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Author Topic:   Checked Your L-Dopa Levels Lately?
Percy
Member
Posts: 23144
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 1 of 8 (36511)
04-08-2003 5:06 PM


This appeared in the News section of the latest issue of Skeptic Magazine:
Paranormal beliefs linked to brain chemistry
The magazine New Scientist released the following story on July 24 2002:
Whether or not you believe in the paranormal may depend entirely on your brain chemistry. People with high levels of dopamine are more likely to find significance in coincidences, and pick out meaning and patterns where there are none. Peter Brugger, a neurologist from the University Hospital in Zurich, Switzerland, has suggested before that people who believe in the paranormal often seem to be more willing to see patterns or relationships between events where skeptics perceive nothing.
To find out what could be triggering these thoughts, Brugger persuaded 20 self-confessed believers and 20 skeptics to take part in an experiment. Brugger and his colleagues asked the two groups to distinguish real faces from scrambled faces as the images were flashed up briefly on a screen. The volunteers then did a similar task, this time identifying real words from made-up ones.
Believers were much more likely than skeptics to see a word or face when there was not one, Brugger revealed last week at a meeting of the Federation of Neuroscience Societies in Paris. However, skeptics were more likely to miss real faces and words when they appeared on the screen
The researchers then gave the volunteers a drug celled L-dopa, which is usually used to relieve the symptoms of Parkinson's disease by increasing levels of doparnine in the brain. Both groups made more mistakes under the influence of the drug, but the skeptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing.
That suggests that paranormal thoughts are associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain, and the L-dopa makes skeptics less skeptical. "Dopamine seems to help people see patterns," says Brugger. However, the single dose of the drug did not seem to increase the tendency of believers to see coincidences or relationships between the words and images. That could mean that there is a plateau effect for them, with more dopamine having relatively little effect above a certain threshold, says Peter Krummenacher, one of Brugger's colleagues. Dopamine is an important chemical involved in the brain's reward and motivation system, and in addiction. Its role in the reward system may be to help us decide whether information is relevant or irrelevant, says Franse Schenk from the University of Lausanne in Switzerland.
--Percy

Replies to this message:
 Message 4 by mark24, posted 04-08-2003 8:28 PM Percy has not replied
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Ryan Bibler
Inactive Member


Message 2 of 8 (36518)
04-08-2003 5:58 PM


Hmm... coincidentally enough (or maybe not), high levels of dopamine are also associated with schizophrenia.
Maybe Freud wasn't too far off when he attributed the religious conversion experience to psychosis!

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John
Inactive Member


Message 3 of 8 (36528)
04-08-2003 6:50 PM
Reply to: Message 2 by Ryan Bibler
04-08-2003 5:58 PM



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mark24
Member (Idle past 5513 days)
Posts: 3857
From: UK
Joined: 12-01-2001


Message 4 of 8 (36539)
04-08-2003 8:28 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Percy
04-08-2003 5:06 PM


Marijuana
Percy,
I'm not sure if marijuana contains dopamine, I suspect not, but about 10 years ago on one of my rare sojourns into drug abuse, I/we got pretty high on the aforementioned. On the way home I couldn't stop seeing faces in trees, it was really wierd, every tree had a face. It was like Alice in Wonderland, or something. I understand that we are pre-programmed to see faces in randomness wherever possible, & I interpreted the "incident" (ahem) as a part of my brain that was rational or suppressive of this "face" function, became itself suppressed, allowing faces to "appear" where they normally wouldn't, but maybe you're onto something!
Mark
------------------
Occam's razor is not for shaving with.

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Minnemooseus
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior)
Joined: 11-11-2001
Member Rating: 5.7


Message 5 of 8 (36551)
04-09-2003 1:43 AM
Reply to: Message 1 by Percy
04-08-2003 5:06 PM


quote:
Believers were much more likely than skeptics to see a word or face when there was not one, Brugger revealed last week at a meeting of the Federation of Neuroscience Societies in Paris. However, skeptics were more likely to miss real faces and words when they appeared on the screen
Another way of saying this, is that the believers were more likely to see a word or face as real, regardless of whether the word or face was real.
This would probably be simular to the type of results you would get if you randomly chose 60% as being real, rather than randomly choosing 40% as being real. An optimist versus pessimist sort of thing.
Moose

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Mister Pamboli
Member (Idle past 7894 days)
Posts: 634
From: Washington, USA
Joined: 12-10-2001


Message 6 of 8 (36584)
04-09-2003 12:35 PM
Reply to: Message 1 by Percy
04-08-2003 5:06 PM


Fascinating stuff. I wonder, however, about the methodology. Were these skeptics and believers self identifying?
Interesting, too, that skeptics tended to miss real faces and words.
It does rather confirm my own gut feeling that science is advanced best by leaps of intuitive theorizing, challenged and reviewed by a radically skeptical methodology.

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Percy
Member
Posts: 23144
From: New Hampshire
Joined: 12-23-2000
Member Rating: 5.8


Message 7 of 8 (37174)
04-16-2003 7:20 PM


Ilon posted a good reply over at TalkOrigins:
--Percy

Replies to this message:
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Minnemooseus
Member
Posts: 3978
From: Duluth, Minnesota, U.S. (West end of Lake Superior)
Joined: 11-11-2001
Member Rating: 5.7


Message 8 of 8 (37178)
04-16-2003 7:41 PM
Reply to: Message 7 by Percy
04-16-2003 7:20 PM


My posting of message 5 (here) was triggered by reading Ilion's message there.
Moose

This message is a reply to:
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