Magic mushrooms briefly reversed severe dementia symptoms |
Nineteen hours after a high dose of psilocybin, an 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s began to speak, and kept speaking for hours, recounting memories from her own life.
After a decade of steady decline, she couldn’t dress herself, walked only with help, spoke in single syllables, and had become emotionally unresponsive. With her guardians’ consent, she took part in a supervised psilocybin session in Brazil, receiving more than double the typical recreational dose.
In the weeks that followed, her incontinence stopped, she began walking and dressing unaided, and started conversations on her own again, using humor and facial expressions her care team hadn’t seen in years. After a second, smaller dose a month later, she was verbally expressive and “described emotionally positive imagery involving surfing with her son on a peaceful island.”
Dustin Hines, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who wasn’t involved in the work, offered one explanation. “In Alzheimer’s, some neural circuits may be impaired but not completely destroyed,” he said, and psilocybin can briefly reshape brain activity, boosting the brain’s flexibility enough for those circuits to function again.
However, this is a single case study, not a full medical trial. Researchers want to know whether the effect holds up in others and, if it does, why it fades.
To learn more about how researchers explain this effect, and the warnings that come with the story, jump to read “Dementia: Large psilocybin dose helped in isolated case study.”
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