Acute objective and subjective intoxication effects of legal-market high potency THC-dominant versus CBD-dominant cannabis concentrates

As the market for cannabis concentrate products grows, the lack of research regarding the effects of concentrated THC and CBD becomes more glaring. The present study analyzes cannabinoid blood levels and subjective outcomes of physical sensation and affective state after ad libitum use of legal-market concentrate products. Recreational cannabis users were randomly assigned to THC- or CBD-dominant concentrate products, completing a baseline session, and an experimental mobile laboratory session consisting of timepoints before, immediately after, and one-hour after concentrate use. THC-dominant concentrates induced higher intoxication, and higher ratings of drug effect and drug liking than the CBD-dominant concentrate. Both products induced immediate feelings of elation, diminishing over the subsequent hour. Subjective outcomes in the CBD-dominant group revealed immediate decreases in tension and anxiety relative to pre-use, while the THC-dominant group only saw significant decreases in anxiety after one hour. Paranoia spiked immediately post-use in THC-dominant concentrate users, returning to baseline within an hour. Overall, the CBD-dominant concentrate invoked positive mood effects, lower intoxication and an absence of undesirable effects experienced with the THC-dominant concentrate, potentially mitigating negative effects when combined. Results support the need for further investigation into harm-reduction potential of concentrated CBD when used alone and with THC.

Playing Cute: Sensation Villainy and the Aesthetics of Small Things in The Woman in White and Lady Audley’s Secret

In Our Aesthetic Categories (2012), Sianne Ngai defines ‘cute’ as an aesthetic ‘preoccupation with small, easy to handle things . . . an aesthetic that celebrates the diminutive and the vulnerable’. Although Ngai identifies the cute as a predominantly twentieth-century phenomenon, and one which is inextricably bound up with the mass-market commodification, even eroticization and fetishization of the cute object or person, it is difficult to imagine a literary character more enamoured with ‘small things’ – from tiny, sugary confections to his menagerie of pet mice – than Wilkie Collins’s Count Fosco, or a character who so perfectly conforms to the definition of the cute commodity itself as ‘appealing specifically . . . for protection and care’ than the ‘childish, helpless, babyfied’ Lucy Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret (1862). This article reads Count Fosco and Lady Audley through the characteristics of cuteness to better understand the aesthetic and economic dynamics of their villainy, and to establish for the twentieth-century phenomenon of cuteness identified by Ngai a discernible genealogy in the specific conjunction of print culture, theatricality, commodification, and physical sensation that we now recognize as the sensation fiction of the 1860s.

The Idea of Landing Sites and Its Inheritance through Tactileology

From the perspective of sustainability, empowering people to live positively without being dominated by death is an important issue. One thing we can do in this vein is to expand one’s own physical sensation, which is the basis for us to live. From this point of view, Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins’ idea of “landing sites” is very important. Landing sites are physical experiences that result from person–environment collaboration. In order to make as many people as possible aware of their physical sensations through landing sites, Arakawa and Gins created artificial environments such as “Site of Reversible Destiny Yoro” where people could gain new physical sensations. They wanted people to build new ethics and move toward social reformation based on their new physical sensations. However, at present, these artificial environments have some problems. It is the time to seriously consider how we can pass on the experience of landing sites to future generations. The aim of this paper is to provide an answer to the question by Yasuhiro Suzuki’s scientific research on tactile sense, called tactileology. I first introduce Arakawa and Gin’s text about the idea of “landing sites” and make clear its importance. Next, I point out that, now, “landing sites” present certain difficulties. I then confirm that tactileology inherits the idea of “landing sites”.

Medical and psychiatric differential diagnoses of pediatric globus sensation: A case study with review discussion

Globus hystericus, also known as globus pharyngeus or globus sensation, is characterized by the physical sensation of a mass in one’s throat. Globus sensation is more common in adults and reported more rarely in children. Adult patients with globus sensation score higher on neuroticism, introversion, anxiety, and depression. However, not all patients with globus sensation have psychiatric abnormalities. Thus, it is important to share an atypical presentation in children and highlight the necessity of ruling out other organic causes. The present case study elucidates the process of ruling out medical etiologies of globus sensation in a young girl with anxiety and food aversion. We provide a review discussion of the differential diagnoses, both medical and psychiatric, of globus sensation in the pediatric population reported in past literature. The case study and review of pediatric globus sensation shows that the symptom can be associated with a wide array of psychological and medical diagnoses. The medical differential diagnoses of globus sensation include the gastroenteric system, laryngeal system, cardiovascular system, and nervous system. We encourage critical analysis of other potential diagnoses, given each patient’s unique history and physical presentation.

