Thanks, and yes, you're correct

The actual scientific article is open-access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5

Ahh that's wack. The article it's based on is open-access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5

Plenty. If you scroll down, there's tens of research articles linked. You just have to click on the circles for most of the articles :-)

Here's an excerpt from the bottom of the article':

The most conclusive long-term study on sleep training to date is a 2012 randomized controlled trial on 326 infants, which found no difference on any measure—negative or positive—between children who were sleep trained and those who weren’t after a 5 year follow up. The study includes measurements of sleep patterns, behavior, cortisol levels, and, importantly, attachment.

That's an interesting point. But maybe there are some compounds that can induce a state that fools people who've never tried psychoactive compounds? I've heard of studies using dehydrated water as a placebo for alcohol as it induces some of the same effects:

Like ethanol, heavy water temporarily changes the relative density of cupula relative to the endolymph in the vestibular organ, causing positional nystagmus, illusions of bodily rotations, dizziness, and nausea. However, the direction of nystagmus is in the opposite direction of ethanol, since it is denser than water, not lighter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water

To a certain extent I agree, but I also think it's a tricky topic that deals a fair bit with the ethics of medicine. The Atlantic has a pretty good article with arguments for and against: https://web.archive.org/web/20230201192052/https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2011/12/the-placebo-debate-is-it-unethical-to-prescribe-them-to-patients/250161/

Yes, in your three situations, I'd agree that option C is the best one. But you're disregarding a major component of any drug: side effects. Presumably ecstasy has some nonnegligible side effects so just looking at the improvement on the treated disease might now show the full picture

I agree that it's a shame that it's so difficult to eliminate the placebo effect from psychoactive drugs. There's probably alternative ways of teasing out the effect, if any, from MDMA therapy, but human studies take a long time and, consequently, costs a lot of money. I'd imagine the researchers would love to do the studies, but doesn't have the resources for it

I think the critique about conflicts of interest seems a bit misguided. It's not the scientists who doesn't want to move further with this. It's the FDA

But if they know they're getting ecstasy, the improvement might originate from placebo which means that they're not actually getting better from ecstasy. They're just getting better because they think they should be getting better

That's a super cool link. Thanks for sharing!

I think those are all good questions that I don't think anyone really have conclusive answers to (yet). Hopefully the researchers will have the funds in the future to investigate those and more!

From the article:

Squeezed in alongside their main projects, the investigation took eight years and included dozens of participants. The results, published in 2016, were revelatory [1]. Two to three months after giving birth, multiple regions of the cerebral cortex were, on average, 2% smaller than before conception. And most of them remained smaller two years later. Although shrinkage might evoke the idea of a deficit, the team showed that the degree of cortical reduction predicted the strength of a mother’s attachment to her infant, and proposed that pregnancy prepares the brain for parenthood.

[1] https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.4458

I think that hypothesis still holds as it has always assumed training data of sufficient quality. This study is more saying that the places where we've traditionally harvested training data from are beginning to be polluted by low-quality training data