The research, led by Dr. Noam Goldway under the supervision of Prof. Talma Hendler and Dr. Haggai Sharon of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for Psychedelic Research at the Sagol School of Neuroscience, was published in the journal Neuropsychopharmacology. For the first time in humans, the team demonstrated that ketamine activates two distinct mechanisms in the brain: one responsible for pain relief and another responsible for the dissociative state the drug is famous for. The distinction is not merely a matter of subjective experience — it is visible in the brain’s activity patterns.

The question the researchers set out to answer is one of the most consequential in modern psychedelic medicine. In recent years, mind-altering substances have migrated from the fringes of culture to the center of serious clinical investigation. MDMA is being studied as a treatment for post-traumatic stress disorder; psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, is being tested primarily against depression; and ketamine has attracted considerable interest for its effectiveness in treating pain, depression and, more recently, PTSD. Yet a central unresolved debate shadows the entire field: is the alteration of consciousness produced by these drugs a necessary condition for their therapeutic benefit, or merely a side effect that happens to accompany it?

To address that question, the team turned to ketamine, a drug that relieves pain while simultaneously inducing dissociation — a temporary sense of detachment from one’s self, body or surroundings. For years, the working assumption had been that these two phenomena were causally linked: the more detached a patient felt, the less intense or threatening their pain would seem. If that were true, then the psychedelic experience itself would be an essential ingredient of the drug’s analgesic action, with major implications for how ketamine-based therapies should be designed.

The study enrolled 37 healthy volunteers, both women and men, each of whom participated in two separate sessions. In one session they received a ketamine infusion; in the other, a placebo. While under the influence of each infusion, participants underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and were exposed to carefully controlled pain stimuli. Throughout the experiment, they reported both the intensity of their pain and the depth of their dissociative experience, allowing the researchers to track the two phenomena independently and in real time.

The behavioral results were strikingly clear. As expected, ketamine reduced pain and increased dissociation. But when the researchers analyzed the relationship between the two effects, no connection emerged. Participants who experienced strong dissociation did not necessarily enjoy greater pain relief, and those with the most substantial analgesia were not necessarily the most detached. As Dr. Goldway explained, the sense of detachment is simply not the mechanism through which ketamine reduces pain. The two effects, long assumed to be two faces of the same process, appear to run in parallel without one driving the other.

The brain imaging data reinforced the behavioral findings at the neural level. Pain relief was accompanied by reduced activity in brain regions classically involved in processing pain, including the insula and the anterior cingulate cortex — structures that map the intensity and emotional salience of noxious stimuli. Dissociation, by contrast, was related to changes in a different network altogether: the default mode network, a set of interconnected regions implicated in, among other things, the construction of the sense of self. In other words, the study did not merely document two uncorrelated subjective experiences; it revealed two different brain mechanisms, both triggered by the same drug but operating on distinct neural circuitry.

Prof. Hendler, who heads TAU’s Institute for Psychedelic Research, framed the findings within the broader scientific controversy. “In recent years, there has been a lively scientific and clinical debate over whether the subjective experience produced by psychoactive drugs is an integral part of their therapeutic effect,” she said. “Our study shows that, at least in the case of ketamine and pain relief, the answer is apparently no. We were able to show that the drug’s effect on pain is separate from its effect on consciousness — both behaviorally and in terms of brain activity.” She was careful, however, to draw a boundary around the conclusion: “It is important to note that this cannot be generalized to other psychedelic drugs, such as magic mushrooms. In this case, the burden of proof still rests with us, the scientists.”

Dr. Sharon, Deputy Head and Medical Director of the Institute and a specialist in pain medicine, emphasized what the results reveal about the brain itself. The study, he noted, provides further evidence of the complexity of the brain’s representation of the pain experience and of the many different ways the brain can regulate and alter it. Pain, in this view, is not a single signal to be switched off but a multidimensional construct assembled across multiple networks — and different drugs, or different mechanisms within the same drug, can intervene at different points in that assembly process.

The clinical implications could be far-reaching. If researchers can learn how to activate ketamine’s pain-relief mechanism without simultaneously inducing dissociation, it may become possible to develop future treatments that preserve the drug’s analgesic effectiveness while reducing the sense of detachment and other subjective side effects. Such decoupled therapies could broaden access to ketamine’s benefits, particularly for patients who cannot tolerate its psychological effects, and could reshape how clinicians think about the role of altered consciousness in psychedelic-assisted medicine more broadly. For now, the study stands as a landmark demonstration that, where ketamine and pain are concerned, relief and detachment are separable — and the road to better analgesics may not need to pass through an altered mind at all.

Subject of Research: Dissociation of ketamine's analgesic and consciousness-altering brain mechanisms in humans

Article Title: Ketamine relieves pain without “disconnecting” consciousness

Article References: Ketamine relieves pain without “disconnecting” consciousness. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: ketamine, pain relief, dissociation, consciousness, fMRI, psychedelic research, insula, anterior cingulate cortex, default mode network, Neuropsychopharmacology, Tel Aviv University, analgesia

The defining feature of Noo-Noo is its mouthparts. These structures were exceptionally long and flexible, reaching nearly twice the length of the insect’s body. Among modern planthoppers, the closest living relatives of the newly described species, mouthparts are built like a simple needle: rigid, straight, and suited to piercing plant tissue to draw out fluids. Noo-Noo and its ancient kin, by contrast, carried feeding organs that could bend and extend, allowing them to reach food sources inaccessible to insects with more conventional equipment — deep inside cracks and crevices in tree bark, where sugar-rich fluids could be tapped.

