How ‘magic mushroom’ chemical treats depression
Unexpected Elements
BBC
4.4 • 568 Ratings
🗓️ 17 April 2022
⏱️ 75 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Brain scanning experiments reveal how psilocybin works to relieve severe depression. Psilocybin is the psychedelic substance in 'magic mushrooms'. The psychoactive chemical is currently in clinical trials in the UK and US as a potential treatment for depression and other mental illnesses. Professor David Nutt of Imperial College London tells Roland about the research
Also in the show, worrying findings about the increase in premature deaths because of air pollution in growing cities in tropical Africa and Asia. An international group of climatologists has found that the tropical storms which struck Mozambique, Malawi and Madagascar in early 2022 had been made more intense by human-induced climate change. And astronomer David Jewitt used the Hubble telescope to measure the largest known comet in the solar system - it's huge at about 120 kilometres across.
The team at CrowdScience has spent years answering all sorts of listener questions, which must make them pretty smart, right? IN this week’s episode, that assumption is rigorously tested as Marnie Chesterton and the team pit their wits against a multitude of mind-bending puzzles from an old TV game show - all in the name of answering a question from Antonia in Cyprus.
She wants to know: how do we work out how clever someone is? Is IQ the best measure of cleverness? Why do we put such weight on academic performance? And where does emotional intelligence fit into it all?
In the search for answers, presenter Marnie Chesterton and the team are locked in rooms to battle mental, physical, mystery, and skill-based challenges, all against the clock. Unpicking their efforts in the studio are a global team of cleverness researchers: Dr. Stuart Ritchie from Kings College London, Professor Sophie von Stumm from York University, and Dr. Alex Burgoyne, from the Georgia Institute of Technology in the US.
They are challenged to face the toughest questions in their field: Why do men and women tend to perform differently in these tests? Is our smartness in our genes? And what about the Flynn effect – where IQs appear to have risen, decade after decade, around the world.
(Image: Mexican Psilocybe Cubensis. An adult mushroom raining spores. Credit: Getty Images)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In 2019, we began investigating the disappearance of Dr. Ruzha Ignatva. |
| 0:08.0 | I believe we are a very special network. |
| 0:10.0 | A scammer who stole billions from investors around the world. |
| 0:15.0 | She's on the FBI's 10 Most Wanted list. |
| 0:18.0 | And now, we have some unmissable updates. She has money and when you have |
| 0:23.0 | money you have power. Join me, Jamie Bartlett, as the hunt for the missing crypto queen continues. |
| 0:29.5 | Listen first on BBC Sounds. Thank you for downloading the science hour from the BBC World Service |
| 0:35.6 | with me, Roland Pe's, an hour of intellectual |
| 0:38.9 | challenges, including the challenge of measuring intellectual capacity. |
| 0:43.7 | All tests of cognitive ability tend to correlate positively with one another. Whether it's |
| 0:48.9 | abstract reasoning, math, verbal, a memory test, people who perform above average on one tend to perform above |
| 0:55.6 | average on the others and vice versa. The clever ways of measuring cleverness on crowd science in |
| 1:01.4 | half an hour. Before that, on science and action, we're fighting depression, worrying about the |
| 1:06.8 | growing pollution problem in growing tropical megacities and about floods and climate change. |
| 1:12.6 | And I've been talking to the astronomer who's seen the fizzing core of a monster comet. |
| 1:18.2 | Something like 120 kilometers, which is really big. So it's roughly 100 times bigger than the typical comet nucleus. So it really is a big one. |
| 1:30.2 | Magic mushrooms, or at least a psychoactive substance from them, may be the key to unlocking |
| 1:35.9 | severe depression in some patients, according to a study in nature medicine this week. It's a |
| 1:42.2 | striking claim, because more often we hear that drugs mess with |
| 1:46.5 | your mind. But evidence has been coming in that the active compound silo-cybin, which gives |
| 1:52.4 | magic mushrooms their psychedelic effect, freeze up the pathological brain patterns that underlie |
| 1:58.5 | depression. David Nutt, a professor of neuropsychopharmacology at Imperial |
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