Category: Research

Charles Raison, a psychiatrist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, has been experimenting with having people sleep through their trips, as a way to understand how much a conscious psychedelic experience matters. Two volunteers received psilocybin while in a deep sleep with a sedative, and 1 week later both “swore they got placebo,” Raison says. He is now developing a larger study in which people with self-reported reduced emotional well-being will be randomized to get psilocybin or placebo while either awake or asleep, to tease out how the trip influences longer term effects on emotional state.

“Even lowering the legal age of marriage to 18 will do nothing to boost the fertility rate now that people have become accustomed to marrying young and having children later,” said Yi Fuxian, a senior scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who conducts demography research. “China’s age of first marriage in 2020 was 29.4 years for men and 28.0 years for women, and it will continue to be delayed, following along the same path as Taiwan and South Korea.”

Vanessa Sperandio, professor and chair of the medical microbiology and immunology department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has studied how the connect between the intestinal system and the brain — called the gut-brain axis — plays into addiction. Sperandio explained that E. coli, the bacterium famous for making people violently ill, always lives in our guts. She found that when there’s an overgrowth of E. coli, a person becomes more susceptible to cocaine addiction.

“If you have an expansion of E. coli … you enhance … cocaine addiction behaviors, cocaine seeking behaviors, cocaine administration behaviors,” she said.

There are countless examples of gut bacteria influencing our lives. Maggie Alexander, an assistant professor of medical microbiology and immunology at UW-Madison, is studying how the gut-brain axis affects autoimmune diseases, where the immune system attacks healthy parts of the body.

“There’s been this really strong connection of microbiota and autoimmune conditions,” Alexander said,

“Ideally, parents should think about their child’s heart health even before their child is born,” said Dr. Amy Peterson, a professor of pediatrics in the department of pediatric cardiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“Social media may be playing a role in pushing the birth rate down, in part by promoting the perception that people should really only have children if they can give those children what we might think of as ‘Pinterest-perfect’ lives,” said Jessica Calarco, an award-winning sociology researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

A new study by researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has revealed that soft-shell helmet covers do not reduce concussions for Wisconsin high school football players.