Magic mushrooms are giving researchers hope in treating conditions like anxiety and depression, a new study may have found the key to increasing photosynthesis efficiency in plants, and research shows that we love being reached out to by old friends!
Magic mushrooms are giving researchers hope in treating conditions like anxiety and depression, a new study may have found the key to increasing photosynthesis efficiency in plants, and research shows that we love being reached out to by old friends!
Mushrooming Minds
Super Plants
Plz Call Your Friends
Follow Curiosity Daily on your favorite podcast app to get smarter with Calli and Nate — for free! Still curious? Get exclusive science shows, nature documentaries, and more real-life entertainment on discovery+! Go to https://discoveryplus.com/curiosity to start your 7-day free trial. discovery+ is currently only available for US subscribers.
Find episode transcripts here: https://curiosity-daily-4e53644e.simplecast.com/episodes/mushrooming-minds-super-plants-plz-call-your-friends
[SFX: INTRO MUSIC/WHOOSH]
NATE: Hi! You’re about to get smarter in just a few minutes with Curiosity Daily from Discovery. Time flies when you’re learnin’ super cool stuff. I’m Nate.
CALLI: And I’m Calli. If you’re dropping in for the first time, welcome to Curiosity, where we aim to blow your mind by helping you to grow your mind. If you’re a loyal listener, welcome back!
NATE: Today, you’ll learn about how magic mushrooms are helping fight depression, new efforts to use ancient plants to improve photosynthesis, and the surprising effects of calling your friends!
CALLI: Without further ado, let’s satisfy some curiosity!
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, I know we love talking about how cool the brain is, so I think you’ll like this story about the amygdala.
NATE: Doesn’t the amygdala regulate our feelings?
CALLI: Yep! It’s usually pretty good at keeping our emotions stabilized. But an overstimulated amygdala can cause pretty intense emotions. And a consistently overactive one often leads to issues like anxiety and depression. Currently, there are treatments on the market like antidepressants, but unfortunately, they don’t always work for all patients. New studies have shown that these patients might be able to get a bit of help from mushrooms.
NATE: …What kind of mushrooms are we talking about here….?
CALLI: Magic mushrooms! Well, not the actual mushrooms per se but a chemical inside them called psilocybin.
NATE: Isn’t that a psychedelic drug?
CALLI: It is. And one that’s found in about two hundred different species of mushrooms. Researchers say that our current antidepressants have a sort of dulling effect that allows patients to cope with their depression, but the chemicals in psilocybin might help us actually confront depression or other psychiatric conditions.
NATE: And that's because the chemical in those mushrooms helps our amygdala do its job better?
CALLI: Right! One study showed that acute use of psilocybin on serotonin receptors reduced responses to negative things and caused positive mood shifts.
NATE: So it might make us happier?
CALLI: “Might” being the optimum word. What we know for sure is that it has some kind of interaction with our amygdala. Scans of patients’ brains have shown that psilocybin doses might be reducing blood flow and calming down activity in the amygdala.
NATE: Like it's helping the amygdala relax.
CALLI: Which could be great news for an overactive one. The same scans also showed the drug caused “looser” connections between brain networks.
NATE: What does that look like?
CALLI: Some have suggested it could be a sort of “reset” of the brain, allowing us to make new connections, and not be as bound to the existing connections in the brain.
NATE: So the chemical readings seem to be there. But has there ever been a study on actual people with depression?
CALLI: The first was in 2016. And it had some significant results with patients reporting a reduction in their depression symptoms, but it also had a very small sample size and didn’t have a control group.
NATE: So we’ll need a lot more info to confirm these results scientifically then?
CALLI: Right. There was a second stage, though, that expanded the patient pool and included a control group using a common antidepressant to see how the treatments worked differently. Currently they’ve only tested about a third of the patients but early results are also promising.
NATE: Ok so I am still confused how these drugs work differently than antidepressants.
CALLI: Right, so antidepressants calm the amygdala, it kind of dulls that overactive amygdala, and for some patients makes their experience…tolerable. But researchers think that psilocybin, on the other hand, has a sort of heightening effect on our serotonin to spark an emotional response that allows us to confront, rather than endure, depression. The result of which may be a strong and helpful shift in mindset.
