from the Dark Web column:
after all, the anonymity of the dark Web means you can’t tell if the party looking for frozen human pineal glands is a mere ghoul or a state DEA agent . . .*
Frozen human pineal glands? Is this a real example or just a random, made-up thing to put in the column?
RR
They’re real. I have a jar of them in my cupboard.
Shenanigans. If they’re in your cupboard, you probably have thawed human pineal glands.
I suspect the example is inspired by a passage in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas which describes human pineal extract as an incomparably powerful hallucinogen.
Pineal glands are used to make human growth hormone.
BBC article
The article says the pituitary gland produces it, not the pineal gland.
The pineal gland apparently makes melatonin and is also linked to reproductive development.
We have a winner!
Una
For the Straight Dope.
It isn’t really, by the way (and, anyway, there is nothing you would get in human pineal extract that you would not get from the same gland from an animal).
Did you bring enough for everybody, Mr. Cook? :dubious:
What??? Hunter S. Thompson wrote something that wasn’t true? Next you’ll be telling me that Richard Nixon wasn’t really a werewolf.
Then why did they drive a wooden stake through his heart before they screwed down the lid?
Whenever pineal glands are mentioned, I always think of From Beyond.
Actually, in Fear and Loathing, it’s “the adrenaline glands from a living human body … It’s no good if you get it out of a corpse.”
No, both glands are mentioned. Actually, there is a tiny bit more substance to claim about the adrenal glands. Adrenochrome is a real substance, chemically closely related to the adrenaline produced by the adrenal glands, and may perhaps (I don’t think the point is well established) have real hallucinogenic effects. The bit about it only working if taken from the adrenal gland of a living body is just bullcrap that Thompson made up, though, as is the similar claim made about the pineal gland in the same passage.
AFAIK though, there is no basis at all for the notion that the pineal might contain anything hallucinogenic. Indeed, it it did contain anything hallucinogenic we would probably all be tripping out all of the time, since it is in the middle of the brain. The hormone it actually secretes, however, is melatonin, which just makes you a little sleepy, and is widely available OTC in the USA.
Descartes, however, thought that the pineal was the point of connection between the body and the immaterial conscious soul. Probably influenced by this, the once very influential woo-mistress Madam Blavatsky declared the pineal to be the “third eye”, the “organ of spiritual vision”. Perhaps that is what caught Hunter Thompson’s imagination about it, although he recast these (already baseless) ideas in terms of his own obsession with hallucinogens. No doubt this is what inspired “From Beyond” too.
Note that the pineal gland does appear to be homologous to the actual third eye found in a handful of lower vertebrate species.
True, but I do not think they use it for “spiritual vision”. It is not even for regular seeing, just for detecting light levels and thereby regulating sleep/waking cycles. (And the latter is probably still its main function in humans.)
Yeah. I just wanted to ensure that any casual reader understood the distinction between the woo and the scientific truth that the woo happens to resemble.
:smack: I don’t know me arse from me elbow… :smack:
But, dude, don’t you get it? We are, man!
But seriously, thanks, njtt, for providing a Cecil-worthy mini-essay on an interesting topic. If Una needs to take a few months off, maybe she could put in a good word for you with the Perfect Master.