nature in a experiment i don't know yet why is blight so far like it sounds so simple they had no idea

but now the data's i find this not only refreshing but but at some level astounding nature

welcome back to the Nature.

Welcome back to the Nature podcast. This week we'll be finding out how a club drug could make brains more receptive to therapy...

And learning about the mechanisms behind skin aging.

I'm Nick Howe.

And I'm Benjamin Thompson.

First up on the show, reporter Noah Baker has been investigating how the club drug MDMA might reopen a malleable brain state called a critical period.

Critical periods are a stalwart of developmental psychology, a period in our growth where the

brain becomes plastic, by which I mean moldable. The synapses and circuits are poised to change

and learn new things.

So I think most people are familiar with critical periods if they've ever tried to learn a

language as an adult.

That's Gouldolen from Johns Hopkins University.

When we learn a language as a child, we learn it without an accent.

We can, if we learn two languages, we can speak both fluently. But if we try to learn

them later in life, you know, we always struggle more and have an accent when we learn those

languages. This week in nature, she and her team have published a paper in which they claim to

have reopened a critical period in mice using MDMA.

I'll get to the MDMA part in a second, but first, it isn't just language which has associated critical periods,

and Gould focused instead on neuropsychiatric conditions, things like depression or PTSD.

Mostly people haven't really thought about things like depression in the

...