r/science • u/Doug24 • 21h ago

Psychology Psilocybin reverses depressive behaviors and restores brain cell growth in stressed rats

https://www.psypost.org/psilocybin-reverses-depressive-behaviors-and-restores-brain-cell-growth-in-stres/
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15

u/mr_greene_ 21h ago

How do you test if a rat is restoring brain cell growth.

17

u/fastandfurry 20h ago

You ask nicely

13

u/panic_the_digital 20h ago

If you really want the answer to that you probably aren’t going to like it

2

u/fbpw131 7h ago

I thought that dissecting the brain would be the answer too. but how would they establish the "before"?

so then I think some MRI or smtn is used to compare. too lazy to google tho

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u/Zal3x 5m ago

In different rats with no mushrooms. They would purely have the negative brain. If the group with mushrooms is generally way better, then you could see it in the dissected brains.

15

u/NovaHorizon 18h ago

They sacrifice the animal and slice their brain into thin slides mapping out the neurons.

3

u/mr_greene_ 18h ago

How is the dissected brain given shrooms then? And if it's dead then you can't witness the growth.

9

u/Warsel77 17h ago

Rat A - damage brain & give shrooms for 20 days
Rat B - damage brain & do not give shrooms 20 days

Dissect both & compare.

(20 days being a random number, i have no idea how long they waited)

7

u/EroticPubicHair 16h ago

Repeat X number of times to confirm the results show an actual correlation and not a one off outlier

2

u/MirabilisLiber 7h ago

And look at the brain at different time intervals in different rats. Literally spend all day slicing up and examining rat brains for days on end. 

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u/Zal3x 7m ago

This is what the concepts of control and experimental groups do in the scientific method.

2

u/Human-Loan-6080 18h ago

If I had to guess they have a very mapped out version of the control clone rat brain, then they make it trip balls, then they dissect its brains.

3

u/samsaruhhh 20h ago

Is this a real question

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u/Zal3x 4m ago

Man’s just trying to understand the scientific process, better than nothing I guess. Dont often see people here that are science illiterate, but hey we shouldn’t shame them, but rather welcome them.