Episode 29 - News of the Woo

I got tired of reading news that bummed me out— this segment is called news of the woo its a dozen hand picked news items about stuff like psychedelics, Cavemen, ancient crystals, hypnotism and mediation. Far out!

Transcript

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Hey folks, I'm Anthony Alvarado. This is the Rough Draft, and we're going to try something a little bit different today. I'm calling this segment News of the Woo. It's a gazette of the strange, the sacred, and the unusual. I always felt like back when I did the morning news for X-Ray FM, I felt like it would be nice to just get more of a break from the morning news, you know, from politics, from war, from uh the travesty of the American situation. Like sometimes you just want something else. And so that's what we have here today. I've got all the news, all the interesting stuff that is recently being discovered that has nothing to do with politics, nothing to do with the usual uh headlines. Okay, let's get into it. So, first off, the tripless trip. So, researchers are working on getting people to get the brain rewiring neuroplasticity from UV lights on amino acid molecules. They're building a brand new class of psychedelic-inspired compounds that is uh giving your brain the mood lift, the serotonin receptor, um, mood lift and neuroplasticity, which is like a regeneration of of the brain, um, that people can get from tripping uh with LSD, with with you know, licking a toad, and and every all that stuff. Like, so tripping, they found out recently. I don't know if you have heard this, but it's really good for you, for your brain. It's good for the mood, it's an antidepressant, and they've been working on getting people to have that experience without any of the well, the trippy part, you know? So it's like, what if you could take a pill that will make you feel in a really pleasant mood and it's uplifting, but it doesn't have any of the trip. And so, you know, that raises the interesting question of like, well, how much of the psychedelic experience is actually tied in with what we're used to thinking of as the trippy psychedelic part, and how much of it is actually the effects on the brain of these chemicals. So that's something that researchers are working on right now, and I'm sure there'll be more of that to come in the near future. Speaking of which, psilocybin is also going to be uh approved by the FDA. The FDA has signaled that it'll approve psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression in 2026. Now, this is something that I think has been slowly making inroads um over the past decade. It's uh shown strong results in clinical trials for treating depression, PTSD, and addiction. But now we're just seeing that mainstreaming moment is getting closer and closer on the federal level. So that's really big news. And one last uh bit from the the medicine cabinet of psychedelics, which I thought I'd lead with because it's something I've always found fascinating, is that researchers are also discovering that the way the visuals work in a trip is that psychedelics turn down the brain's visual input system. The live feed from your eyes actually gets sort of dimmed in the brain. And to fill the gap, the brain reaches into memory and patches in vivid fragments from your own past. So slow rhythmic brain waves appear to be doing that swapping, and it's literally they're saying this is the mechanism behind seeing things. Um, so yeah, that's the latest research on psychedelics. And going into uh anthropology next, uh, in a different beat, researchers are saying that they now think that the reason that Neanderthals, which I always thought of as the cavemen, but I'm not sure if that's accurate, Neanderthals maybe died off because they were lonely. So for years the theory has been climate change or simply losing out to Homo sapiens in head-to-head competitions. But a new study that came out this year is pointing to social connectivity. Homo sapiens built better social networks, more connection, more exchange, more resilience because Homo sapiens were better at being pack animals. Neanderthals, these researchers are saying, were more isolated. They were a species that uh lived more in isolation, and so they lost out to the smaller, and I think some say smaller brained humans that are us. So that's pretty interesting. They they lost out to um dumber, but but uh able to like gang up, I guess, is the idea. Uh in other news, there's uh this was interesting. So the Aztec calendar, you may have heard of the Mayan calendar. There's also the Aztec calendar, which ran on two different calendars at once. One was a 260-day count, and one was a 365-day count. And these would sync up every 52 years. And archaeologists have found the same logic going back in time on the pyramids, on the Aztec pyramids, going back in time thousands of years. This was seen this link up, which would happen every 52 years between these two clocks, was seen as a potential time for the end of the world if you weren't careful. So you had to do like a reset. You had to sweep the streets, smash all pots, throw out all old clothes, idols, and do a full reset on the community every 52 years. And um, I believe also make a a sacrificial um uh human would was was needed for this ceremony, and and then uh the new year or the new 52-year cycle would begin. And the interesting thing about that, the next one is coming up in 2027, I believe. So world might end unless uh that ceremony is observed. I think that they do still actually observe the ceremony, just without the the sacrificial human part, but there there is like a a lighting of of the fire and observance of that that uh that happens. And in other one last um anthropology news item to share, uh, Neolithic crystal trade has been traced by anthropologists back for tens of thousands of years. Um, there's roads in northern England, crews of diggers have turned up cachets of rock crystals, Neolithic rock crystals going back into ancient times. That the thing about these crystals that's interesting, and we're talking, you know, pre-recorded history before there was anything written down, any written ideas of what this was for. There were crystals that traveled long distance. There's evidence of far-reaching exchange networks, and crystals were used as some kind of bartering system, or they had ritual significance and were carried for um great vast distances. And we don't know why they were valued. We just know that 5,000 years ago uh people were really into crystals. Okay, and uh next news item uh is studies on hypnosis or finding that it is measurable now. I've talked a little bit on this show about hypnosis. Um, it's something that I've studied. I'm pretty into hypnosis, I find it fascinating, and scientists are now saying that hypnosis was long a black box. We didn't really understand much about it. There's even been speculation um as to is it real or or what exactly is it? But now three university studies from the University of Zurich are able to measure hypnosis for the first time. This is an EEG and MRI measurements. Hypnosis genuinely shifts the brain's large-scale networks and neurochemistry with feta waves rising. Theta waves are deep relaxation, but not quite sleep. So this is the first time that there's been a uh a scientific study showing this kind of state change in the brain, which is um pretty exciting, pretty interesting, I think, as as a hypnotist, actually. And uh in related news, they've also found that magnets can applying uh magnetic trance to the brain can work to change how hypnotizable people are, almost like a sort of dimmer switch for the brain, by um upping the electrical simulation, stimulation uh of certain brain regions. The researchers were able to change how easy people were uh hypnotized. Okay, just a couple more things. Uh another study that came out, there's a lot of interesting study data in uh mind-body practice coming out uh this year. A study found that one week of intensive meditation was enough for measurable change across the brain and the body. So it only takes seven days to rewire how your brain and body work. These researchers clocked improved brain efficiency, stronger immune signaling, and more of the body's own natural painkillers. So that's pretty cool to know that if you just spend one week, I think you know, they're talking about large amounts of meditation, but as somebody who has a meditation practice, um, it does have its days where it feels like it gets easier, and then you some days it feels like you're are you know kind of just sitting there twiddling your thumbs. So I don't know, maybe that's just me. So those are the news items I wanted to share that are a little bit unusual. That was news of the woo. Hope you enjoyed that segment. And thanks for listening. I'm Anthony Alvarado. You can check out other things that I'm up to. Anthony Alvarado.net. Thank you so much for listening.

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And see you next time.