Biological psychiatry global open science
September 1, 2025
Čestmír Vejmola, Klára Šíchová, Kateřina Syrová et al.
4 citations
Psilocin, the active compound in psychedelic mushrooms, impairs the ability to distinguish between static and moving images in both humans and rats. In a visual discrimination task, human participants and male rats were asked to judge whether an image was static or moving. Under psilocin, both species showed significant difficulty in this task. In humans, the impairment tracked psilocin plasma levels and self-reported hallucination intensity. In rats, psilocin selectively disrupted performance in a motion-based task but not a luminance-based task, suggesting a specific effect on motion perception. Decision time was also linked to discrimination impairment. This is the first evidence that rats experience visual distortions similar to those reported by humans, offering a model for studying altered visual perception in drug-induced and psychiatric conditions.
IBRO Neuroscience Reports
October 1, 2023
Čestmír Vejmola, Kateřina Syrová, Klára Šíchová et al.
GABAB receptors, which are part of the brain's inhibitory system, are modulated by accessory proteins called KCTD16. In experiments using mice lacking the KCTD16 gene, baseline pain sensitivity and nerve cell activity in the spinal cord were similar to normal mice. However, when treated with the GABAB receptor agonist baclofen, normal mice showed greater pain relief (higher thresholds for heat and touch) than mice lacking KCTD16. In a model of peripheral inflammation, KCTD16-deficient mice tended to have higher pain thresholds, and baclofen's inhibitory effect on nerve signals was reduced. The findings suggest KCTD16 may be important for pain modulation during pathological conditions when GABAB receptors are activated, but further research is needed.
The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience
December 6, 2017
Hsin-Yi Kao, Dino Dvořák, Eunhye Park et al.
The psychotomimetic drug phencyclidine (PCP) impairs a learned hippocampus-dependent place avoidance behavior in rats, even when injected directly into the dorsal hippocampus. PCP increases 60-100 Hz gamma oscillations in hippocampal CA1, and these increases correlate with cognitive impairment. PCP disrupts the coordination between theta-modulated medium-frequency and slow gamma oscillations, and it disrupts the subsecond temporal organization of discharge among place cells, causing ensemble representations of a familiar space to cease resembling pre-PCP representations despite preserved place fields. These findings indicate that PCP-induced cognitive impairments arise from neural discoordination, specifically excitation-inhibition discoordination, rather than from disruption of place fields themselves.