The study was led by Dolev Fabrikant and Dr. Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou of Tel Aviv University’s School of Zoology, part of the Wise Faculty of Life Sciences, the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History and the New Environmental School. The team examined fossil insects belonging to Neazoniidae, an ancient family of planthoppers, including 13 specimens preserved in Kachin amber from Myanmar. Kachin amber is one of the most important windows into Cretaceous terrestrial life, preserving organisms in extraordinary three-dimensional detail, and the Neazoniidae specimens it contains turned out to hold a surprise that only modern imaging technology could fully unpack.

Under close examination, the elongated mouthparts of the ancient insects revealed a surface densely covered with transverse folds. To determine whether these folds were merely decorative or structurally meaningful, the researchers turned to high-resolution micro-computed tomography, a technique that uses X-rays to reconstruct internal anatomy without damaging the fossil. The scans showed that the folds were integral to the structure itself rather than external ornamentation. Their likely function was to give the mouthparts flexibility while preventing them from kinking or collapsing under stress — much like a bendy drinking straw or a corrugated flexible hose, which can curve freely without pinching shut.

The fossils themselves provided further confirmation of this flexibility. In several specimens, the mouthparts were preserved in a bent position. Because amber freezes insects in place at the moment they are engulfed by resin, these bent postures represent snapshots of the animals as they were in life. The researchers therefore interpret the curled mouthparts as direct evidence that the structures were genuinely flexible while the insects were alive, not artifacts of preservation. Among the living relatives of Neazoniidae, no comparable structure is known, marking this as an ancient evolutionary solution that has since disappeared entirely.

The new species’ unusual appearance inspired its name. The epithet “Noo-Noo” was chosen after the friendly vacuum cleaner from the children’s television series Teletubbies, whose long, flexible hose bears an uncanny resemblance to the ancient insect’s feeding organ. The whimsical moniker belies the scientific weight of the find, but it also captures the essence of the discovery: an animal whose most distinctive feature looks like something engineered rather than evolved, a corrugated tube coiled within a creature smaller than a fingernail.

Why would an insect need such an elaborate feeding apparatus? Butterflies might seem an obvious comparison, since they use a flexible proboscis to drink nectar from flowers. The researchers, however, believe the resemblance is only superficial. The mouthparts of Noo-Noo pointed backward and functioned as a piercing-and-sucking system, a design that, like those of its modern relatives, is poorly suited to nectar feeding. Moreover, despite examining numerous fossils, the team found no convincing evidence of pollen accumulating on the insects’ bodies — the kind of sign that would indicate a role as pollinators. The butterfly analogy, in other words, fails on both anatomical and ecological grounds.

The explanation the researchers propose is more specialized: these insects were sap-suckers with a taste for what lies beneath the bark. Their long, flexible mouthparts could have snaked through narrow cracks in tree bark and guided the piercing organs toward deep vascular tissues, where nutrient-rich fluids flow. At the tip of the mouthpart sat another unusual feature — a structure with two grooved lobes that likely opened during feeding, helping to anchor the mouthpart against the walls of the crack. The researchers liken this mechanism to a wall plug expanding inside a drilled hole, holding the apparatus firmly in place while the insect fed.

The discovery may carry broader implications for understanding Cretaceous forest ecosystems. Long or corrugated feeding structures appeared in several unrelated insect groups during this period, raising the possibility that forests rich in thick-barked trees offered a competitive advantage to insects capable of reaching deeper tissues. The study notes that resin-producing forests of the Cretaceous were also associated with evidence of recurrent fires, and trees in fire-prone environments often develop thicker bark as protection. The researchers cautiously suggest that such conditions may have created ecological opportunities for unique feeding strategies — strategies that are almost entirely absent among planthoppers today, whose needle-like mouthparts reflect a very different set of environmental pressures.

Dr. Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou stated: “The discovery of ‘Noo-Noo,’ a new species that lived approximately 99 million years ago, gives us an extraordinary glimpse into the insect world of the age of the dinosaurs. This is not merely an insect previously unknown to science, but an animal that developed an evolutionary solution with almost no modern equivalent: a long, flexible, and durable feeding organ that likely enabled it to reach food deep within tree bark. The fact that similar structures appeared in several insect groups during the Cretaceous period suggests that ancient forests created ecological conditions and opportunities very different from those we know today. The discovery of a new species like this is therefore not simply the addition of another name to the tree of life, but another piece of the puzzle that enables us to reconstruct what ecosystems looked like and how they functioned tens of millions of years ago.”

For paleontologists, the find underscores the value of amber as a time capsule. Soft structures such as flexible mouthparts rarely survive in conventional compression fossils, where delicate anatomy is crushed or dissolved over geological time. Amber, by contrast, entombs specimens in three dimensions, preserving fine surface detail and even internal architecture that can be visualized with micro-CT scanning. Without such preservation, a feeding apparatus as unusual as Noo-Noo’s might never have been recognized, and the evolutionary experiment it represents would have vanished from the record altogether.

The description of Cretodorus noonoo adds a new branch to the tree of life and, just as importantly, a new data point in the history of ecological specialization. It shows that during the age of the dinosaurs, insects were experimenting with feeding strategies that have since been abandoned, shaped by forests whose structure and fire regimes differed markedly from those of the modern world. Each such discovery refines the picture of how Cretaceous ecosystems functioned — and reminds us that evolution’s portfolio has always included designs that today seem almost alien.

Subject of Research: A new Cretaceous planthopper species with flexible, corrugated mouthparts preserved in Kachin amber

Article Title: Rare discovery reveals a new species from the dinosaur age

Article References: Rare discovery reveals a new species from the dinosaur age. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: Cretodorus noonoo, amber fossil, planthoppers, Neazoniidae, Kachin amber, Cretaceous period, micro-computed tomography, insect mouthparts, Tel Aviv University, paleontology, tree bark feeding, Myanmar amber