Monkeys seem like a good place to start. Similar enough to us to see if it’s unique to humans, small enough to not start ripping someone’s face off if it goes badly.

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 3 points 2 hours ago (3 children)

Yeah but how do you get an experimental result from them?

[–] DougPiranha42@lemmy.world 1 points 14 minutes ago

Mackaques love touchscreens, amd can be trained to do complex tasks on tablets placed in their enclosures.
You make a test where they need to press a button when and only when they see tiny monkeys that you can project on a screen or on their floor.
Then you give the drug at various concentrations and placebo, and see if there is a dose dependent increase in the monkeys indicaions of mini monkeys.
Then you can repeat the experiment after treatment with antipsychotic, if it prevents the mini monkey reporting, you already have a hint at the mechanism.
Any nonhuman primate lab can do this from 1-2 million dollars, should we start a go fund me?

[–] AlteredEgo@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 hour ago

Can't you just ask them? Like train them to show what they are seeing by pointing to one of multiple pictures.

[–] Gerudo@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 hours ago (1 children)

I think you could watch pupil response, body temp, sweating, brain scans, etc and get a good idea.

[–] yakko@feddit.uk 4 points 2 hours ago

I thought we were trying to see if the hallucinations of the tiny men changed to match your species' body shape