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Nicotine Improves Brain Function In Schizophrenics
An anonymous reader suggests a Cosmos Magazine note that nicotine has been shown to enhance attention and memory in schizophrenics. Research is now aimed at developing new treatments that could relieve symptoms and prevent smoking-related deaths. "A strong link between schizophrenia and smoking — with over three times as many schizophrenics smoking (70 to 90%) as the population at large — prompted scientists to investigate the link. Researchers led by Ruth Barr, a psychiatrist at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, set out to find if the nicotine in cigarettes was helping patients to overcome their difficulties with cognitive function, such as planning and memory in social and work settings."
I'll simply start telling folks I'm a schizophrenic to justify my pack a day habit.
Would you want to see what happens when I try to quit?
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
Nicotine itself is unlikely to make an effective treatment, because of its side effects and addictive potential, but drugs known as nicotinic agonists, which target nicotine receptors in the brain, are front runners in the challenge to find an effective replacement.
Haha. So rather than use a cheap natural solution it's better to get the expensive patented synthetic stuff. Riiiiiight... Now I see.
And all this time I thought that the voice in my head telling me not to smoke was common sense.
I would have thought smoking would bring on mental problems in the first place rather than be a palliative. Smokers have reduced lung function, less oxygen in the blood, which I think would lead to a more poorly functioning brain (as well as other organs), leading to things like depression and other mental problems.
"I bless every day that I continue to live, for every day is pure profit."
As I suffer from schizophrenia myself I know how bad your memory can get because of it. Maybe there is a connection between I stopped smoking and I (finally) got a diagnose on what was wrong with me. Perhaps it made the symptoms clearer?
I sure hope it is correct and doesn't get debunked.
This is old news -- nicotine has long been known to improve cognitive function in schizophrenics. I remember hearing about this in an undergrad abnormal psych class about 5 years ago.
Facts have a liberal bias.
This isn't exactly breaking news. It's long been known that nicotine has had positive cognitive and memory-enhancing benefits in most people. So the fact that it might help someone with schizophrenia to get somewhat "back to normal" doesn't really surprise me. Not sure if I'd recommend that they smoke, though. There are other ways of delivering nicotine to the brain without all the other crap that cigarettes have associated with them,...
Nicotine can also be a potent self-medication for other mental health issues. For example, nicotine (as a stimulant) is often used by those with ADHD to self-medicate.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
Schizophrenics have been said to "self medicate" with nicotine for YEARS. When I started in the field in 1998 it was already a conclusion everyone was working under.
Schizophrenia Bulletin 1998 24(2):189-202;
A series of human and animal investigations has suggested that altered expression and function of the {alpha}7-nicotinic cholinergic receptor may be responsible for the auditory sensory gating deficit characterized in schizophrenia patients and their relatives as diminished suppression of an auditory-evoked response (P50) to repeated stimuli. This finding, in conjunction with evidence for familial transmission of this sensory gating deficit, suggests a pathogenic role of the gene for the {alpha}7-nicotinic receptor in schizophrenia. This article considers the possible effects of this dysfunction in a broader context. Not only is this dysfunction consistent with difficulties in sensory gating, but it might also pre dispose patients to problems with learning efficiency and accuracy. Such learning problems could underlie schizophrenia patients' delusional thinking, hallucinations, and social dysfunction. In addition, heavy smoking in many schizophrenia patients is consistent with the high concentration of nicotine necessary to activate the receptor and with the receptor's extremely rapid desensitization. Finally, the receptor's possible role in cell growth and differentiation should be considered in connection with developmental deficits and other cellular abnormalities in schizophrenia.
"Capital punishment makes the state into a murderer. Imprisonment makes the state into a gay dungeon-master"
FTFA:
Nice to see the anti-smoking lobby contradicting the Paki doctor right there in the middle of the article. When the researching doctor says "hey, we may have found a great new treatment based on X", maybe the government shouldn't use its mouthpieces (cosmos magazine in this case) to tell him to fuck off right in the same article.
Was this study paid for by the tobacco industry?
From TFA: We would ask patients to go without cigarettes for 12 hours.
IDIOTS. Anyone who has ever quit smoking will tell you the HELL they go through in the first few days. So they take smokers, ask them to stop smoking, MARVEL at the fact that the patient who is struggling to maintain a grasp on reality anyway - loses it, and then claim that nicotine improves brain function?
