Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.
Was that causation though? I have to imagine the kind of people who are open to psychedelics also generally oppose war.
On the other hand I heard a single dose does permanently increase your trait openness by a standard deviation, which is nuts. So maybe there is causation there too.
It definitely wasn't causation, the causation flows the other way (criminalizing a proxy for a political belief as an end run around the first amendment).
Psilocybin is harder to get research approvals for than many things, but it’s not “completely banned”. There are studies every year being completed with psilocybin, many of which get posted here on HN.
There is a growing tension between the extraordinary pop culture claims of psilocybin curing everything (now extending to Alzheimer’s due to this 1 low-quality report from Brazil) and the actual studied effects, though. A lot of the published outcomes are surprisingly low quality, like this case report or all of the studies that neglect to include a control group. Mental health studies without a control group are basically useless because even a control group that doesn’t receive a placebo (that is, people you simply monitor and interact with) will get better.
Just look at this comment section: People raising suspicions about the obvious problems in the study are being downvoted. The top voted comments are citing a Joe Rogan podcast with a guy hyping his startup. People really, really want to believe this is a magic cure and the usual guardrails of suspicion for extraordinary claims are seemingly suspended for this one topic.
When you take it, you understand, that if taken with the right approach it can lead to profound insights in changing your life and the effects described: helping with depression, addiction and accepting death are not far fetched at all. Yet it can also, if not guided or done on someone with anxiety have the opposite effect.
The more biological effects I agreed are not conclusion that can be drawn from that.
In defense of the comment you replied to: Research into treatments with Psilocybin or LSD was in quite a hiatus for decades after the substances were banned in the 1960s or 70s.
I understand that, but a lot has changed since then and psilocybin is not the only substance that has been studied which interacts with those receptors.
Our ability to synthesize new compounds has also exploded since then. Drug companies are looking for the next blockbuster drug. They don’t need to use psilocybin. We can now use powerful computers to come up with countless variations of drugs that activate the receptors involve and study them rapidly. There are hundreds of ligands that interact with the same receptors.
certainly you should understand the context of the comment then- the commenter was saying we had a 40 year moratorium on research because of the governments decisions at the time. There is a lot of research again now, but research takes time.
This exact case study came up on a recent Rogan episode with Dean Radin, PhD. While the result is very interesting and perhaps illuminating about the unexpected biological mechanisms, apparently the effects were very short lived.
Even more interesting, Dr. Radin discussed one of his companies is working on a new drug that uses the same brain receptors as psilocybin, that has the potential to induce similar effects (with no psychedelic side effects) with a nasal delivery system that crosses directly into the brain. The benefit of that, he says, is the effect would last for much longer, months perhaps, and patients would only have to take it a few times per year.
The problem with this study though is that it doesn’t really illuminate anything. Psychedelics restoring the default mode network in the brain is already somewhat understood (*that it happens, not the mechanism of how), so it’s not that strange a temporary reversion of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s would happen.
And it’s not even suggestive of eg making an actual medicine that could be taken long term, because Alzheimer’s physically destroys your brain. The restorative effect of psychedelics is just a bandage over not understanding why that damage is happening in the first place.
I am immediately skeptical of anyone who goes on Rogan's show. Looking him up the guy has a PhD in education psychology, and his masters was in electrical engineering. I'm curious how much expertise he truly has on the subject and whether this was just spin for his company's work vs the natural option of psilocybin.
Not that I doubt the benefit of a non-psychoactive treatment. Just the adjacency of this idea to Rogan makes me immediately suspicious.
This is crackpot stuff - there's no scientific evidence of any of this, it's pure grifting. The individual cited above has a phd in educational psychology and runs a pseudoscience "institute"
It’s a single case study so obviously take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.
> On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field
I responded to your other comment with this exact text, but to repeat:
This paper is not illuminating to people in the field. This is 3 unaffiliated people who paid to publish an anecdote without any supporting evidence. Paid medical journals are full of these.
Medical professionals know how to spot these claims because they’ve seen a hundred of them over the years that went nowhere. This was published not for the medical establishment, but for news media and social media and maybe to boost the author’s visibility to get funding for something they want to do.
Good criticism but be aware that acreditated authors and institutions are a bunch of crooks on the whole who cook their results, do p-hacking to the death, badly document their protocols, don't release their datasets not their analysis, and have no problems getting paid by big pharma and not disclosing it fully. The field is more joke than science at this stage.
That's fair, but research into psychoactive substances remains difficult due to legal constraints; N=1 but it will have piqued interest by others, they may want to repeat the tests on a larger scale.
That, or individuals will science on the ones they care for. I for one would write something like that down if I were to start developing dementia/alzheimers.