NATE: Kind of like a perspective changer.
CALLI: In simple terms yeah. I should mention that a lot of researchers are still cautious with their optimism as we still have a pretty rudimentary understanding of psilocybin and how its mechanisms work with the human brain.
NATE: I have heard there’s a possibility for some pretty bad side effects.
CALLI: And we’re not even really sure what those are either. It’s believed that use of the drug may trigger schizophrenia in some people. Which is why most trials of it don’t include patients who have a hereditary predisposition to it.
NATE: With all these promising results, it sounds like it's time for some larger trials, and a lot more brain scans.
CALLI: It is getting easier to study with the drug becoming more commonly legalized around the world. So there’s hope that studies will become more common and we can gain more solid information about its potential as an effective fix.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: I hope you have your gardening hat on Calli: because today we’re talking all about rubisco!
CALLI: I don’t think I’ve heard of that plant?
NATE: That’s because it's not a plant! Rubisco is an enzyme that is a key facilitator for carbon dioxide conversion, turning carbon dioxide into oxygen and sugars for plant food during photosynthesis!
CALLI: Ah well you can’t grow without food!
NATE: Right, but rubisco is notoriously inefficient at its job. It’s slow, and can make mistakes like interacting with oxygen to create a toxic byproduct. Interestingly, it's also super old. Millions of years ago, ancient plants had rubisco that worked far more efficiently in the high CO2 air of the time. There could be as much as five hundred to eight hundred parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere.
CALLI: That sounds super high. But what is that relative to today?…
NATE: Nearly double! The atmosphere stayed under three hundred ppm for hundreds of thousands of years. That is until the 1950s when CO2 started to rise pretty sharply and continue climbing to our current level, around four-hundred twenty ppm.
CALLI: So we might see rubiscos start to revert back to their old efficient ways?
NATE: Researchers are trying a more active role, and attempting to bring those efficient rubiscos to modern plants. A team at Cornell has identified ninety eight historical rubisco enzymes from nightshade plants that are superior to the ones found in plants today.
CALLI: Nightshade, isn’t that a surprisingly wide variety of plants?
NATE: It’s the family that includes crops like potatoes, peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, and tobacco.
CALLI: All my favorite foods! Except for tobacco, no thanks.
NATE: Their goal is to eventually try and engineer the more efficient enzymes into modern crops to make photosynthesis more efficient, and help the crops get bigger yields. Basically growing more food per plant.
CALLI: Higher efficiency and more food? That’s a pretty serious win-win. So how are they doing this?
NATE: We’re still in the very early stages of the process. But part of the study was creating a diagram to trace the relationships of modern rubiscos to those ancient ones to find the strongest relationships from modern plants to those that existed twenty or thirty million years ago.
CALLI: Well once they have that connection, how exactly do they plan on “engineering” these ancient enzymes into current plants?
NATE: Through a whole lot of gene editing. The first step is removing an enzyme called carbonic anhydrase which is responsible for creating a balancer of CO2 and bicarbonate, the compound that plants can get usable carbon from for photosynthesis.
CALLI: But isn’t equilibrium a good thing?
NATE: It is if you want the plant to behave normally. But to create the conditions for rubisco to work more efficiently the bicarbonate levels in the plant have to be way higher than the enzyme currently keeps them at.
CALLI: How high can we go with them?
NATE: Well there’s a balance to the removal process. One study removed ninety-nine percent of the anhydrase enzyme’s function and the plants still grew. But when another study took out a hundred percent the plants barely grew at all. It turns out they used the enzyme to make bicarbonate in other parts of the plant to grow as well.
CALLI: Well that doesn’t sound a lot more efficient.
NATE: Right, researchers did find a work around by putting the plants in chambers packed with high levels of CO2 which caused the plant to make bicarbonate spontaneously without the enzyme. Another group thinks that by adding a bicarbonate transporter to the plant, the plant could move bicarbonate around the plant more efficiently to allow it to grow, and maintain efficient photosynthesis.
CALLI: And they could do that and keep that efficient balance going?
NATE: Exactly, and researchers think it will make the plants photosynthesize super efficiently. There are still a lot of hoops to jump through but, if researchers can figure out how to get a proper imbalance of bicarbonate, it looks very plausible to edit the ancient rubisco back in to make the plant healthy, strong, and way more efficient.
