Locator: 45436RESEARCH.
From Wired, September, 2023
Gül Dölen
Research.
- critical periods of brain development
- multiple critical periods
- walking, seeing, hearing
- bonding with parents, developing absolute pitch
- assimilating into a culture
- is there a "master key" or opening (or re-opening "lost") critical periods?
- spoiler alert: psychedelic drugs (previously discussed on the blog)
- enter, stage right: Gül Dölen (I assume pronounced Jill Dylan)
- neuroscientist, Baltimore, MD
- grew up in San Antonio, TX
- began with a beach vacation, Antalya, Turkey -- eight years old
- in college: Brain and Behavior
- psychedelics hijack the machinery used by molecules that occur naturally in the brain
- noted strikingly similar molecular structures between the neurotransmitter serotonin and LSD
- enrolled in a dual MD/PhD program at Brown University and MIT
- joined a lab that studied learning and memory during "critical periods"
- her focus focused on fragile X syndrome; autism
- oxytocin + serotonin = love
- area in the brain: the nucleur accumbens
- started her own lab at Johns Hopkins, 2014
- that's when she went down the psychedelic rabbit hole
- octopus studies; MDMA mimics serotonin; changed the behavior of octopi -- landmark study
- partner: French neuroscientist, Romain Nardou
- Dölen discovers a "critical period" -- publication-worthy on its own
- first drug tried on mice: cocaine
- then MDMA; results similar to oxytocin
- 2019: published those results; thought that this was all done, then decided to try LSD
- that's when things really got weird
- switch to drug pioneers Alexander and Ann Shulgin and the lab off Ted Sawyer
- LSD worked as well as MDMA for re-opening critical periods
- also worked with
- ketamine (a dissociative; anesthetic)
- psilocybin (aka magic mushrooms)
- ibogaine (a psychedelic derived rom an African plant)
- cocaine did not work
- 2021: Austria; inadvertently discovered; ketamine re-opens a vision-related critical period
- Dölen felt something must "connect" all the psychedelics
- and that connection? Genetic.
- her lab has pinpointed 65 genes that seem to be involved in the process
- current study: critical period to re-open what is lost during a stroke
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