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Psychoactive drugs operate by temporarily affecting a person's neurochemistry, which in turn causes changes in a person's mood, cognition, perception and behavior. There are many ways in which psychoactive drugs can affect the brain. Each drug has a specific action on one or more neurotransmitter or neuroreceptor in the brain.
Psychoactive drugs exert their sensory and behavioral effects almost entirely by acting on neurotransmitters and by modifying one or more aspects of synaptic transmission. Neurotransmitters can be viewed as chemicals through which neurons primarily communicate; psychoactive drugs affect the mind by altering this communication.
[1] [2] Psychoactive drugs induce emotions that in human evolutionary history signaled increases in fitness. [8] Positive emotions such as euphoria and excitation are tools chosen by natural selection to help direct the behavior and physiology of an individual towards an increase in Darwinian fitness.
Recreational drug use is the use of one or more psychoactive drugs to induce an altered state of consciousness, either for pleasure or for some other casual purpose or pastime. [1] When a psychoactive drug enters the user's body, it induces an intoxicating effect. [1]
Drugs such as opium, alcohol, and certain plants have been used for millennia by humans to ease suffering or change awareness, but until the modern scientific era knowledge of how the substances actually worked was quite limited, most pharmacological knowledge being more a series of observation than a coherent model.
The Monkey Drug Trials of 1969 were a series of controversial animal testing experiments that were conducted on primates to study the effects of various psychoactive substances. The trials shed light on the profound effects of drug addiction and withdrawal in primates, pioneering critical insights into human substance abuse.
This is a list of plant species that, when consumed by humans, are known or suspected to produce psychoactive effects: changes in nervous system function that alter perception, mood, consciousness, cognition or behavior. Many of these plants are used intentionally as psychoactive drugs, for
A dried cannabis flower. The short-term effects of cannabis are caused by many chemical compounds in the cannabis plant, including 113 [clarification needed] different cannabinoids, such as tetrahydrocannabinol, and 120 terpenes, [1] which allow its drug to have various psychological and physiological effects on the human body.