Good riddance - this kind of thing needs to be experimented with more. But 5 grams! This reads like witch doctor science; I’m surprised it passed ethics
The Johns Hopkins studies have been administering high doses for 20+ years now. The difference is that they use synthesized psilocybin instead of mushrooms (which makes the dosing more consistent since potency can vary a lot across strains and individual mushrooms).
Yeah and when they give it in experiments they also give participants an eye mask, which doesn't allow you to quickly snap back to reality. I enjoy Psilocybin, but that would be scary for me.
Yeah this story was on HN before a few weeks ago and I raised similar - it’s nuts to give that to someone who probably doesn’t have the mental state to be able to comprehend what is going on. Don’t understand how it is possibly ethical to do.
Especially with the effects being temporary - can you imagine how awful it must be to regain lucidity outside of your control and then lose it again for the sake of an experiment like this? Awful experiment.
This case report is being shared widely across social media but it’s full of red flags from top to bottom.
It’s a case report (n=1) that a group of 3 people from Brazil wrote up and pushed into the publishing world. The report is full of big words and tables, but barely says anything more than the abstract: It’s basically “an 80 year old Japanese women received mushrooms and was better afterward” expanded with as much medical jargon as they could apply without accidentally getting too specific. No mention of how the Alzheimer’s disease history was documented or diagnosed or even if she was a patient of one of the authors.
I’m surprised how much it’s getting people to let their guard down and accept the result. Normally when studies get posted with only 100 to 500 participants the comments everywhere are full of doubters calling out the small sample size. For some reason this n=1 story written vaguely about extraordinary claims with a complete absence of pre-treatment documentation or standardize testing/scoring hits all the right notes to convince a lot of people that mushrooms can reverse Alzheimer’s disease.
I know it’s something that a lot of people would like to be true, but this is a domain where anyone in the world can make any claims they want and find a journal who will publish it if you pay them. People write and publish papers like this all the time claiming to have treated major diseases in a single patient or group of patients with different drugs or herbs.
Sure, It’s a single case study so obviously take it with a grain of salt. Actual scientists understand this. People on social media don’t ands that’s annoying I get it.
On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.
> On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field
People in medicine or research have seen hundreds of extraordinary case reports like this. They’re everywhere on different topics and they’re not hard to get published.
They know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it’s easy to see that this paper is completely devoid of evidence, just some extraordinary claims written in formal medical language, minus the usual process, methodology, and assessments one would expect in a paper like this.
Hey, fair enough. I don’t necessarily disagree with you, anything with psilocybin in the title tends to be a little more sensational. I find it very interesting though, I just listened to a recent Rogan podcast with Dr. Dean Radin, this exact case study came up because one of his companies is working a related product. Apparently they’ve developed a nasal delivery system that directly crosses into the brain, and the drug uses the same receptors as psilocybin but without the psychedelic effects. Apparently it has extraordinary positive effects on memory and lasts for months. They’ve tested on mice and chimpanzees, so real science is being done in this lane outside this case study. I guess I’m saying sometimes when “traditional” science gets stuck in the mud, we need creative & bold people who think outside the box to move things forward.
> This case documents transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following psilocybin administration. The findings do not imply disease reversal but suggest that residual functional capacity may persist in late-stage neurodegeneration and may become transiently accessible under specific neuromodulatory conditions.
Very interesting nonetheless.
> One month after the initial session, the patient remained continent and functionally improved compared with baseline. A second supervised psilocybin session using 3 g was subsequently performed and was associated with greater verbal expressivity, improved facial mimicry, spontaneous humor, emotionally valenced autobiographical imagery, and increased agility while walking.
> The patient spontaneously stated: “It is pleasant to come here.
AFAIK psychedelics are thought to stimulate neurons into connecting with each other more than they normally do - both temporarily (which explains the short-term sensations) and also permanently (they stimulate neuroplasticity).
I'd love to see a before / after video of this or similar experiments, I'm really curious. I've seen similar ones for e.g. giving parkinsons' patients a dose of weed.
Psilocybin is one of those things we don't even know the full effects of because the government had a hysterical fit and completely banned it because people who took it were more likely to oppose the Vietnam War.
Was that causation though? I have to imagine the kind of people who are open to psychedelics also generally oppose war.
On the other hand I heard a single dose does permanently increase your trait openness by a standard deviation, which is nuts. So maybe there is causation there too.
It definitely wasn't causation, the causation flows the other way (criminalizing a proxy for a political belief as an end run around the first amendment).
Psilocybin is harder to get research approvals for than many things, but it’s not “completely banned”. There are studies every year being completed with psilocybin, many of which get posted here on HN.
There is a growing tension between the extraordinary pop culture claims of psilocybin curing everything (now extending to Alzheimer’s due to this 1 low-quality report from Brazil) and the actual studied effects, though. A lot of the published outcomes are surprisingly low quality, like this case report or all of the studies that neglect to include a control group. Mental health studies without a control group are basically useless because even a control group that doesn’t receive a placebo (that is, people you simply monitor and interact with) will get better.
