Well Astragalus is many molecules in small amounts and it probably varies from one type of plant or region it is grown in to another as far as make up, just a guess.
The dreams for me were like you took a recording of a every minute of your life, and then at random selected so many minutes of it to live again. In away, they seem very real like you are there and it is happening but also not very special kind of like most of the minutes of life.
Now I have a really crazy theory of why they are happening. Park says we grow or replace 15,000 neurons a night and what if our brains record everything we see and do without us being conscious of it, and what if with telomerase and its repair and enhancing replacement ability with the neurons our brain transfers memories to the new neurons, as those neurons containing them start to die out there by preserving them and that is replayed in the dreams for some reason. Like I said they seem totally real and from 10-30 years in the past and nothing like a dream.
Now Park calls it lucid dreaming, but mine do not seem like a dream, that seems real or vibrant. More normal real and nothing created, just played back. I am there and then I am not and awake. It gets hard to adjust to that kind of time shift LOL
I had a look at Dr Parks Podcast. Quite interesting theories you have. A few thoughts.
1. Similarity in effects
Many of the effects he describe in the first slides are the same as can be experienced while using SSRI's. This include drowsiness, altered sleep patterns and also an "enhancement", although personally I only had them while awake and not while dreaming, of many of the senses. Examples of the latter are that colours may be experienced as more colourful, smell is much more pronounced and that food tastes much more than before.
My own alternate theory is therefore that Astragalus/Cyclo/TA-65 works in a similar fashion with regards to the central nervous system.
2. Old memories
Your theory is that the neurons of our brains transfers memories to the new neurons while they are replaced during sleep and that memories are then replayed. I don't think this would occur during the actual replication of "the memories", because it would be hard to put together a coherent dream before you knew exactly which neurons have been replaced. I think it might be more logical if the brain ran a control program afterwards - on the parts of the brain where neurons have been found to be replaced. This would be done in order to verify that memories which might have been affected are still intact, perhaps by verifying that the the memories "as a whole" seem to be logical and coherent. At least that's the way I would construct the system :-)
Personally I think the reason why SSRI's, and possible Astragalus, triggers old memories is that they affect the sensitivity of of
neurotransmitters. By blocking the reuptake pumps of neurotransmitters they make it easier for neurons which have not been activated in a long time to be triggered. This also includes being triggered by mistake while the central nervous system recalibrates to a new baseline with a new higher level of serotonin/dopamine/etc present in the synaptic clefts, triggering old almost forgotten memories at the same time. If these memory recollections occur during daytime, why not during sleep?
Or this might be a combination. The playback of the memory replication might suddenly contain more distant memories which have suddenly come on-line again. The neurons which contained them might previously have been "cut off" from the network but are now on-line again due to some neurons newly increased sensitivity to the neurotransmitter substances which tries to trigger them.
3. Effects on parts of the brain
There are several different types of neurotransmitters, but if Astragalus/Cyclo/TA-65 should affect the
Serotonin system, there are several
interesting places where it can have an effect, maybe by simply enhancing the sensitivity of nerve cells in these places. You might note that the
thalamus and
hypothalamus are among these, which might affect consciousness, sleep and the circadian rhythm. It also includes the hippocampus which might affect the handling of the consolidation of short term memory to long term memory.
3. Lucid dreaming and meditation
I also had more lucid dreams while younger, but not that many lately. I note that lucid dreams seem to occur in the
Beta 1 frequency band. This is just
above the Alpha band
where you most likely will be during meditation. If you want to experiment with measuring brain waves during meditation, I can recommend using a
MindWave. It's a pretty good tool for learning to control your mind. I'm not sure how good it will be for measuring the activity during sleep though, because it will probably fall off if you move around a lot while sleeping. There are more game related
headband variants of it which might work better for that purpose, but I don't have one, so I've not been able to try to pair it to a computer where you can measure your activity.
You might also try out a
sleep phase alarm clock.You can upload the nights log to a computer where you will see approximations of your sleep phases. You need to do the uploads regularly, though. The clock doesn't have that much memory and then it will overwrite the logs.
Edited by GreenPower, 23 August 2013 - 12:32 PM.
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