Slate Star Codex: In a Mad World, All Blogging is Psychiatry Blogging
r/slatestarcodex
Abstract
Although drugs are a critical component of mental healthcare, most have modest benefits and significant side effects. One way to develop a superior intervention would be to administer drugs with the spatial and temporal precision that better replicates natural diversity within neurotransmitter systems. A technology called focused-ultrasound (FU) may be able to safely and transiently disrupt the blood-brain barrier with spatial precision, permitting the site-specific delivery of molecules that do not conventionally cross the blood-brain barrier. If this method is proven to be safe and effective in larger human trials, it may trigger a paradigm shift in biopsychology research where the level of precision with which neurotransmitter systems can be influenced is massively increased. In this article, we use the example of oxytocin in the treatment of Autism. We propose that intranasal administration is not highly effective because it leads to oxytocin’s wide dispersion throughout the brain, failing to specifically stimulate oxytocin’s prosocial effects in specific regions. Consequently, we hypothesize that site-specific delivery of oxytocin, particularly in brain regions such as the Nucleus Accumbens and Ventral Tegmental Area, would lead to more consistent benefits.
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Seeds of Science is a journal (funded through Scott Alexander's ACX grants program) that publishes speculative or non-traditional articles on scientific topics. Peer review is conducted through community-based voting and commenting by a diverse network of reviewers (or "gardeners" as we call them); top comments are published after the main text of the manuscript.
We have just sent out an article for review that may be of interest to some in the SSC community, so I wanted to see if anyone - particularly those with a background in neuroscience - would be interested in joining us as a gardener providing feedback on the article. It is free to join and anyone is welcome (we currently have gardeners from all levels of academia and outside of it). Participation is entirely voluntary - we send you submitted articles and you can choose to vote/comment or abstain without notification (so it's no worries if you don't plan on reviewing very often but just want to take a look here and there at the articles people are submitting).
To register, you can fill out this google form. From there, it's pretty self-explanatory - I will add you to the mailing list and send you an email that includes the manuscript, our publication criteria, and a simple review form for recording votes/comments. If you would like to just take a look at this article without being added to the mailing list, then just reach out (info@theseedsofscience.org) and say so.
Happy to answer any questions about the journal through email or in the comments below.
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See the Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite comment policy: comments should be at least two of {true, necessary, kind}.
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More by Scott Alexander
Best community posts
Book Review: Fernand Braudel's Civilization and Capitalism
Book Review: Bryan Caplan's The Case Against Education
Halakha (Jewish religious law) as pertaining to hypothetical Jewish vampires
Plausible Deniability, therefore No Deniability
Stephen Pinker Jinxes the World
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See also
See also the SSC Discord server, with nice chatrooms like #rationality
or #math_and_cs
.