How about a different conclusion: NICOTINE WITHDRAWAL IMPAIRS BRAIN FUNCTION IN SCHIZOPHRENICS. What a shocker. Well I dunno about "Cosmos Online" being a peer reviewed journal (as if even THAT matters nowadays), but this is a classic example of bad science, or incredibly bad reporting.
A good study would be to get non smoking schizophrenics to start smoking, and see if they improve, but the ethics committee would never approve it...
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Smoking Away Schizophrenia? Scientific American Mind, 2007-11-27.
Scientific American also published an article in 2003 suggesting that a by-product of nicotine can slow the onset of Alzheimer's disease. It does not take a nicotine-addict to see that CNS stimulants can have beneficial effects on brain function.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Ulcerative colitis (warning, gross picture of internals). I've been a sufferer since I was in my early teens, and was in a state of active flare ups for nearly five years, even going to the hospital now and then. I've been on dozens of medications for it, from immunosuppressants to steroids to everything doctors could come up with.
When I was 19, a doctor mentioned smoking, off the record. He didn't want to actively advise me to smoke, but I was 19 and in danger of needing my colon surgically removed already. I, like a good geek, read everything about it I could find. I hated my first pack of cigs, but by the time I was through it--nearly a week--my symptoms were subsiding. Since then, one flare up in six years that lasted for two weeks. Trade-offs, eh?
Nicotine sharpens the mind while simultaneously relaxing the muscles. That's why it's so addictive. Duh.
In fact, personally, I blame the lack of smoking by people for the general dumbing-down of everyone and everything including Slashdot. Oh? You doubt me? Ha! Just go read some of the threads on Slashdot from back in the 40s and 50s and compare it to the drivel of today. Notice, in particular, the civility of discourse and the lack of Linux/Apple/Microsoft fanbois. You'll see.
I recently quit smoking, and I haven't had any issues.....and neither have I.
One of the less known bad effects of nicotine is destruction of cartilage. This can show up as lower back pain or knee pain.
Seastead this.
If nicotine is quite useful yet may cause higher incident of lung cancer, isn't it better to just inject nicotine into bloodstream? Or is there something I'm missing here?
If you delay pleasure infinitely, the pleasure will be infinite. (YM)
1. I don't know where you live, but around here with all the taxes the cigarettes are probably the most expensive imaginable way to get your nicotine fix.
If you're smoking R1, as an extreme example, you're paying 4.4 euro for 1.7mg nicotine total. Or about 2.6 euro per milligram. For other brands of cigarettes, ok, you can get up to 10 times cheaper per mg, but it's still bloody expensive.
I'd think that the expensive patented stuff could gouge you like the medieval tax collectors -- or like HP for ink as a modern day equivalent -- and still be a lot cheaper.
2. You obviously skipped past half the sentence you answer to. The problem with just using the (not so) cheap natural stuff is:
A) it's extremely addictive stuff. And actually the real problem with that isn't the obvious "OMG, it's getting people addicted." It's that, like all physiological addictions:
- you're building resistance to it
- it's moving the baseline state to worse
So soon you'll either need more and more nicotine to actually fix that schizophrenia, or you'll need your regular fixes just to keep yourself at the point where you'd be if you never started with it in the first place. And you'll actually be worse off when you can't get your fix.
B) it creates a bunch of other problems. E.g., that it's a vasoconstrictor (which is actually the root of more smoking-related health problems than the smoke in the lungs), or that it inhibits osteoblasts (so if you treat someone post-menopause generously enough with it, they'll get fractures), etc.
C) nicotine is a poison. It's only safe to use because there's very little in a cigarette, and most of it burns. You're actually getting very little of it in your system. But there just isn't that much margin between that and when things start to get uglier. So especially in view of problem A, you don't want a treatment which will over time escalate dangerously close to the toxic dosage to do anything.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Nicotine's affects on the mind and body have been known for quite some time, but that it can CLINICALLY help schizophrenics is a step forward for them (drugs tend to be testy with psych patients). Quite a few of our medicines come from plants, and nicotine in itself is not very harmful (I administer more dangerous drugs on the back of the ambulance). Just remember, it is the SMOKE AND ADDITIVES that cause the cancer and COPD... not the nicotine itself. Because it is tied to smoking nicotine has a bad stigma, but we have already refined it for medicinal purposes.
