No Stupid Questions @lemmy.world sir_pronoun @lemmy.world 8 mo. ago

Would eating raw human brains make you high?

With all the hormones and whatnot inside. Dopamine, adrenaline, melatonin, whatever. Also, there's this Hunter S. Thompson bit on the.. pineal gland?

If it had an effect on you, wouldn't it be a really messed up high, all over the place? With uppers, downers etc mixed? (Not including the emotional implications of eating raw human brains.)

73 comments

It's a good way to get prion disease for sure.
- ...Would the prions make you high? 🤔
  
  Can you taste memories
  
  well they would certainly destroy your brain
- Are those the ones that give "laughing disease" or whatever it's called - that's in fact very deadly
- Why would that be likely? Wouldn't that only be the case of the brain you are eating already has it?
  
  For whatever reason prion disease has a chance to spontaneously occur when mammals cannibalize. Especially if they are obligate herbivores. Prion disease was originally discovered in cows transmitting it to humans due to some particularly sick fuck running a slaughter factory thinking it would be a good idea to put cow meat scraps back in their feed soylent green style.
Not sure about that but it is a great way to get Kuru
- Risk factor: cannibalism Prevention: Avoid cannibalism
  
  That sounds too difficult
  
  It's easy when you put your mind to it.
- Often takes years or even decades for symptoms to appear after exposure
  
  Oh jolly, everything about this resembles the Mad Cow Disease
  
  [...]
  
  The epidemic likely started when a villager developed sporadic Creutzfeldt–Jakob disease and died. When villagers ate the brain, they contracted the disease and then spread it to other villagers who ate their infected brains.
  
  Jolly
  
  It's a prion disease. Mad Cow, Creutzfeldt-Jacob, Chronic Wasting (so far only seen in deer), and Scrapies (known of for a long time and so far limited to sheep and goats) all start with a misfolded protein and gradually break down the brain till it looks like a sponge.
  
  It resembles mad cow disease because they're both prion diseases, which are more or less only spread by consumption of brain.
  
  Some of the other nasty ones that keep my a little freaked out are Chronic wasting disease, aka the zombie deer disease and Fatal Insomnia , which just sounds like something straight from a horror film.
  
  …. Just why would they do that tho?
  
  I mean, it pretty much is. They're both transmissible spongiform encephalopathy, one just emerged in cows.
  
  Jolly
  
  Brits try human brains for first time!
  
  What's with your use of the word "jolly?"
- Did anyone else learn about Kuru from the Book of Eli movie?
  
  For me, it was the game Dead Island
- That wikipedia article reads like an a try in the sco wiki.
Nah, it's the other way around, you'd have to be really fucking high to wanna eat human brains
- Zombies really just hit some of that snoop dogg good good.
  
  More like a Florida man tea party
- Like... Bath salts high.
no your stomach acid would denature most of the proteins, then they'd be conjugated at the liver so whatever goes in will be transformed by what comes out. A lot of those hormones are tightly regulated so I'm thinking even if they make it into circulation they'd be eliminated fairly quickly. Only exception would be if they're acid stable, not impacted on their way through the gut/metabolised by microbiota, absorbed in tact and still active after the first pass effect. Also theres enzymes like trypsin in your stomach that are specifically for degrading proteins so I doubt it would make you anything other than a canibal.
- Would smoking raw human brains make you high?
  
  Wait no thermal degredation
  
  Would nebulizing raw human brains make you high? Especially of I got a little brain-diffuser in the corner that just filled the room with the aroma
  
  Get me some brains and I'll let you know.
- Okay, hear me out. Rectal route?
  
  Boofing brain
  
  It would still go through the liver for metabolism. The only thing "boofing" effectively does is skip the stomach part of the digestive process. To take up anything from the digestive tract, it gets transported through the intestinal lumen and into the mesenteric and hepatic portal system. The liver filters everything that gets into the blood from the gut before it goes into the inferior vena cava and into the rest of the circulatory system.
  
  Correction to clarify: the lower gut/colon mostly only takes up water and certain vitamins that are released by gut bacteria, and very small molecules like ethanol can sometimes get through as well. The very lowest part of the colon does have a vascular supply that can bypass the liver, and there are some medications designed to take advantage of the select receptors and transporters down there. However, neurotransmitters and peptide hormones (which is what OP was asking about) would likely not get taken up until it was much higher up in the digestive tract, and at that point it would go through the hepatic portal system.
  
