What is the neurology mechanism during drug intake ?

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What is the neurology mechanism during drug intake ?

In: Chemistry

2 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

It really depends on the frug you’re talking about. The addiction part is simply that it stimulates either the happiness receptors, or the receptors that launch the happiness molecule production. That causes your brain to get “desensitized” to the happiness molecule (either it gets used to “too much” of it, or it get used to be asked to produce it so regulary that it stop producing it as much as it used to for other things).

Now, as I said, each drugs don’t act in the same way than the others. THC and canabinoids activate 2 kinds of receptors that stimulate a lot of parts of your brain, including

* the “happiness molecule repection” part of your brain making you feel temporary happy.

* the memorization parts of your brain making it harder to remember stuff

* the sensitivity parts of your brain making you feel numb

LSD have a more funky effect. It connects sensory parts of your brain that shouldn’t be connected (the vision and the hearing, the sensation and the taste,… that’s why you have the clichĂ© of people saying that they taste colours or things like that while they’re high on LSD). So while your brain normally works like many “tiny brains”, it now works like “one giant brain” which is not really normal nor good. It would also makes it harder to your brain to “stop analysing” things. Like, when you look at something, the raw picture is sent to an “analysing” part of your brain that will say “okay, so two points and one line is a face” making that 🙂 seems like a smiling face. But on LSD, your brain overanalyse what it’s exposed to and that cause the really colorfull fractal hallucination. Basically, your brain sees a face, and reanalyse it as a face, and reanalyse it as a face,… making you “see” multiple face, or a monstruous face, because your brain keeps analysing it over and over, making each details of the face more and more precise and big and excentric.

Opioids makes the “organ to brain pain transmission” dull which is why they’re used as painkillers. it also cause spasms in the sphincters.

Anonymous 0 Comments

That’s way too broad a question because different drugs have different mechanisms of acting on the body, but essentially drugs interact with endogenous (built in) signaling pathways in the body such as neurotransmitters and their receptors. To use one example, caffeine is shaped kind of like a neurotransmitter called adenosine that builds up throughout the day and acts on adenosine receptors to trigger sleepiness. Caffeine is shaped closely enough to fit in the receptors but not closely enough to actually activate them, so like a key that fits in the keyhole but can’t turn the lock, caffeine blocks adenosine from doing its thing, leading to us feeling more alert.