Now I know why President Obama smokes!
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Also has vitamin C in it and is known to protect the little teddy bears from the bogey man at night.
Plus, it's such an attractive look.
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
The government is not controlling your mind by adding flouride to your water, its the cigarettes!
"There ought to be limits to freedom." -George W. Bush
So now the government is heavily taxing a medication for a specific condition. Do you think they'll repeal these taxes, or just continue to tax wht is now medication? From what I know medications are tax-free. So now I have to get a prescription to smoke? Where do I get my cigarettes tax free?
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
i wonder why there's never been a tobacco tea?
i know tobacco is a stew of horrible glycosides, alkaloids, and other plant poisons (which of course, is all nicotine really is: its just the plant saying "stop eating me!"), and boiling tobacco in water might deliver far less nicotine and far more bitter tasting horrible for you glycoalkaloids
but still, there's got to be a cheap natural way to get nicotine without getting lung cancer and without forking over lots of money to pharmaceutical companies
lots of other nightshades have nicotine:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanaceae
but nightshade has uh... other "slightly" more hardcore chemicals, heh
what a poisonous aggressive plant family, damn these guys are deadly
tobacco even naturally concentrates polonium and lead... seriously, i think this plant is trying to kill us folks
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_tobacco#Radioactive_carcinogens
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
And if they did, did he inhale?
Remember "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters"? Help make it a reality again! http://soylentnews.org
Was this research conducted by Marlboro by chance?
I was told years ago that smoking helps relieve schizophrenic symptoms (and schizophrenic affect), reduces incidence of hallucinations, etc. I've definitely noticed my "normal" pack-a-day skyrocket to near constant chainsmoking when i haven't had insurance and been off my meds. Shrinks have been aware of this for some time.
Does this means, patients suffer from Schizophrenics need to spoke, or intake doses of Nicotine? haha interesting!
there are many countries with universally available health care that do not rely on the taxes collected from smokers to cover. generally the health costs of covering smokers while they die slowly from emphysema or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease with expensive medications exceeds that obtained from the sale of tobacco.
almost nobody at the many universities ive encountered studying mathematics at a phd level smokes cigarettes. a smaller proportion of professional mathematicians smoke than the incidence of smoking in the general population.
Many schizophrenics are chain smokers, because for many of them,
the demons hold their tongue for the duration of the cig, and a few minutes after
The positive symptoms of schizophrenia are those the public is most likely to bring to mind when envisioning schizophrenics, these include auditory hallucinations and paranoid behaviour. It's these symptoms that seem to be most amenable to treatment with drugs that act on the dopamine system. The second set of the disease's symptoms are termed negative symptoms and include social isolation and degrees of depression. These secondary symptoms currently have few effective treatments. My best guess would be that nicotine and smoking, (the ritual and anachronistic, Freudian, oral pleasure) treat the secondary symptoms.
FWIW I'm a diagnosed schizophrenic with a uni education and a plus 160 IQ. I've been diagnosed as schizophrenic, schizo-affective, and, possibly not schizophrenic at all; but my favourite diagnosis came from a neuropsychiatrist, who, upon learning that I had begun studies of epistemology at age 17, said: "People who study epistemology... (long pause)... I don't know... (head shaking)... I just don't know." My case seems to be the more interesting because I recognized my symptoms and sought medical attention, and, while suffering the full range of symptoms, was able to deal with them as symptoms of a disease and not as in any way defining who I am or considering them as causes of action. John Nash, he of "A Beautiful Mind" escaped the symptoms of his schizophrenia when he learned not to argue with his voices. The most debilitating aspect of schizophrenia is that people seem not to understand that it's a brain based disease and that the mind, as put by a neuroscientist, is just the brain doing it's job. More high functioning schizophrenics are able to get on with their lives because schizophrenia is now known to be a a disease no different than any other and the symptoms can be detected, marked, treated, minimized, and, over time, all but disregarded in day to day life.
ideopath @ play
If you want something to hate, then I will refer you to my journal about how sugar should be outlawed. I do suspect most people to be hypocrites on the subject however; the people who want tobacco banned or heavily taxed probably don't want the same for sugar because they are sugar abusers.