The Effects of Synesthesia on Recall Memory Abilities in Teenagers

Synesthesia is a rare phenomenon in which people associate an inducer, such as a sound, song, or sequence of time, with a specific concurrent, such as a color, shape, or physical sensation. Very little is known about what causes this phenomenon, although due to a recent influx of research, it has been recorded that synesthesia provides a wide array of cognitive benefits to those who experience it, with the most notable being memory. Children with synesthesia in group studies have not been shown to have advantageous memory, while adults with synesthesia in group studies have shown the opposite. However, a group study of this nature has never been conducted on teenagers with synesthesia, despite this being the age range where advantageous memory would seem likely to manifest. This study conducts an experimental analysis on the relationship between synesthesia and advantageous memory in teenagers for immediate, delayed, and matrix recall memory. The results of this study show that teenagers with synesthesia have a memory advantage in matrix recall memory, leading to the conclusion that, for some types of memory, synesthesia begins to provide a benefit in the years of adolescence.

How Gardens Feel

This chapter considers the ways that Edmund Spenser and John Milton focus their considerable epics on the scrupulous calibration of physical sensation with a range of environmental textures. Spenser, it is argued, offers a lush topography of corporeal temptation; he is primarily concerned with how environments can pollute individuals. Milton, by contrast, is concerned both with the ways that environments can pollute individuals, and the ways that individuals pollute environments. The landscapes of Spenser and Milton challenge individuals to manage their responses to sensuous environmental stimuli. While Spenser creates a lush paradisal garden that must be boisterously razed by a knight representing the virtue of Temperance, Milton proposes that if humans behave temperately, they might erect within themselves the infrastructure of a lost paradise.

Back in Time: The Bildungsroman and the Source of Moral Agency

This chapter focuses on the Bildungsroman, studying the philosophical and literary significance of the novel of development. Through readings of Margaret Oliphant's Miss Marjoribanks (1866), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, Charles Dickens's Great Expectations, and John Stuart Mill's Autobiography, it suggests that the ethical foundations of the concept of Bildung—and in particular the idea of sensus communis (common sense)—made form in the Bildungsroman, lay the groundwork for one's own understanding of what makes a novel count as an object of study. The operating principle in the narrative structure of the Bildungsroman is the discovery that one is already a member of a community, and that one's decisions can be understood as stemming from that community. Proper cultivation means the development of a character that can understand and respond to the pre-existing, yet unconscious, shared consensus: the sensus communis. This sort of reciprocity between individual and community is actually a better description of how moral intuition worked, at its more refined levels, than references to physical sensation.

Romantic Encounters with Homer in Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles

Elizabeth Cook’s novella, Achilles (2001), offers a meditation on the eponymous hero and the lives with which his own life intersects, charting the blossoming of the aristos Achaion, from Skiros to Troy, and his immortalization in epic song. The closing section, ‘Relay’, maps points of literary contact between Achilles and the Romantic poet, John Keats, for whom appreciation of the Iliad and its receptions translates to physical sensation. In Cook’s novella, Keats’s historic expression of fellow feeling for Achilles (‘According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in the Trenches’) becomes a catalyst to explore the pleasures of reading and the cultivation of meaningful encounters across time and place. With Achilles, Cook plays with a Keatsian poetics of physicality, sensuousness, and desire, exposing the ways in which Homer’s Iliad is a text not altogether untouched by eroticism.

Inquiétude / Uneasiness: Between Mental Emotion and Bodily Sensation (Eighteenth–Twentieth Centuries)

From the eighteenth century patients might use ‘uneasiness’ / inquiétude to describe both a physical sensation and a personal anxiety. This double definition reflects the deep interrelation between emotion and sensation in the period. Inquiétude was embedded in a specific historical context, defined by humoral medical discourse, by the practice of self-writing, by the doctor-patient relationship, and by a semantic confusion in the use of certain words. Analysis of the different uses of inquiétude in nineteenth- and twentieth-century French novels shows that it increasingly described a mental state, such as an anxiety, but that the sensorial meaning persisted discreetly in different ways. Elements of neurophysiological theories and relevance theory offer some tools to bridge the gap between the two narrative genres and historical contexts.