CALLI: Are they just more efficient? Or did they do other things better too? I have to imagine the world looked a bit different 20 million years ago.
NATE: Outside of being more efficient, the ancient rubiscos also appeared to be better adapted to hotter and drier climates.
CALLI: Which is going to be absolutely necessary if current environmental trends continue. So our crops could be more efficient, more resilient, and higher yielding. That's pretty good news.
NATE: We’ll certainly need it. The world population is projected to hit nine billion people by 2050. And estimates say we’ll need to grow fifty percent more food than we do right now to feed them all. This could be the key to doing just that.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
CALLI: Nate, I heard a great study this week about something I know we love: friendship! A new study shows that people experience a psychological rush when friends reach out unexpectedly. And it's almost always more meaningful than the person making the call thinks it will be!
NATE: That’s interesting and more than a little heart warming! How did they figure that one out?
CALLI: Well, researchers conducted a LOT of experiments with nearly 6,000 participants. Previous research showed that positive interactions, like with friends and coworkers, can increase emotional well being and help decrease anxiety. For this test though, researchers also wanted to see how accurate our perceptions were in predicting and determining how excited someone would be to hear from us.
NATE: What did the experiments look like?
CALLI: So in one of them researchers asked half of the participants to remember the last time they reached out to someone in their social circle “just because” or “just to catch up” after a very long period of not talking. Then, they were asked to rank how pleased, grateful, thankful, and appreciative they imagined the person felt about being contacted, on a one to seven scale. One being not at all pleased, and seven being very pleased. The other half were asked to remember a situation where somebody reached out to them at random, and they had to use the same scale to measure how pleased they felt.
NATE: So what did the researchers find?
CALLI: When participants remembered a time a friend had reached out to them, they ranked this experience really highly, they greatly appreciated being reached out to. And yet, when the other group ranked how they thought their friend felt being reached out to, they almost always ranked the expectations of how their friend felt pretty lowly. We underestimate how great a gesture it is for us to reach out to a friend, even when we know a friend reaching out to us feels so good!
NATE: That’s so interesting! I guess we shouldn’t underestimate what even a small gesture can do, but I get it. I love when my friends reach out.
CALLI: Another experiment had the participants send a short note and a small gift to somebody in their friend group they hadn’t spoken to in awhile and then asked the participants to use the seven point scale to rank how they thought their friend would react.
NATE: Let me guess: the gift senders ranked their expectations lowly?
CALLI: Exactly!
NATE: Did the researchers have any thoughts as to why we always expect so little of these positive actions in the world?
CALLI: Well the study found something pretty interesting, people don’t reach out to old friends because they’re afraid of how the friend being reached out to will react. People worry about how these positive gestures will be received, we fear people might doubt our intentions. This can cause us to be hesitant for any number of reasons, like not wanting to feel stupid or fearing rejection. But researchers say in situations like this, it can be helpful to remember how appreciative you would be if that friend randomly reached out to you.
NATE: It's funny how we often assume the worst, even when we know being the recipient of such a gesture would make our day.
CALLI: Totally, and researchers say that the way our relationships happen in today’s society, especially with so much technology involved in our friendships, staying connected often involves one person reaching out.
NATE: Which can feel weird after a long period of time
CALLI: Right! But all you need to do to get over this weird feeling…is reach out! And you’ll both be stoked, even more than you’ll let yourself imagine!
NATE: Well I’ve got some calls to make then
CALLI: Well I’m sure everyone will be excited to hear from you.
[SFX: WHOOSH]
NATE: Let’s recap what we learned today to wrap up. Magic mushrooms are giving researchers hope in treating conditions like anxiety and depression. The study of psilocybin has shown positive results in “calming” an overactive amygdala, but research is needed to fully determine how the drug interacts with our brain functions.
CALLI: A new Cornell study may have found the key to increasing photosynthesis efficiency in plants and producing higher crop yields by reincorporating ancient versions of common enzymes. This could be a huge development to help supply the world’s growing population.
NATE: If you’re on the wall about unexpectedly reaching out to an old friend, do it! A new study shows that we love being reached out to by old friends, even if we simultaneously underestimate how they’ll feel being reached out to.