  Thank you to those that corrected me. Intestines are actually fairly complicated.
- conjugated???
  
  The liver "conjugates"/metabolises a bunch of stuff, its been almost a decade since I studied this stuff but bassically it will remove or add functional groups on/off a given compound. Most of what you eat heads straight to the liver for "processing" where food (and orally administered drugs) get altered prior to circulation. Its part of the first pass effect.
- you're mostly right, however trypsin is produced in the pancreas and excreted into the duodenum, so not in the stomach. I think maybe you're thinking of pepsin?
  
  Ya it was the first one to pop into my head as an example, the main point is anything active would be neutralized one way or another by the time it ended up in circulation.
- ...so how many brains would i have to inject to get high?
Simplifying the question a bit:

Which hormones can be absorbed when eaten, and what effects would you feel

At what concentration are those found in the brain
- To answer the first one:
  
  My understanding is that it's basically impossible to get these hormones through oral pathways.
  
  Mostly because they break down in stomach acid or can't cross the blood brain barrier.
  
  And finally, if all that were solved, these hormones are typically short lived and are quickly lost.
  
  Which is why, say you are low on dopamine. We don't give people dopamine pills, but instead some other medicine that promotes higher levels of dopamine.
  
  We don't actually promote higher levels of dopamine as far as I know. Dopamine agonists work by mimicing what dopamine does to your nervous system. It doesn't actually produce any more. Also you can be given dopamine intravenously. It is mostly used to raise blood pressure in newborns. But you are right. For other uses, its smarter to mimic it, because of how short it lasts.
  
  We do, however, promote a higher concentration of serotonin with SSRIs. We do that by blocking natural inhibitors that destroy serotonin after being used. This way we can use them more before they die off.
  
  I used to think that these hormones might break down in stomach acid as well, but then I discovered melatonin fruit gummies, which supposedly help you sleep. These gummies are what really inspired this question. (The ones I have are mango flavored, not brains flavored, btw, in case you were wondering)
As far as the pineal gland goes, a book written in 2000 (DMT: The Spirit Molecule) declares the pineal gland produces enough DMT (Dimethyltryptamine) to experience hallucinogenic effects but this has not been confirmed, trace amounts of DMT has been found in the pineal glands of rats, but not humans. If there was enough DMT in a pineal gland and you ate it, you would also need to inhibit certain enzymes that break it down, namely, Monoamine Oxidase.
- You seem to be a very well educated Fleshtrap! Thanks!
  
  that is a common story that most people know
  
  i bet a lot of people know more than you due to the question that you asked being very far off base from how anything actually works
  
  brain when consumed digests so if any chemicals were still there theyd have been metabolized into something different including dmt probably but im not sure if dmt is bioavailable in the stomach
Having absolutely no formal knowledge, I doubt it. The brain afaik is mostly fat..We also evolved eating animals we hunted and we didn't just eat the meat. We ate the organs, liver, brain, etc. The liver is really full of that stuff and doesn't make us high.
- Yeah. Cows are way bigger than us. If we got high eating brains we would know from eating animal brains.
- Why would you think it's appropriate to comment if you're just guessing? This is not a question where random guessing is appropriate.
  
  Your reasoning is correct in that we do eat brains, and of course they don't get us high.
  
  You're wrong is the fact that brain is mostly fat. That's incredibly misleading. The brain is entirely nervous tissue plus supporting things like vessels. It does contain lots of myelin which serves to insulate axons, since nervous tissue is electrical. Myelin happens to contain a lot of fatty acids, but it is in no sense "fat".
Question OP, were you high when you thought about this?
- Shamefully, no. I was pondering my melatonin fruit gummies after lots of coffee, though. Coffee tends to get me a bit high sometimes. (I hadn't eaten any gummies after the coffee, I was just thinking about them.)
  
  melatonin is a horomone and doesnt get you high just regulates how you should sleep
  
  coffee or caffeine inhibits your bodies ability to relax ur muscles (by mimicking adenosine i think) but doesnt make you high or more awake (like people seem to think). could cause a heart attack tho but that's super rare if ur a normal person.
  
  i take it you havent dabbled much in the drug world, so id remain ignorant. its more blissful. but if you really want to dabble please research yourself and not news articles. actual studies. news articles will lie and propagate misinfo.
That's how you become a Wendigo.
Even if it was legal and ethical, don't eat far-left's. You'll be so woke you will regret it.

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