Just look at this comment section: People raising suspicions about the obvious problems in the study are being downvoted. The top voted comments are citing a Joe Rogan podcast with a guy hyping his startup. People really, really want to believe this is a magic cure and the usual guardrails of suspicion for extraordinary claims are seemingly suspended for this one topic.
When you take it, you understand, that if taken with the right approach it can lead to profound insights in changing your life and the effects described: helping with depression, addiction and accepting death are not far fetched at all. Yet it can also, if not guided or done on someone with anxiety have the opposite effect.
The more biological effects I agreed are not conclusion that can be drawn from that.
In defense of the comment you replied to: Research into treatments with Psilocybin or LSD was in quite a hiatus for decades after the substances were banned in the 1960s or 70s.
I understand that, but a lot has changed since then and psilocybin is not the only substance that has been studied which interacts with those receptors.
Our ability to synthesize new compounds has also exploded since then. Drug companies are looking for the next blockbuster drug. They don’t need to use psilocybin. We can now use powerful computers to come up with countless variations of drugs that activate the receptors involve and study them rapidly. There are hundreds of ligands that interact with the same receptors.
certainly you should understand the context of the comment then- the commenter was saying we had a 40 year moratorium on research because of the governments decisions at the time. There is a lot of research again now, but research takes time.
This exact case study came up on a recent Rogan episode with Dean Radin, PhD. While the result is very interesting and perhaps illuminating about the unexpected biological mechanisms, apparently the effects were very short lived.
Even more interesting, Dr. Radin discussed one of his companies is working on a new drug that uses the same brain receptors as psilocybin, that has the potential to induce similar effects (with no psychedelic side effects) with a nasal delivery system that crosses directly into the brain. The benefit of that, he says, is the effect would last for much longer, months perhaps, and patients would only have to take it a few times per year.
The problem with this study though is that it doesn’t really illuminate anything. Psychedelics restoring the default mode network in the brain is already somewhat understood (*that it happens, not the mechanism of how), so it’s not that strange a temporary reversion of the symptoms of Alzheimer’s would happen.
And it’s not even suggestive of eg making an actual medicine that could be taken long term, because Alzheimer’s physically destroys your brain. The restorative effect of psychedelics is just a bandage over not understanding why that damage is happening in the first place.
I am immediately skeptical of anyone who goes on Rogan's show. Looking him up the guy has a PhD in education psychology, and his masters was in electrical engineering. I'm curious how much expertise he truly has on the subject and whether this was just spin for his company's work vs the natural option of psilocybin.
Not that I doubt the benefit of a non-psychoactive treatment. Just the adjacency of this idea to Rogan makes me immediately suspicious.
Wow, if that turns out to work, that would alleviate lots of suffering for both the patient and her or his relatives and caretakers.
This would be pretty amazing.
This is crackpot stuff - there's no scientific evidence of any of this, it's pure grifting. The individual cited above has a phd in educational psychology and runs a pseudoscience "institute"
> n=1
> pay to publish journal
> no clear Alzheimers diagnosis ("[...] were considered clinically most compatible with advanced Alzheimer’s disease")
> administration of a heroic dose of street-quality drugs vs. a controlled sample
> no university or hospital affiliation?
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, hence I remain skeptical
I think it’s funny to describe a drug as “street-quality” while using a slang term “heroic dose” in the same sentence.
It’s a single case study so obviously take it with a grain of salt. On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.
> On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field
I responded to your other comment with this exact text, but to repeat:
This paper is not illuminating to people in the field. This is 3 unaffiliated people who paid to publish an anecdote without any supporting evidence. Paid medical journals are full of these.
Medical professionals know how to spot these claims because they’ve seen a hundred of them over the years that went nowhere. This was published not for the medical establishment, but for news media and social media and maybe to boost the author’s visibility to get funding for something they want to do.
Good criticism but be aware that acreditated authors and institutions are a bunch of crooks on the whole who cook their results, do p-hacking to the death, badly document their protocols, don't release their datasets not their analysis, and have no problems getting paid by big pharma and not disclosing it fully. The field is more joke than science at this stage.
That's fair, but research into psychoactive substances remains difficult due to legal constraints; N=1 but it will have piqued interest by others, they may want to repeat the tests on a larger scale.
That, or individuals will science on the ones they care for. I for one would write something like that down if I were to start developing dementia/alzheimers.
Not only that but the author has appeared on Joe Rogan - that tells me all I need to know.
Good riddance - this kind of thing needs to be experimented with more. But 5 grams! This reads like witch doctor science; I’m surprised it passed ethics
The Johns Hopkins studies have been administering high doses for 20+ years now. The difference is that they use synthesized psilocybin instead of mushrooms (which makes the dosing more consistent since potency can vary a lot across strains and individual mushrooms).
