This is not just getting high. The antidepressant effects far outlast the brief trippy effects, which is an important reason why science is interested.
Although this is a small sample, this is not the first study of this antidepressant effect, which had been studied since at least 2000 (citation at end). I'd guess this study is probably getting extra attention from the BBC because of it's from a British group of researchers.
This area of research is important both because it's a new mechanism of antidepressant (opening doors to other drugs and a better understanding of depression) and it is faster acting than other antidepressants, which improve mood slowly over weeks. For the suicidal, this wait can be a lifetime.
There's currently a super interesting (to some of us) question about how important the acute trippy effects are to the sustained antidepressant effects. Is this something where we can engineer out the psychedelic components or are these somehow part of the antidepressant mechanism? See for example this paywalled paper from Zatare's group, which correlates what they call 'dissociative' effects with the antidepressant effect http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032714...
Eddie: Is it hyphenated?
Chief Wiggum: It used to be. Back in the bad old days. Of course every generation hyphenates the way it wants to. Then there's N'Sync. Heh. What the hell is that. Jump in any time, Eddie, these are good topics.
If a user clicks on one of the top ten search results for a variety of terms, there is 99.5% chance that they will become tracked by all top 10 trackers within 30 clicks.
ggplot2 may be influenced by Tufte, but the main influence is Leland Wilkinson's grammar of graphics. In fact, that is what the 'gg' in the name stands for.
The grammar of graphics approach attempts to identify the components of a graphic so we can specify them in a high level, abstract manner. This is also why the syntax is so unusual compared to most plotting libraries. (Grammar of graphics also deeply influenced protovis and D3.js.)
I've found learning the basics of ggplot2 to be a great investment in my productivity at data analysis. Basically you get to say "make a plot; x-axis is page views and y-axis is time and make it a bar plot with bars grouped and colored by user age" and you get something that looks great.
I guess it's not really on most people's radar. There's little professional incentive in arguing against some old quasi-folk theory that is not believed by any of your peers.
The incentive could exist for scientists who want to write books and be more public facing. However, I think most neuroscientists want to write something that relates to their professional work and is more interesting to them. Triune brain theory just isn't on radar.
Moreover, popular neuroscience is really really hard to do well. You need to find the overlap between the narrow controlled experiments of neuroscience and the messy realm of observable human behavior and experience. Things are that are known in the former are seldom known in the latter. Careful scientists know this and often feel alarmed when asked to talk about things outside the lab.
This leaves much of the writing, by default, to people who aren't concerned about being exact and who are happy to use technical terms as loose metaphors. Many of these aren't neuroscientists, but people who want a little neuro terminology to make their work seem cooler. Accurate neuroscience is not all that important to success in punditry and publishing. For example, psychiatrist Louann Brizendine's books on gender and the brain and economist Paul Zak's oxytocin book The Moral Molecule seem to me to write egregious neurobabble.
(There are certainly modules in the brain -- contemporary work statistically identifies which areas are active at the same time. There's a large cool literature on the default mode network, which is a pretty central concept in neuroscience: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_network ).
Yes. As a PhD neuroscientist, I use reference to the triune brain as a sort of shibboleth: If someone mentions it, I can tell they don't know any neuroscience.
This is not just getting high. The antidepressant effects far outlast the brief trippy effects, which is an important reason why science is interested.
Although this is a small sample, this is not the first study of this antidepressant effect, which had been studied since at least 2000 (citation at end). I'd guess this study is probably getting extra attention from the BBC because of it's from a British group of researchers.
This area of research is important both because it's a new mechanism of antidepressant (opening doors to other drugs and a better understanding of depression) and it is faster acting than other antidepressants, which improve mood slowly over weeks. For the suicidal, this wait can be a lifetime.
There's currently a super interesting (to some of us) question about how important the acute trippy effects are to the sustained antidepressant effects. Is this something where we can engineer out the psychedelic components or are these somehow part of the antidepressant mechanism? See for example this paywalled paper from Zatare's group, which correlates what they call 'dissociative' effects with the antidepressant effect http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165032714...
(An early paper on the phenomenon is Berman RM, et al. Antidepressant effects of ketamine in depressed patients. Biol Psychiatry. 2000;47(4):351–354. Paywalled http://www.biologicalpsychiatryjournal.com/article/S0006-322... )