Download Neuroscience and Pharmaceuticals: Agonists, Antagonists, and the Neurochemical Revolution and more Papers Psychology in PDF only on Docsity!
XXXXXXXX
Paper 1/ Group A Chapter 2: Agonists and Antagonists, p. 40- In chapter two of the textbook it describes and shows the cause and affect of how different chemicals influence neurotransmitters across the synapse and around the receptor sites of the receiving neuron. An agonist molecule closely resembles a neurotransmitter molecule, so much so that it actually has the same effects on the body as the actual neurotransmitter molecule. An antagonist molecule has a similar structure to a neurotransmitter molecule, but does not resemble the neurotransmitter molecule enough to stimulate the neuron receptor. Instead the antagonist docks at the receptor sites of the receiving neuron and prohibits other neurotransmitter molecules from docking. This newspaper article from The Washington Times (attached) discusses the ongoing quest by the general American public to use pharmaceutical solutions to unnaturally motivate, stimulate, and run their lives. Paul Root Wolpe uses a futuristic setting (2018) and fictional prescription drugs to depict a society dependant on stimulants and mood correctors. He then shifts his focus to the modern world of medicine and describes the current affect of psychotropic drugs on the population, and how by using these drugs we are inherently depriving ourselves of valuable life skills and experiences. The real pharmaceutical examples in this article deal with agonists such as Provigil, beta blockers (antagonists), or brain enhancers such as Donepezil. All these medical examples directly influence the way neurotransmitter molecules react with neuron docking sites and how our bodies react due to this influence.
Sunday, August 24, 2008 WOLPE: Preparing for a neuroscience revolution Paul Root Wolpe The year is 2018. You wake in the morning and take Sunrise, a mild stimulant pill that erases the foggy feeling of slumber. Before going off to work or school, you take your memory-boosting pill and your attention-enhancing pill, and, if it is the first day, a calmative to keep your sweaty palms dry. Right before coming home after your hectic day, you take Sublime, the pill that calms you and puts you in a serene mood so you will be centered and peaceful when you walk back in the door to greet your family. Finally, as night falls, you take Sleepex, a new drug that keeps you awake and refreshed with only four hours of sleep a night. If my experience as a social scientist and ethicist are any measure, some people will read the above paragraphs with delight. How wonderful it will be to lose less time to sleep, to be able to memorize sonnets or box scores, to put the worries of a high-pressure job completely behind you when you get home! Others will read it with a kind of dread, seeing pharmaceutically enhanced workers laboring under a new kind of human servitude, dependent on drugs that increase competitiveness, remove incentives to improve ourselves through hard work and turn us into enhancement junkies. Human beings have always looked for natural substances to alter their mental functioning. We may even have a natural, innate desire to vary our states of consciousness. Take stimulants, for example. Almost every culture has discovered one or two that were commonly ingested; in the Americas, native cultures used chocolate, mate and guarana to get their doses of caffeine, coca leaves to enhance attention and endurance for traveling or hunting, tobacco for the stimulating effects of nicotine. Of course, native cultures did it the right way; coca leaves are nourishing, nonaddicting and only give a mild stimulation. Cocaine, on the other hand, is a highly stimulating, highly addicting and dangerous substitute. The same with tobacco; native cultures would chew it or take a puff or two, not smoke two packs a day. Now, we have a new class of pharmaceuticals in development. On the market already are stimulants, such as modafinil (marketed as Provigil) that enhances attention but which, unlike amphetamines, does not increase heart rate and blood pressure and is nonaddictive. Millions of American children are on Ritalin or other psychotropic drugs, and one study showed that up to 20 percent of college students used prescription stimulants to help them study for exams. Beta blockers are prescribed to stage performers and nervous brides and grooms to settle them before the big day. Coming down the pike are memory- enhancement pills (already in clinical trials), memory-suppression pills (propranolol is already being tested for that purpose), pills that enhance the brain's executive functioning (decision-making, judgment), and pills like Donepezil, an Alzheimer's treatment, which has a wide range of effects, including increasing concentration, memory and the ability to learn. Dangers lurk in the casual use of such substances, however. First, very few drugs are as effective or safe as they first appear; there seems to be a bubble effect, where people report that newly released drugs are highly effective, but as the novelty wears off, so does
