Mouse Vision - Psychedelics & PTSD - Psychedelics & Addiction - Hippocampus & Statistics

0 views

Skip to first unread message

Breedlove, S

unread,

Mar 11, 2026, 6:17:41 AM (6 days ago) Mar 11

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/mar/10/short-films-brain-activity-mice-how-they-see-world

Short films made from brain activity of mice aim to show how they see world

Ian Sample Science editor

Scientists have reconstructed short movies from the brain activity of mice that watched videos for a project that aspires to lift the veil on how animals perceive the world.

The brief movie clips are grainy and pixellated, but provide a glimpse of how mice processed footage that featured people taking part in various sports from gymnastics to horse riding and wrestling.

The work is in its infancy, but as technology advances, scientists hope to eavesdrop on a richer suite of animal perceptions and ultimately gain fresh insights into their experiences and how brains more broadly respond to their surroundings.

“The nice thing with humans is you can just ask someone, what did you dream about? What did you see? What are you hallucinating?” said Dr Joel Bauer at the Sainsbury Wellcome Centre at University College London. “But we don’t have that access with animals in the same way.”

Central to the work was an artificial intelligence program that won a recent scientific competition to predict how electrical activity in the visual cortex of the mouse brain changes depending on what the animals are seeing. The visual cortex receives raw input from the retina and turns it into a coherent view of the world.

To reconstruct what mice were watching, the scientists first used an infrared laser to record how neurons were firing in the visual cortex as the rodents watched 10-second-long movie clips. They then fed blank video data into the AI program and steadily altered the imagery until the AI predicted the same patterns of brain activity as those seen in the mice. Details are published in the journal eLife.

Mice have poor eyesight compared with humans, so the reconstructed videos may never be as clear as the originals. But at a rough guess, Bauer suspects scientists could make the footage about seven times sharper than it is at present.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/01/magazine/ibogaine-psychedelic-treatment-trauma-mental-health.html

It’s an Obscure Psychedelic Used to Treat Trauma. Could It Help Me?

By Robert Draper

The hallucinations began the moment I lay back onto the mat and pulled the mask over my eyes. Oh, I instantly thought, this is not at all what I expected.

The first images were assembled like a film strip, a sharply focused Technicolor row of strong, grim-faced men who appeared to be some sort of tribal chiefs. Within seconds, a green tint covered their faces, which then dissolved, replaced by images of conflict. Bodies strewed across a battlefield. Starving children. They, too, dissolved. A pile of rocks took shape. From the pile, several long, dark snakes slithered out.

This could be unpleasant, I thought.

A crackling sensation coursed through my entire body, as if all my neurons were firing — not in any way painful, but also inescapable. I could feel my hands sweating. My ears buzzed, and it wasn’t long before I heard the murmuring voices of people who weren’t there, followed by the sound of puking from people who were.

There were 11 of us in the treatment room, in a basement in a cottage that overlooked the Pacific Ocean just south of Tijuana, Mexico, where ibogaine — a Schedule I drug in the United States — is legal. It was the night before Thanksgiving. We all had our reasons for coming to the treatment clinic called Ambio Life Sciences. Several in the group were veterans suffering from PTSD, traumatic brain injury, substance abuse or some combination of those. A sex-crimes detective had been in a terrible car accident and lost much of her short-term memory. A Marine veteran and blueberry farmer in Georgia was quietly drinking his life away.

And there was Erin, a Texas-based corporate consultant who had suffered trauma that began in childhood and continued in the workplace. Erin’s mat was next to mine at the far end of the treatment room. Because we were the only two in the group not to throw up during the 10-hour experience, we later referred to ours as the Quiet Corner.

The drug is derived from the Tabernanthe iboga plant, found mainly in Gabon in central Africa. The powerful hallucinogen has long been used there in the initiation ritual that is part of the Bwiti spiritual tradition, involving an intense all-night group ceremony of dance and music and fire-keeping that culminates in a trancelike state.

--------------------

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/10/nx-s1-5742457/psilocybin-magic-mushroom-quit-smoking

A low dose of psilocybin helps smokers quit in new study

Will Stone

The long-running campaign against smoking could find reinforcements from the new wave of research into psychedelics.

Though much of the attention around psychedelics has focused on depression and other mental health conditions, researchers believe these substances also hold the potential to transform addiction treatment.

A new study makes the strongest case yet for a psychedelic drug's impact on smoking, which remains the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S.

The trial, conducted by a team at Johns Hopkins University, compared nicotine patches to the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, known as psilocybin.

At the end of six months, those who had taken just one dose of psilocybin had more than six times greater odds of being abstinent from cigarettes than their counterparts who relied on the nicotine substitute.

Everyone in the study also underwent cognitive behavioral therapy for smoking cessation over the course of 13 weeks.

"I was surprised by the sheer magnitude of the effect," says Matthew Johnson, the study's author and a professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins.

The findings, published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open on Tuesday, came from a sample of 82 current smokers, who were randomly separated into two groups.

Similar to other psychedelic trials, the participants had support from facilitators to make sure they were comfortable and prepared for their trip. They ingested a relatively high dose of pure psilocybin.

--------------------

https://www.thetransmitter.org/memory/hippocampus-builds-reputation-as-general-purpose-statistical-learning-machine/

Hippocampus builds reputation as ‘general-purpose statistical learning machine’

By Natalia Mesa

Experience kindles most of our learning throughout life, without any explicit instruction or reward. Thanks to this process, called statistical learning, people unconsciously recognize patterns in their surroundings, and infants soak up language.

The hippocampus, it turns out, may be essential for this capability, according to a new preprint, beginning to resolve a long-standing debate. Numerous functional MRI studies have suggested that the structure is involved in statistical learning, but lesion studies have produced mixed results.

“This is a tour-de-force study,” says Anna Schapiro, associate professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who was not involved in the work. “It makes me feel more confident that, yes, the hippocampus is involved in statistical learning, but it’s also necessary for that learning across species.”

In the study, people and mice learned to respond—by pressing a key or licking a waterspout, respectively—to a particular sound. As they performed this “cover” task, they also heard an irrelevant four-note sequence at random times, interspersed with the other sound. After repeating this cover task 100 times, both people and rodents showed strong pupil dilation, a sign of surprise, whenever the sequence of notes changed slightly, with more similar sequences evoking a smaller response—indicating that they had passively learned the original musical motif and abstract rules about its structure.

Neuronal populations in the hippocampus encoded not only the original and altered tone sequences but also how frequently each occurred. Pharmacologically or optogenetically shutting down hippocampal neurons in the mice prevented them from passively learning the auditory pattern and making generalizations about how often it played, but it didn’t disrupt their performance on the cover task.