Apparatus
Animal self-administration experiments are typically performed in standard operant conditioning chambers adapted for the catheters used to deliver a drug intravenously. The catheter is secured to the animal by a harness or back plate and is tethered to a protective leash that extends upward through a hole in the top of a chamber, where it attaches to a rotating swivel on a mechanical arm that allows the subject to move around freely. The chamber houses two levers: one whose depression results in the delivery of a drug, the other whose depression does nothing. Activity on these levers can be used to measure drug administration (via activity at the drug-inducing lever) as well as changes in nonspecific behavior that reflect short- and long-term effects of the drug (via activity at the non-inducing lever). The sterile intravenous catheter used to deliver the drug into the bloodstream of the subject is typically composed of a flexible plastic, silastic tubing and nylon mesh placed subcutaneously. It is attached to a mechanical pump that can be calibrated to deliver a specific amount of drug upon depression of one of the levers in the chamber. Other chamber modifications are required if the drug is to be delivered orally or via inhalation, such as liquid containers or an aerosol distribution mechanism.
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Famous quotes containing the word apparatus:
“Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“One’s condition on marijuana is always existential. One can feel the importance of each moment and how it is changing one. One feels one’s being, one becomes aware of the enormous apparatus of nothingness—the hum of a hi-fi set, the emptiness of a pointless interruption, one becomes aware of the war between each of us, how the nothingness in each of us seeks to attack the being of others, how our being in turn is attacked by the nothingness in others.”
—Norman Mailer (b. 1923)