Time For Something A Little Different -- Brain Research -- August 21, 2023

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