Most of the 300 species we know of today will kill each other if released in the same tank. Octopuses are highly antisocial creatures… until some very goofy scientist gives them MDMA, the same psychedelic stimulant (yes, MDMA is a psychedelic) that has been linked to extroversion and increased feelings of closeness with others.
in last week’s installment have a good future He podcast featuring Gideon Litchfield and Lauren Goode They talk about how fast everything is changing in the world talked to Johns Hopkins University philosopher, linguist, and neuroscientist Gul Dolen, who wanted to find out, to better understand the effects of psychedelics on the brain What would happen if some octopuses were fed molly? Ecstasy, or 3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine, also known as MDMA.
Naturally, the octopus soon became Dolen’s most famous study in ecstasy. But, as bizarre as it sounds, this was serious business, like the rest of their research on how psychedelics affect people’s brains, and they’ve already found promising results about whether they can help people with conditions like mental illness. How can we help you overcome situations? Post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or stroke.
But let’s go back to octopuses and their underwater ‘travels’. This showed that giving them the substance made their behavior more affectionate. Gul Dolen remembers that “when we gave him the MDMA, They started out being antisocial and staying away from the camera that had other octopuses, they became social and preferred to spend most of their time in that camera,
Social octopuses, talking and even doing something that appears to dance. humans in one To go mad, basically. The strange thing is that octopuses and humans are completely different. Why study animals in this way to understand humans?
“This famous neuroscientist, J. Z. Young, wrote a book called a model of the brain, And in it he argued that if we want to understand complexity – if we want to know how to build really complex behavior out of synapses and circuits and molecules – we should rather look at a brain very similar to our own, like Whether it’s a primate or a monkey, we should really start with an animal that is as different from us as possible,” Dolen explains. And it looks like octopuses are the perfect candidate: ”They’re very, very different from us. Their genetic kinship is more akin to that of a slug and, however, they are capable of some amazingly complex behaviour,” he noted.
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