Anyone who has enjoyed a magical mystery tour thanks to the psychedelic powers of magic mushrooms knows the experience is surreally dreamlike. Now neuroscientists have uncovered a reason why: the active ingredient, psilocybin, induces changes in the brain that are eerily akin to what goes on when we’re off in the land of nod.

For the first time, we have a physical representation of what taking magic mushrooms does to the brain, says of Imperial College London, who was part of the team who carried out the research.

Researchers from Imperial and Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany, injected 15 people with liquid psilocybin while they were lying in an fMRI scanner. The scans show the flow of blood through different regions of the brain, giving a measure of how active the different areas are.

The images taken while the volunteers were under the influence of the drug were compared with those taken when the same people were injected with an inert placebo. This revealed that during the psilocybin trip, there was increased activity in the hippocampus and anterior cingulate cortex, areas involved in emotions and the formation of memories. These are often referred to as primitive areas of the brain because they were some of the first parts to evolve.

Primal depths

At the same time, decreased activity was seen in “less primitive” regions of the brain associated with self-control and higher thinking, such as the thalamus, posterior cingulate and medial prefrontal cortex.

This activation pattern is similar to what is seen when someone is dreaming.

“This was neat because it fits the idea that psychedelics increase your emotional range,” says Carhart-Harris.

Neuroscientific nuts and bolts aside, the findings could have genuine practical applications, says psychiatrist Adam Winstock at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust. Psilocybin – along with other psychedelics – could be used therapeutically because of its capacity to probe deep into the primal corners of the brain.

“Dreaming appears to be an essential vehicle for unconscious emotional processing and learning,” says Winstock. By using psilocybin to enter a dreamlike state, people could deal with stresses of trauma or depression, he says. “It could help suppress all the self-deceiving noise that impedes our ability to change and grow.”

Next, the team wants to explore the potential use of magic mushrooms, LSD and other psychedelics to treat depression.

Journal reference: Human Brain Mapping, DOI:

“IT’S TIME to stop subsidizing schools that are not producing good results.”

When US president Barack Obama addressed the State University of New York (SUNY), Buffalo in August this year, he . Obama plans to implement a set of changes – including a new ranking system for universities – with the aim of making colleges more affordable and cost-effective for both students and state. And those at the heart of the changes will be faculty members.

In the US, average tuition for a four-year degree at a public college has , while , according to College Board and Census data. At the same time, the nation’s businesses are complaining of , suggesting that educators aren’t producing graduates for the jobs the economy actually needs.

“For a very long time, Americans have paid astronomical amounts of money for an education that doesn’t necessarily prepare them for a career,” says Stephen Spector, assistant press secretary to the US Department of Education. “The system needs to be reformed.”

Obama plans to halt the rising cost of college and make higher education more accessible for all students. As part of these plans, universities will be ranked according to their performance, the perceived quality of tuition, their graduates’ job prospects, and student accessibility and affordability. Colleges with high dropout rates will be penalized. Currently, universities with the highest number of students receive the lion’s share of federal aid – by 2015, the new system will instead provide the most aid to colleges with the highest ranking.

The idea is to encourage a competitive strive for excellence in education. Places at the most prestigious and sought-after colleges will be opened up to students who currently cannot afford them, argues Obama. At the same time, poorly performing colleges will be prevented from draining federal resources by producing graduates with little to contribute to the economy.

A risky strategy

Colleges that appear to underperform will lose funding, students, and the income that comes with them. That carries the obvious threat of redundancy, or at least a diminished workload to be shared among faculties of colleges that find themselves ranked poorly in the new system.

Harvey Stenger, president of Binghamton University in New York, says that if the university ranking system is tied to federal funds, schools that serve disadvantaged populations may be disproportionately affected. Colleges that currently only attract economically disadvantaged and geographically immobile students could face funding cuts under the President’s plan.

It’s a concern shared by Henry Reichman at California State University. “Education isn’t like buying a car,” he says. “Due to family or work obligations, low-income students are often tied to where they are.”

Other faculty members worry that the plans could encourage colleges to adopt safe, standardized curricula and increase their use of adjunct professors in place of expensive, tenured equivalents. If rankings are too heavily weighted on graduate salaries, lucrative courses producing investment bankers and lawyers could become overpopulated at the expense of economically vital new blood in careers such as teaching and social care.

But the quality of university faculty will benefit in the long term, says F. King Alexander, president and chancellor of Louisiana State University. “There are many institutions with low student outcomes, low graduation rates and high loan default rates – faculty at those campuses will be in jeopardy down the road if nothing is done, because we haven’t so far done a good enough job differentiating between colleges at the federal level,” he says.

Embrace the change

Colleges will be able to differentiate themselves by speeding up the duration of degree courses. Fifty per cent of graduates currently take six years to graduate – . For students whose graduation is delayed by childcare responsibilities or living far from their school, technology could provide the answer. For instance, “massive open online courses” (MOOCs), which comprise lectures streamed to students online, can be accessed remotely and .

