SSS 2008-03-03（在线收听）

This is Scientific American's 60-Second Psych, I'm Christopher Intagliata, got a minute?

While at Stanford in the mid-1960s, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest author Ken Kesey started adding a peculiar ingredient to his home-cooked venison stew--LSD. Now, more than forty years later, the psychedelic pioneer's beloved drug is giving neuroscientists new clues about what causes schizophrenic psychosis. Their research was published this week in the journal Nature.You’ve got a lot of chemical messengers naturally swimming in your brain. Serotonin and glutamine are two of them and have corresponding receptors to accept their chemical messengers. LSD is a chemical messenger too. When it binds to a serotonin receptor, the hallucinations kick in. But only if the serotonin receptors hooked up to a glutamine receptor. The neuroscientists say the serotonin and glutamine receptor pair could be the culprit for both hallucinations and mental psychosis. Curiously, when neuroscientists added the chemical messenger to block the glutamine receptor, LSD didn’t have any psychedelic effect. There’s currently a drug in the second stage of clinical trials that does just that--block the glutamine receptor, and it may bring us one step closer to curing the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia.

Thanks for the minute ,for Scientific American's 60-Second Psych, I'm Christopher
Intagliata. 60-Second Psych is sponsored by Worth Publishers, the leading educational publisher in psychology.