SHR # 2570 :: Psychedelic Drug Psilocybin Tamps Down Brain's Ego Center plus Getting Closer to Nature, One Bite at a Time - Dr. Frederick Barrett - Steve Brill - Violet Brill - Perhaps no region of the brain is more fittingly named than the claustrum, taken from the Latin word for -hidden or shut away-. The claustrum is an extremely thin sheet of neurons deep within the cortex, yet it reaches out to every other region of the brain. Its true purpose remains -hidden away- as well, with researchers speculating about many functions. What is known is that this region contains a large number of receptors targeted by psychedelic drugs such as LSD or psilocybin the hallucinogenic chemical found in certain mushrooms. To see what happens in the claustrum when people are on psychedelics, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers compared the brain scans of people after they took psilocybin with their scans after taking a placebo. PLUS Steve and Violet Brill looks at a forest the same way most people think about a supermarket. Walk through a park or wooded area with them and they can show you a number of wild plants that might make for tasty additions to your dinner plate. They would tell you how yellow wood sorrel tastes just like lemonade or how black birch can be used as a minty flavoring for pudding. With the advent of this pandemic, foraging may be more important than ever. Some are including it in their home-schooling curriculum in hopes of arming their children with this almost-forgotten art.