It's a good way to get prion disease for sure.
this post was submitted on 22 Oct 2023
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...Would the prions make you high? π€
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?
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Not sure about that but it is a great way to get Kuru
Risk factor: cannibalism Prevention: Avoid cannibalism
That sounds too difficult
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 CreutzfeldtβJakob 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.
Specifically a spongiform encephalopathy. Completely incurable and universally fatal. If you contract a prion disease medical science can only ever prolong the inevitable, and it is extremely unlikely that will ever change barring some unknown hyper futuristic nano-machine technology.
And Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in cervids such as deer, moose, and elk, which thankfully has not been shown to be transmissible to humans yet. Prions are the stuff of nightmares.
Oh, and Fatal Familial Insomnia.
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.
β¦. Just why would they do that tho?
As part of mourning people would eat parts of dead family members.
Also alot of people who find out about this think you'll get it from eating just anyone's brain but the chance of developing the initial desiese is literally one in a milion, not that you should go around eating brains
This is actually not good stats. In the general population, the current situation with prions is that they are extremely rare. But that's for the general population. If you are around brain eaters then your risk for exposure is exponentially higher. For example, the odds that a person from the general population is exposed to HIV is relatively low. But if you instead only focus on people that live in smack houses in an abandoned part of detroit, then those people have much different odds.
The problem with prions is literally fucking everything though. There is a reason they will wipe out thousands of cows if they find out even one has prion disease. First is time. They usually do not show symptoms for a long long time. Next, is prions are damned near impossible to get rid of. So you're hanging out with brain eaters, but you aren't eating brains? But did you use their forks? Because the dishwasher isn't getting rid of that prion. Goddamn medical autoclaves do not get rid of them. I know someone that was participating in a neurosurgery, and after a couple days after the surgery, they found out the patient had a prion disease (probably CreutzfeldtβJakob but I don't recall for sure). Well that caused havoc because of possible exposure and the lag time between the surgery and finding out. They destroyed a lot of things, had intense decontamination for others, had to inform some people in the hospital about possible exposure. Even with the low risk, just imagine being one of those people. For the next 20 years, the thought is probably just lingering in the corner of their brain that a dumbass protein that couldn't follow directions and decided to make its own rules is also lingering around a corner of their brain.
But yeah, cannibalism in general tends to lead to increased rates of disease and new diseases. Which is logical. Most diseases aren't interspecies, but if you are eating the same species then you can catch anything that has lingered. Parasites, bacteria if you like your human flesh medium rare, viruses, and prions. So I highly suggest against hanging out with cannibals.
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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.
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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
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Okay, hear me out. Rectal route?
Boofing brain
...And I'm done. No beating this today.
Coward. I'll beat to this.
Boofing 2: Brain Boogaloo
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.
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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?
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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.
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Simplifying the question a bit:
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Which hormones can be absorbed when eaten, and what effects would you feel
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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)
Melatonin also breaks down in your stomach. It's absorbed through the mouth and tongue while chewing. After that, most of the rest is lost. That's why Melatonin pills require higher doses to do anything. The medical science world is still split if any of the fancy melatonin you gobble up in all those gummies can cross the blood brain barrier at all.
So the same rules apply.
Overall its very inconsistent due to the first pass effect of the liver as well. Anything absorbed from the alimentary canal goes through the liver first and the liver is very effective at breaking down lost hormones.
I think melatonin is more the exception than the rule.
Testosterone needs to be injected and has a very short half life.
A quick Google shows Dopamine also needs to be injected and has a half life of one minute, so is only used as an IV drip.
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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.
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.
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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.)
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That's how you become a Wendigo.
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