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I'd like to know what is the reference for amoebic learning. I cannot comment directly on this, but there is some evidence for "adaptive anticipation" in both prokaryotes and single-celled Eukaryotes which do not have a nervous system. In the case of E. coli, it has been shown that the bacteria can anticipate the environment it is about to enter. E. coli ...

In addition to the excellent response up top (by Poshpaws), one can also imagine how these systems work by looking at recent synthetic examples of single-celled organism memory. It is possible to design various bistable switches using protein pathways, RNAi, or other means that will latch a particular state. In that way, an organism could effectively ...

Someone is almost sure to prove me wrong about 30 seconds after I post this, but I don't think that the mechanistic aspects of learning are really all that well known in these study systems. The idea that it is occurring at all is recent enough (I've enjoyed Tanya Latty's Ph.D. work on this, for instance: http://www.tanyalatty.com/Home/research) that I ...

I think you'll like this article. It's on monoamine release / reuptake inhibition for a host of different psychedelic and empathogenic drugs. This wakefulness inducing effect you describe for LSD is widely reported for all common 5-HT2 mediated psychedelics.

CB1 and CB2 are indeed particular genes which are present in neurons, but also liver and other tissues. The HGNC website is a good resource for questions like this - HGNC is the international organization that tries to unify and track gene names. The official gene names are CNR1 and CNR2 respectively. Gene names are a bit of a mess, since many genes have ...