Comment by ipsum2
21 hours ago
These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.
21 hours ago
These mushrooms have been eaten for thousands of years. Does it really count as a new discovery? Maybe isolating the specific compound does.
What excites me as a chemist (and as someone who dabbled in psychedelics as a teenager) is the prospect of identification the active components... and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals.
The great, late Alexander Shulgin made his fame through systematic tweaking of the tryptamine and phenethylamine backbones, giving rise to many interesting psychoactive, mostly psychedelic compounds. Nature has a few more classes of psychedelics, but it's very rare to come across an entirely new category of molecular compounds.
Because the hallucinations are seemingly distinct from the effects from traditional psychedelic, that's... pretty tantalizing. But the mushroom does bruise blue, which is what tryptamine-containing magic mushrooms also do.
It's super exciting, all in all. It's either a cultural or mass psychological effect (but I doubt it personally), an as of yet unidentified tryptamine-like compound that's highly active (and thus difficult to isolate because theres relatively little mass of it) or an entirely novel chemical class.
I think the point GP was making was to take issue with framing like "and it turning out to be an entirely new class of chemicals."
More accurately we can say "an entirely newly described class of chemicals". Even before penicillin was isolated and described for the first time, soldiers would keep moldy pieces of bread and use them on wounds (Penicillium being the most common bread mold). Even Ötzi the iceman was found to be carrying a piece of fungi that we know was used to kill parasitic worms.
While these traditions didn't conceptualize their medicines as compounds or chemicals, they were certainly well aware of their effects. Sometimes intimately so.
All that aside though, there are bolete species documented to have tryptamine content so I would be a little surprised if the active compound(s) in question here aren't also tryptamines. Although I did read that Dennis McKenna hypothesized it could be an anticholinergic effect (i.e. Datura alkaloids)
You would love the readings from Mckenna and the DMT, and the concept of Fractal Time.
https://serendipity.li/trypt.html
List:
https://serendipity.li/dmt/dmtart00.html
Yeah, I know, pseudoscience and the like, but biology it's weird and with the current scientific discoveries (and even reusing quantum mechanics for profit, such as chlorofilla with leafs and photons), Nature itself it's 'magical'. Not actually something from fairy tales, but from weird mechanics we are actually grasping a little today.
Instead of my comment from I-Ching being taken as numerology, I would think of the universe as something being 'computed over', kinda like numeric towers under Lisp. Because in the end nothing exists per se; it's just fields generating matter, waves, energy and probably, information. Thus, the Mckenna theory on Fractal Time (and the Chinese paper from Vixra) might be related to hypercubic equations (because of Hamming distance between changes) that we aren't fully aware.
I don’t think the article was insinuating that these mushrooms were a new discovery, they’ve been known not just in the region but to scientists for some time, though they did assert that this is the first time that the DNA had been sequenced.