This is an argument against Intelligent Design: for God to design a plant to do that, he would have to be malicious. That, or work for the tobacco industry.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Cool! Do they have an article called "The top 10 moves to make your mice scream in ecstasy", or "Things your lab rats don't want you to know (but secretly wish you did)"?
as is the problem with most potent drugs in difficult to manage delivery forms, its hard to calibrate the right dose that exists somewhere between intended effect, and death
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
If you like tobacco and nicotene, but don't like smoking or spitting, I recommend snus. Get the real deal from Sweden.
POKE 36879,8
It would be interesting if they could draw a link between schizophrenia and long-term family history of smoking. If ones ancestors were physically addicted to nicotine then perhaps it could manifest in children after a few generations.
Electronic Cigarettes (more accurately -Personal Vaporizer or PV) simply vaporize a nicotine solution to avoid the harmful effects of smoke and its 8000 chemicals.
I was on a pack a day for 15 years and in a month of starting 'vaping' i have gone to zero analog cigarettes without missing my nic kick.
Checkout Wikipedia for basic info or ecig-forum for detailed info.
These look like normal cigarettes, have rechargeable batteries with convenient cartridges or refilling BUT it does takes a week or two to get everything right,so be careful of which model etc you choose. Ask me for advise if in doubt.
Incidentally, FDA is trying to ban them for some of the most stupid reasons
AND - I am not associated with any seller etc. so its not a plug. Just trying to help !
This has been clear for many years -- nicotine improves cognitive function in a lot of people.
So, the FDA must be charged with the 10s of millions of deaths due to smoking, as they have prevented use of nicotine as a medicine.
I have a cousin diagnosed as schizophrenic. He's 33 and lives at home with no ability to maintain a simple job.
Now, prior to being diagnosed a few years back, he self-medicated with both cigarettes and alcohol. I wonder - if nicotene is a stimulant - wouldn't a few Red Bull cans or even Ritalin do the same job? I figure I'm ADAD, and I love my caffeine. I don't really care for smoking though I can see its benefits. (It has its drawbacks also, as my two-pack/day father passed away at the early age of 67.)
The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
I have been for almost 5 weeks. Where I live (British Columbia, Canada) buying the patch costs me just slightly less that half what my pack a day habit cost me. So I am saving $ and feeling better. Any schizophrenics out there, just head to your local drug store and pick up the patch.
One unexpected bonus is that I have never been able to remember dreams. But since I started on the patch I have had some of the most amazing dreams, and I remember them when I wake up.
If I were God, wouldn't I protect my churches from acts of me?
I use on and off - Nicotine gums, to improve my alertness and fatigue at times.
I discovered that as long you don't cross a certain threshold - I will not get addicted, and spiral out of control.
This comes from someone who used to be incredibly addicted to Nicotine gum / patches - it was living hell.
Now for about 1 year, I've been chew nicotine gums on and off - in very small amounts (maximum 4mg in one day) as needed.
If by any chance I feel it is getting out of control, then I just go cold-turkey for about 2 weeks.
I do not know how harmful this is - or if it is any worse than caffeine, or my medically prescribed amphetamine and Ritalin.
... works great for tobacco. Especially pipe tobacco, nutty, vanilla, etc.
So... They want to find a non-addictive treatment for a condition the patient will have to treat for the rest of his life? Am I the only one who sees that as ridiculous? Why not just get a prescription for a nicotine patch and be done with it?
However, a few months later, side effects usually begin to occur: tics and twitches, a ravenous appetite, which coupled with the disinclination to move, quickly produces extreme obesity (and ironically Type 2 diabetes), and a pernicious apathy that slowly extends itself to jobs, appearance, other people and life itself. Worse, trying to get off these drugs means that psychotic symptoms reoccur, even worse than before, as the body's L-dopa production often has increased to unnatural levels. While it's true that some patients can function, and sometimes quite well, under these circumstances, the truth is that most of them do not, and the simple equation Psychotic - (L-dopa) = Normal simply does not hold up.
