this is one of these papers i have just been fascinated by for a really long time it was published in NUMBER_TOKEN by two microbiologists named doris keller and wayne umbrite and they were both employed by merck pharmaceuticals they were not psychedelic experts they only have two papers on psychedelics and the name of this paper is permanent alteration of behavior in mice by chemical and psychological means and there's a lot packed into this very short two-page paper one you can make some kind of political extrapolations about what they were trying to do you know this was at a time when there was just starting to be a lot of interest in the possibility that lsd could be used as a model for psychosis specifically schizophrenia one of the big discrepancies between the psychedelic experience and the schizophrenic experience is that the psychedelic experience is transient and reversible in most instances and the schizophrenic experience is not reversible in most instances and so the question emerges okay if this is a pharmacological model for schizophrenia why is it transient and can that be changed can this alteration be made permanent so that's what i see as a sort of implicit goal that is not stated in this article even more interesting than that is the means they use to achieve this permanent behavioral alteration which was done via the co-administration of lsd we're all familiar with lsd and indole so indole is not usually discussed as a psychoactive or even a bioactive substance outside of the context of microbiology i mean it is it is bioactive but it's not used therapeutically as a drug it's actually because it's ubiquitous it's somewhat hard to even research the bioactivity of indole i don't know anyone that has ever you know taken NUMBER_TOKEN milligrams of indole to see what happens and i wouldn't recommend that anyone do that so just the very idea of using indole was a little bit unusual but they co-administered lsd and indole and they found a permanent behavioral alteration or one that lasted many months in mice that was manifested in terms of a head twitch and again what i also find very fascinating about this paper is the scientific method if executed correctly can elucidate truths that the researchers weren't even aware of if you are carefully observing reality and you are conducting your experiments in a rigorous fashion it might be the case that you discover something don't even realize it and then subsequent researchers find that the most important aspect of your experiment was something that you weren't even aware of so in this case they are focused on this permanent behavioral alteration this uh interaction between lsd and indole and the fact that they are measuring this alteration in terms of a head twitch response is almost a secondary component to this paper but in the you know half century plus since this publication the head twitch response has been the subject of thousands of scientific articles every month you will find new articles about head twitch and you might be thinking okay this is a really obscure subject to spend an hour talking about i would say it is not that obscure and i would say that you know for people that are just getting interested in psychedelic
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