stupid of me to do both while I was alone and with nobody to keep an eye on me. That was mostly because of all the horror stories put out to discourage the use of Psychedelics. I have since figured that they were an early form of disinformation, but still it was incredibly rash of me to experiment on my own.

Even so, I believe my dangerous, unsupervised use of two powerful psychoactive drugs, made me the person I am today. Did not cure my autism, but I believe it opened some pathways that made my affect less bothersome to me and as a result less noticeable to others except in stressful situations. Not advocating here, nit even suggesting, this is just mere speculation on my part.

Now I never had any major hallucinations, some spatial and temporal distortions to be sure, and an alteration in the way my brain processed information (some slowing in verbal communication). I know this because I was even stupider driving and interacting with others while tripping. Hey, I was a lot less enlightened and did a lot of ill advised things back then (like going to see the first Muppet movie with a couple of friends and we all dropped LSD right before buying our tickets).

Now, having said all that. I am not quite convinced that Psilocybin is any sort of panacea for autism. Sure, it might help in making new pathways in the brain under the right conditions, but I think it might be a little hit and miss in its application. I took both psychedelics with focused, which was to get inside myself and unlock what I refused to examine. Not having a particularly stressful life and not having any distractions to interfere, I may have achieved my goal, but in retrospect it was a very dangerous thing to do on my own, but a lot cheaper in the long run than years of psychotherapy, which I have little use for because it is associated with bad things in my life.

Just one person's experience and nothing more, and while both articles are interesting, they do not really mean much to one my age. I could posit that my earlier use could be an underlying cause for the seizure I had back in the middle of 2020, but I just shrug at that possibility. The human brain is too complex an organ to fully understand, much as we struggle to do so.

I think Lao Tzu was onto something in advocating naturalness, spontaneity and freedom from social conventions and desires. Did drugs do that? I cannot say! I just know with certainty that I would not be the same person without the experience.

Back when I was in my early 20s I discovered hallucinogens. It was part self-medication, part recreation. There were certain drugs that had the ability to bust me out of my depression. I discovered "naturalness, spontaneity and freedom from social conventions and desires" in spades. I also discovered NTs liked me more when I was high. All those aspie traits that drove NTs nuts mellowed out. Brownie points if they were high too.

I think I learned a lot of important lessons. I think psychoactive drugs open up possible neural pathways other than the ones you're currently stuck in. Great for thinking outside the box. I saw the world for what it really was and learned acceptance of what I could not change. I began to love all the little things around me that most people either don't notice or don't think are "important." My aspie mind kept me fussing over things that didn't really matter. When I was high I was still an aspie but I was one who could stop agonizing about how things ought to be. The trick is not to let go of the lessons learned when one came down.

I did a lot of my tripping alone. Solo tripping never bothered me. That gave me the freedom to wander and dance around naked. (Terrible at social dancing but I did study Modern Dance in college.) Clothing became almost "unbare-able" when I was high. I did some tripping around people who were tolerant sorts but that was a rare situation. Pot, in particular, also had a strong sexual component. Having people around meant I had to tamp that particular need down.

Too poor to afford a lot of drugs and not connected to any serious dealers. That might have been to my benefit.

I never had a bad trip though there were a couple of really strange trips. Embrace the strange! Only had outright hallucinations a couple of times but I did have interesting visual effects. Some people really freak out at their radically altered perceptions or are afraid they won't come down. I imagine a lot of people do need a guide the first few times. And bad trips are often the result of negative baggage you were carrying when you went into the trip.

No matter how high - or how drunk - I got I never had a desire to drive or do anything else particularly dangerous. I guess other people are different.

By my late 20s I was pretty much done with the drugs. I figured I'd learned everything I was going to.

I went thru psychotherapy once and was not impressed. Autism and ADD were my problems - didn't realize it at the time - not childhood abuse or social bullying. That's something I learned to let go of on my own.