What nicotine, and to some extent, alcohol does is to increase L-dopa to a slight degree, but not as much as simply going without the drugs, and it does so fairly quickly. Part of the problem with the neuroleptics is that brain hormone production and consumption varies from moment to moment -- what would be "too much", say, waiting for a bus, would be "not enough" dancing at a lively party, brainstorming a new product, or trying to organize housework.
Without getting all Tom Cruise on you, I don't think that they're using the right angle.
teleny, friend of cats.
Except that lobby can't really kill it, short of forbidding tobacco, can they? And we both know that outright forbidding nicotine won't happen any time soon.
So realistically, whoever objects to the patented cure, will always still have the option to light a cigarette instead. Or just to get a nicotine patch. I mean, it's not like an anti-smoking lobby will be that easy to use to forbid patches marketed as means to stop smoking.
I would imagine that would put an upper limit on the patented version's cost. Precisely because there'll always be the real nicotine as competition out there.
But even if it doesn't cap the price, the important fact still remains: the real nicotine isn't going anywhere.
Ditto for the "available now" part. It's not like anyone's stopping you from going to the pharmacy and getting a box of nicotine patches, or nicotine chewing gum, or whatever, if you want to self-medicate right away.
The only thing that's going to happen is that someone will research an alternative that does less harm. Maybe they'll succeed and make a profit. Maybe not. But it's not going to mean the end of life as we know it or anything.
Really, I don't see a "big evil pharma is going to kill nicotine" threat there. That jack is already out of the box. They're going to research an alternative. And if you don't like their alternative, you'll still be able to medicate yourself the old fashioned way until you lose a leg or a lung or whatever.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
We're glad to hear it!
Years ago I had a girlfriend who rarely smoked. She started having episodes of severe depression with hospitalization, with diagnoses including personality disorder and I believe schizophrenia. During these times she would smoke nearly non-stop. Self-medicating?
many schizophrenics smoke cannabis as well... cannabis is extremely varied in effect.... but by the logic used by many 'doctors' nicotine might increase the risk of developing schizophrenia !!
No one said smoking didnt have some benefits, but it doesn't outway the negatives. X and LSD increase some people ability to function sexually and for longer periods of time, doesn't mean you should take them. Drinking helps some people focus and be more creative, doesn't mean you should take them. Like all drugs the human body gets a higher benefit in the beginning, but over time and use the benefit drops, so do the advanges and the negitives began to rise up.
My sister has schizophrenia and her smoking has increased dramatically since the onset of the disease a decade ago. She is pretty much a chain-smoker now...this effect of nicotine helps to explain why she would be dedicating so much time, effort and the majority of her money to this gross practice (yellow fingers and all). With this knowledge I'm going to see what can be prescribed for her (such as a patch or nicotine gum) to help get her the aid of the drug without the cost or health risks of a cigarette-based delivery mechanism. Thanks to the poster for sharing this news!
People who think there's some mystery to why schizophrenics smoke clearly have not spent any time in mental hospitals. You get allowed outside into a dingy yard for a smoke break every two hours. It's one of the few pleasures and there is damn little else to do. I didn't pick up smoking, but if I was there on a regular basis, I probably would have.
suck, honey, suck...blow is just a figure of speech
I quit smoking cigarettes years ago. I smoke a small cigar after dinner and 2-3 snus tobacco during the day. Thats all the nicotine i need.
Yeah, lets ban Cigarette smoking and Smokeless tobacco in the millitary. Yeah so all the schizophrenics in the millitary who were normalized because of it can go all ape shit insane when they no longer have their smokes....... Well done Hero....
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
imo, schizophrenia is more of a description of the product of (prolonged) social circumstance than it is of any predetermined mental condition. imo, most psychological categorizations follow this rule.
i can't rule out, however, that i'm a psycho in denial. harmless tho.
That the only thing to do in a ward, save for walking around in a circle, is to smoke. The only time you are allowed outside is to smoke. The only other time you can really socialize with people who are not strapped down? Smoking. The only time you can muster up enough will to think through the medication clouding your thoughts like a wet blanket wrapped around your mind? Smoking.
My ex went into the hospital for suicidal depression and left with two habbits: Smoking and Benzos... And lost her ability to do therapy, as she only believed in "quick fixes"... Which led into her drug habbit. Ironically, they keep the rehab patients in with the normal patients, so when she is dumped by the drug dealer she left me for, she might end up going back to get sober...
