Going a ways towards illustrating Aldous Huxley's description of the brain as "cerebral reducing valve" is the discovery of Npas4, a transcription factor responsible for the formation of inhibitory synapses. "...Npas4, regulates more than 200 genes that act in various ways to calm down over-excited cells, restoring a balance that is thought to go askew in some neurologic disorders." Huxley's realization, made possible through his ingestion of Mescaline and written in The Doors of Perception, was that one of the primary functions of the brain is to reduce the amount of information available to us at any one time, distilling what is left into an evolutionarily viable product (i.e. something that lets us fulfill our basic drives: eating, sleeping, and having sex). Npas4, described as a 'master switch', plays a vital role in this mechanism.
Not sure where I was going with that, other than that I really like the phrase "cerebral reducing valve" and wanted an excuse to use it.
Speaking of Huxley's bypassing of the 'cerebral reducing valve', check out this comic from overcompensating.com. Don't worry, they're not actually anti-drugs. In fact, they're the only comic I've seen to feature DMT elves.
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The given Overcompensating link gives a 404. A currently-working URL (found by searching "dmt") is here.
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