Comments on: Psychotropic Base Rates: The Argument From Antibiotics

By: Anthony

Anthony — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:34:03 +0000

If you’re in the field, his jobs posts might be as hair-raising, but yeah – that’s some scary stuff.

By: Alrenous

Alrenous — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 06:16:30 +0000

Makes sense. It is the nature of complex structures to be delicate and sensitive. Most food is psychoactive in some subtle way.

Is there any plausibility to presuming there’s symbiotic brain bacteria? I was going to say that the lethal properties of the chemical can’t possibly be an explanation when the effect is negative. Then I realized I thought the brain was sterile of foreign life and I have zero evidence for that. Time to accept my ignorance.

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By: Nornagest

Nornagest — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 00:28:34 +0000

That series of posts is a special kind of hair-raising. I usually only hear the like from soldiers and security researchers.

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By: Anthony

Anthony — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 23:27:33 +0000

If you want more pretty molecular structures, look at Derek Lowe’s blog. I particularly like Things I won’t work with. Hexanitrohexaazaisowurtzitane is lovely! But he’s got chemical structures on all sorts of posts.

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By: Sarah

Sarah — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 22:36:21 +0000

By the way, let me be the first to cast GIANT DOUBTS on mouse models of autism.

There are theories, but no consensus, on the physiological causes of autism in humans. In fact, we don’t know that there’s one cause rather than many.

The diagnosis of autism in humans is behavioral, and very vague, and relies heavily on “high-level” skills like language and socializing, which mice, of course, don’t have in the same way humans do. I suspect that lots of different kinds of neural abnormalities can break language, for the same reason that lots of different kinds of damage can cause a car not to start. Not to mention that observable autistic traits vary a whole lot.

People say that “cancer’s not one disease.” But cancer at least has a common *form* — uncontrollably dividing, undifferentiated cells. And you can attack many kinds of cancer at once through mechanisms that deal with that form — hit it in the glucose supply, for instance. I think that, to our current knowledge, autism is a lot less of a unified phenomenon than cancer is.

Some mouse models of autism (or cousin conditions) are relatively sane. For example, the FMR1 gene, loss-of-function mutations in which cause Fragile X syndrome, causes some social/cognitive stuff in knockout mice. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3396120/

But this “maternal immune activation” thing is just a “face value” model. That is, when you stimulate the mouse mother’s immune system, you get babies who vocalize oddly, self-groom more, and approach other mice less. Is that autism? I’d say the answer is “mu” or “there’s no way to tell.” Do similar mechanisms cause autism in humans? Well, there’s conflicting evidence in the epidemiological studies whether mothers exposed to viruses during pregnancy are more likely to have autistic children.

IL-6 is today’s favorite Big Bad, and my gut says stuff like this (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3068755/) is probably buzzword-salad when you look at it closely. I’m not sure it’s not true, I just don’t trust these fuckers. They have no incentive at all not to fool themselves spinning these conjunctive webs of regulatory pathways.

My heuristic is to look at what actual differences (genetic & physiological) show up between autistics and nonautistics, and maybe even describe behavioral traits observationally again, because people see what they want to see. The mouse thing is on the shady side, even for an animal model.

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By: A440

A440 — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 20:12:51 +0000

In general, I would expect a good fraction of chemicals that can cross the blood-brain barrier to have some sort of psychoactive effect. But, of course, many can’t.

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By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 19:30:30 +0000

Wikipedia says that minocycline is sometimes used to treat toxoplasmosis:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxoplasmosis

…which suggests that it does have an antiprotozoal effect.

Toxo is so weird. I am not sure whether to be worried about the link between latent toxoplasmosis and increased risk of traffic accidents. There is at least a 30% chance that I am infected.

As for minocycline, I am also reminded of the thing about minocycline improving decision-making ability:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/hdn/link_antibiotic_seemingly_improves_decisionmaking/

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By: Luke Somers

Luke Somers — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 19:15:40 +0000

Don’t quaff to ID! Sheesh. Throw it at a monster first.

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By: Ialdabaoth

Ialdabaoth — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 19:09:39 +0000

Query: what changes did the viral infection have? Were they genetic, epigenetic or more downstream?

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By: pxib

pxib — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 18:53:11 +0000

We are also, on a very superficial level, integrated colonies of protists. Those eukaryote cells are, in turn, walled and gated factories employing what are functionally prokaryote workers and mechanisms. Chemistry which influences protists will, naturally, influence the operation of several of our colonies, and chemistry which influences bacteria may occasionally sneak through the factory gates.

At a deep level, all (non-viral) life operates like other life. Many critical and widespread adaptations occurred only once and a few of the creatures that managed them (famously the chloroplasts and mitochondria) have simply been installed as symbiotes.

It’s uniquely difficult to notice brain effects in the same way that we notice, for example, liver effects… but it’s not surprise that they should occur.

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