You should watch those Comedy Central roasts. The truth does come out. Apparently Denis Leary went to a gay college in high school. Mr. Tough Crowd Colin Quinn knows what's up. The two of them were roommates.
We worshipped Denis Leary as kids. Why not, he was a badass. Dice Clay too, sad to say. Hey, is that a pink shirt on Weird Al Yankovic? Yeah, we liked him too.
Oh my God, is that Weird Al Yankovic with Jack Black? He's not gay at all.
Which is good, cuz I think I've seen Jack Black with Robert Morton Downey Jr. Robert Jr. is a great actor, one of the best. But you ever wonder why he had so much difficulty with coke and strippers a few years back?
He had difficulty liking it.
This is the subject that started my research career. Got some good references below (full references are available in the mentioned PDF).
Anything that has an effect on living organisms has the potential for incurring both positive and negative effects. We just have to find the way to make things happen the way we want them to. That's been the basis of pharmacology since its origin of trying to systematically determine what it is about material from one organism that has effects on another.
There's 5,000 chemical components in a cigarette, another 10,000 in the smoke from one. We understand about 1% of those 15,000. I was fortunate enough to do my dissertation examining the effects of some of those. It was part of the project that got its results mentioned in "Thank You For Smoking" ('We just found that smoking can offset Parkinson's Disease.')
Here's some words and numbers relevant to (and predating) TFA. The whole thing can be downloaded as a PDF from http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/theses/available/etd-05062002-134953/unrestricted/McClainFurmanskiAmend.pdf
=====
Some clinical populations use tobacco significantly more than non-clinical
populations. Whereas 24% of the general population smokes, 70% of schizophrenics
smoke (Adler et al., 1998), as do 42% of persons with attention deficit disorder (Lambert
& Hartsough, 1998). Both of these disorders are frequently associated with deficiencies
in ignoring or gating extraneous information. These persons, as well as many smokers
(Edwards et al., 1985; Gilbert, 1994; Kassel, 1997), report that smoking improves their
ability to concentrate and focus their attention. Nicotine may serve as an ameliorative for
cognitive decline in Alzheimerâ(TM)s (for review, see Rezvani & Levin, 2001). Thus, tobacco
smoking may serve a neurotherapeutic role in some groups or individuals.
Several epidemiological studies suggest that tobacco smokers contract
Parkinsonâ(TM)s disease at a rate of only 25% of that of non-smokers (e.g., Morens et al.,
1995). This may be due to the chronically inhibited monoamine oxidase (MAO) levels in
smokers (Fowler et al., 1996; Fowler et al., 1998). Despite negative connotations due to
harmful effects of smoking, tobacco remains a potentially important source of beneficial
pharmaceuticals.
[And a bit later...]
The majority of studies which have investigated sensory gating deficits in
schizophrenics, who often report accompanying difficulty in attentional processing and
the blocking out of extraneous information or stimuli, use ratio or subtraction scores to
determine degree of sensory gating and assume that differences are due to gating out
mechanisms. Smoking normalizes the deficit in P50 reduction in these patients and
decreases their negative symptoms (Adler et al., 1993). It is theorized that this is due to
dopaminergic activity (Lyon, 1999). After reviewing this literature, DeBruin et al. (2001)
point out that these sensory gating deficits observed in schizophrenics may be due to
decreased S1 (gating in) rather than decreased S2 (gating out) amplitudes.
=====
The 'gating' referred to is an EEG measure similar to the startle response. Both are inhibited more or less according to an individual's make up, by a stimulus that preceeds the startling one by half a second or so. The effect is very pronounced in schizophrenics. It is also pronounced in about half the non-symptomatic first degree relatives of schizophrenics. While TFA is correct regarding nicotinic/cholonergic effects (as noted in my dissertation) it is not the only chemical at work, and the results may be better explained as an interaction of the effects of nicotine and other psychoactive substances.
The substance of our interest wasn't nicotine, it was trimethyl naphthoquinone. It was up to me to show that something other than tobacco was activ
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Eat a dozen cigs and you will die.
So , dont start cooking a pack of cigs into that banana cake as a gift to that person you dont like.
Liberty freedom are no1, not dicks in suits.
(no it doesn't!)