In rodent models, chronic exposure to cannabis' psychoactive ingredient, Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol, during adolescence leads to abnormal behavior in adulthood. In female rats, this maladaptive behavior is characterized by endophenotypes for depressive-like and psychotic-like disorders as well as cognitive deficits. We recently reported that most depressive-like behaviors triggered by adolescent...
Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Previous studies have demonstrated that meditation may have positive effects on self-awareness, emotion regulation, attention processes, and also structural neuroplasticity [1]. However, the...
Depression is a common mental disorder that is associated with memory dysfunction. Ketamine has recently been demonstrated to be a rapid antidepressant. The mechanisms underlying how depression induces memory dysfunction and how ketamine relieves depressive symptoms remain poorly understood. In this work, we have three groups of male C57BL/6J mice: mice exposed to chronic social defeat stress...
Objective: Alcohol and cannabis misuse are related to impaired cognition. When inferring causality, four nonexclusive theoretical models can account for this association: 1) a common underlying vulnerability model; 2) a neuroplasticity model in which impairment is concurrent with changes in substance use but temporary because of neuroplastic brain processes that restore function; 3) a...
Abstract In 1992, a United Nations report had called work stress as ‘The 20th Century Disease’. The ‘always on’ economy of the 21st century has ensured that the prevalence of work-related stress is omnipresent even now like the mobile phones that perpetrate it. As stressors in the environment are continually present, what appears to be an antidote, is to change the response and have a more...
Sociality in primates is determined by the social brain and is the outcome of an intricate and multi-dimensional relationship between the brain size, the richness as well as the selectivity of the neural networks and the behavioral complexities emanating from the bonded relationships that underpin the social coalitions. Accumulating data from the neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience research...
Pregnenolone sulfate (PregS), an endogenous neurosteroid, which negatively and positively modulates gamma amino butyric acid subunit A (GABAA) and N-methyl D-aspartate (NMDA) receptors (R) respectively, among other potential neuroplastic changes on synaptic processes, has shown some beneficial effects on treating cognitive impairment associated with schizophrenia (CIAS) and negative symptoms....
tial impact of psychedelic drugs on psychiatry to that of the microscope on biology and, while this analogy may strike some as laughable, let us reflect for a moment that human research with psychedelics has been effectively moribund since the restrictive drug policy reforms of the 1960s-70s, and has only recently been revived. Classic serotonergic psychedelics – such as LSD, psilocybin and...
3,4-methylenedioxymethamphetamine (MDMA, "ecstasy") is a widely used entactogenic drug known to impair cognitive functions on the long-run. Both hippocampal and frontal cortical regions have well established roles in behavior, memory formation and other cognitive tasks and damage of these regions is associated with altered behavior and cognitive functions frequently described in otherwise...
The detrimental effects of amphetamines on developmental stages of NPCs are limited to rodent brain and it is not known if these effects occur in nonhuman primates which are the focus of the current investigation. Young adult rhesus macaques either experienced MDMA only, a combination of amphetamines (MDMA, MDA and methamphetamine) or no amphetamines (controls) and hippocampal tissue was...