Bryan Johnson describes two elderly Alzheimer's patients who regained speech and mobility after a single 5-gram psilocybin dose, then shares his own brain scans showing psilocybin quieted his default mode network while boosting motor and speech connectivity. He hypothesizes dormant neural circuits in aging brains might be reactivated by psychedelics.
A woman who was 80 years old and had barely spoken for 5 years took one dose of psilocybin and then spoke for 4 hours. An elderly woman 10 years into Alzheimer's was given a 5-gram dose of mushrooms. After consumption, she entered a sleep-like state lasting around 19 hours. When she woke up, she was able to recognize her family, hold conversations, dress herself, regain bladder control, walk on her own, and the gains held for weeks. This is why I'm so optimistic about the world of psychedelics. I completed the most measured psilocybin experiment in history. We measured my brain using Kernel Flow. What we found was that psilocybin quieted my default mode network. This is the part of my brain that keeps it locked into usual patterns. It also increased my connectivity between my motor, sensory, auditory, and speech networks. Now back to this woman. Her brain was suffering from severe neurodegeneration. While mine wasn't, it still raises an interesting hypothesis. Could the same networks that psilocybin activated in my brain be playing a role in what came back online for her? This is of course one case and I'm speculating, but it makes you wonder how much of an aging brain is actually gone and how much is just waiting to be switched back on. Whoa, that rhymed.