MOOCs are certainly a cheaper format for lectures, but some professors are perturbed by the potential shift to high-volume online education. Mary C. King, president of the Portland State University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors, worries that the use of MOOCs at universities “reduces the faculty’s role to simply turning on the television.”

However, the threat could be overstated. MOOCs could be complemented with in-person or video-conferenced tutoring, mentoring, discussion and debate sessions. For centuries, teachers in the liberal arts have supported lectures with smaller group discussions, says Nick Hillman at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s department of educational leadership and policy analysis. “We don’t always think about faculty in terms of student performance, but they actually play a huge role in student success and their persistence through college” – something that could continue alongside the use of new technology, he says.

Faculty members will also play a significant role in improving the quality of tuition, and therefore the rating of their college. Hillman says: “they should be more attentive to student retention and helping students succeed.”

That could mean more counseling, increased tutorial time, or more, smaller classes. Reichman notes that while independent learners will succeed with remote and online teaching, close contact is more effective for less able students.

While the academic world waits to hear more details on Obama’s proposals, it would be prudent for colleges to reassess how their faculties interact with their students. “If there is a single guarantor of student success, it’s ongoing contact with faculty members,” says Reichman.

“Faculties should not be fearful of these proposals,” says Alexander. “If we realize that something has to be done that can benefit the vast majority of our faculties, now is the time to embrace those changes.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Time for change”

You can tell when a starfish is too hot – it loses an arm. The remarkable behaviour is part of a surprising strategy that may allow the animals to survive in warmer waters than previously thought possible.

Ecologists tend to think that cold-blooded animals, called ectotherms, are incapable of changing their body temperature and instead simply take on the temperature of their environment. at the Institute of Research on Insect Biology in Tours, France, and at the University of California, Davis, had a hunch that things are more complicated than that.

To investigate, they collected 70 ochre starfish () from the coast of California. They housed them in 10 tanks, set to different temperatures ranging between 26ËšC and 42ËšC, and monitored the body heat of the starfish with infrared cameras.

Their work confirmed that body temperature varies across the starfish rather than being uniform. Each animal’s central disc was always cooler than its five arms, by anywhere from 3˚C to 5˚C.

If the temperature of its central core rose above 35 ˚C, the starfish died – its vital organs unable to function in the heat, says Sanford. Its arms, however, could withstand those temperatures – although if they remained at around 35 ˚C for more than a few days, one or more of the arms typically turned soft and fell off.

Heat sinks

The team isn’t sure how starfish regulate the temperature in the different parts of their bodies. One possibility is that the animals actively divert heat into their arms, which can then release the heat into the water relatively efficiently because of their large surface area and small internal volume.

This could explain why animals that are particularly warm for an extended period lose an arm or two: by using them as heat sinks, the starfish may thermally damage their arms beyond repair.

We know that starfish can lose arms to predators and later regrow them again, but this is the first time researchers have shown that arm loss can be related to thermal regulation.

Musselling in

Starfish are a key predator off the coast of California. “They influence what the populations of mussels and other animal communities look like,” says Sanford. This means any change to the starfish population as a result of climate change could trigger a cascade of knock-on effects further down the food chain. So understanding how these animals respond to temperature change should help ecologists understand how regional changes in climate might affect coastal ecosystems, he says.

of Stanford University in California studies the mussels the starfish prey on. “The mussels for their part would love to not have the starfish around,” he says. “The fact that the starfish are good at cutting losses and surviving [in warmer water] is bad news for the mussels.”

Any evidence that some marine organisms have ways to deal with warmer water could be significant as global temperatures continue to rise. “[The work] might spur other researchers now to look at other keystone species in the same way, with physiologists and ecologists coming together to understand how temperature changes will affect populations and communities,” says Denny.

Journal reference: , DOI: 10.1242/jeb.083881

Plants may be spiking their nectar with addictive drugs to lure insects into spreading their pollen.

at Newcastle University, UK, and colleagues trained bees to associate a scent with a sugary reward. Bees given sugar water laced with caffeine were twice as likely to remember the scent – and stick their tongues out in anticipation – three days later, than bees fed on sugar alone.

To see how the caffeine was affecting the bees’ memories, the team looked at what happened in their brains when they were injected with the stimulant. Sure enough, the caffeine triggered changes in the neurons’ ability to pass messages vital for olfactory learning and memory.

Small amounts of caffeine and other chemicals such as nicotine are present in the nectar of more than 100 plant species. Plants use these often nasty-tasting chemicals to deter predators, but Wright’s work suggests that they also use them to keep pollinators loyal to their flowers. It’s a matter of getting the dose right; leak just the right amount into their nectar to lure in the bees, but not too much so that the bitter taste puts them off.

Looking at how far bees will go to get their caffeine hit – and whether they willingly put themselves in danger – could answer a fascinating question, says Wright: “Can an insect become addicted to a drug?”

More work on bees could also shed light on how coffee affects us. The evidence for caffeine’s memory-enhancing capacity in humans is inconclusive, says Wright. Bees share many of our cerebral molecular building blocks, in particular the receptors for the neurotransmitter adenosine, which caffeine binds to. “We are confident that this is a common property across the animal kingdom,” says Wright.

Journal reference: Science, .