[ad_1]
What's got eight legs, a lot of feelings and could be spotted by hugging a rave? An octopus on the MDMA.
According to New York Times, a study published Thursday Current Biology documents the effects of the psychoactive drug MDMA (also known as ecstasy or Molly) on octopuses. It turns out that – similar to its effect on people – the substance makes these creatures of the sea quite delicate.
These results were surprising for Gul Dolen, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins University who led the study, and other researchers on octopuses, as octopuses are generally antisocial creatures. But under the effects of MDMA, the free-roaming animals wanted to stick together and spend time together, contrary to their usual behavior of fighting to death.
Dolen came up with the idea of testing an octopus's reaction to the drug after studying MDMA for several years, reports NPR.
"My lab has been studying MDMA for a long time and we have developed many neural mechanisms that allow MDMA to have these really profound social effects," the neuroscientist told NPR.
Sea invertebrates have made seductive test subjects because of their recorded antisocial behavior, but also because of how their brains compare to the human brain. While octopuses have begun to follow a different evolutionary trajectory than humans hundreds of millions of years ago, they still show great aptitude for learning and resolving problems. Octopuses can open jars, pick winners of the World Cup and make escape attempts.
According to NPR, scientists have recently discovered, after sequencing the complete genetic code of an octopus, that the "protein that binds the serotonin signaling molecule to brain cells" is almost identical in humans and octopuses.
To see if this protein had the same actions in humans and octopuses, Dolen and his colleague Eric Edsinge of the Marine Biology Laboratory donated MDMA Octopuses by placing the creatures in glass containers filled with infused seawater of MDMA.
Under a high dose of drugs (greater than what a human would take for recreational purposes), the octopuses acted "panicked" and were just "watching everything". But under the effect of a dose similar to that of a human, animals began to become curious and friendly. Instead of avoiding their tank mates, the octopuses drew closer and began to touch each other in a manner that resembled a hug.
We can not say for sure if these acts were done through the affection as we understand it, but Dolen thinks it shows that we are perhaps more alien to seemingly alien creatures than we think and that some of our social functions may seem unique human could have been encoded much further back than we realized.
Source link