It's not just 5 grams of some random cubensis, it's 5 grams of the enigma strain, which is ridiculously potent.
Yeah and when they give it in experiments they also give participants an eye mask, which doesn't allow you to quickly snap back to reality. I enjoy Psilocybin, but that would be scary for me.
Yeah this story was on HN before a few weeks ago and I raised similar - it’s nuts to give that to someone who probably doesn’t have the mental state to be able to comprehend what is going on. Don’t understand how it is possibly ethical to do.
Especially with the effects being temporary - can you imagine how awful it must be to regain lucidity outside of your control and then lose it again for the sake of an experiment like this? Awful experiment.
What an interesting take. I was imagining how precious one last conversation with a loved one would be.
While it’s a fairly good sized dose, it’s not one that would typically produce a nightmare trip scenario.
As far as ethics go, I would absolutely sign a document that gives the right for experimentation in the event I become incapacitated to some degree.
I wouldn't, or put constraints into it - you may be incapacitated but you may also still be aware, and you wouldn't want to get I-have-no-mouth'd.
5+ grams is considered a "heroic dose", i.e. the one that is needed for ego death and subsequent therapeutic effects.
This case report is being shared widely across social media but it’s full of red flags from top to bottom.
It’s a case report (n=1) that a group of 3 people from Brazil wrote up and pushed into the publishing world. The report is full of big words and tables, but barely says anything more than the abstract: It’s basically “an 80 year old Japanese women received mushrooms and was better afterward” expanded with as much medical jargon as they could apply without accidentally getting too specific. No mention of how the Alzheimer’s disease history was documented or diagnosed or even if she was a patient of one of the authors.
I’m surprised how much it’s getting people to let their guard down and accept the result. Normally when studies get posted with only 100 to 500 participants the comments everywhere are full of doubters calling out the small sample size. For some reason this n=1 story written vaguely about extraordinary claims with a complete absence of pre-treatment documentation or standardize testing/scoring hits all the right notes to convince a lot of people that mushrooms can reverse Alzheimer’s disease.
I know it’s something that a lot of people would like to be true, but this is a domain where anyone in the world can make any claims they want and find a journal who will publish it if you pay them. People write and publish papers like this all the time claiming to have treated major diseases in a single patient or group of patients with different drugs or herbs.
Sure, It’s a single case study so obviously take it with a grain of salt. Actual scientists understand this. People on social media don’t ands that’s annoying I get it.
On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field. A field mind you, that has made a little to no progress in decades. Arguments could be made they’ve made some errors and went down the wrong path. It’s a field that could probably use some new ideas.
> On the other hand, it’s interesting and perhaps illuminating to people working in that field
People in medicine or research have seen hundreds of extraordinary case reports like this. They’re everywhere on different topics and they’re not hard to get published.
They know that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and it’s easy to see that this paper is completely devoid of evidence, just some extraordinary claims written in formal medical language, minus the usual process, methodology, and assessments one would expect in a paper like this.
Hey, fair enough. I don’t necessarily disagree with you, anything with psilocybin in the title tends to be a little more sensational. I find it very interesting though, I just listened to a recent Rogan podcast with Dr. Dean Radin, this exact case study came up because one of his companies is working a related product. Apparently they’ve developed a nasal delivery system that directly crosses into the brain, and the drug uses the same receptors as psilocybin but without the psychedelic effects. Apparently it has extraordinary positive effects on memory and lasts for months. They’ve tested on mice and chimpanzees, so real science is being done in this lane outside this case study. I guess I’m saying sometimes when “traditional” science gets stuck in the mud, we need creative & bold people who think outside the box to move things forward.
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48420481
Not quite a "successful treatment":
> This case documents transient multidomain functional improvement in advanced Alzheimer’s disease following psilocybin administration. The findings do not imply disease reversal but suggest that residual functional capacity may persist in late-stage neurodegeneration and may become transiently accessible under specific neuromodulatory conditions.
Very interesting nonetheless.
> One month after the initial session, the patient remained continent and functionally improved compared with baseline. A second supervised psilocybin session using 3 g was subsequently performed and was associated with greater verbal expressivity, improved facial mimicry, spontaneous humor, emotionally valenced autobiographical imagery, and increased agility while walking.
> The patient spontaneously stated: “It is pleasant to come here.
This is just wonderful.
AFAIK psychedelics are thought to stimulate neurons into connecting with each other more than they normally do - both temporarily (which explains the short-term sensations) and also permanently (they stimulate neuroplasticity).
I'd love to see a before / after video of this or similar experiments, I'm really curious. I've seen similar ones for e.g. giving parkinsons' patients a dose of weed.