Psilocybin and the Making of a Healthier Brain

The old caricatures of psilocybin are fading, and in their place a steadier conversation has taken hold. Psychologists, scientists, and clinical researchers have been running studies on the active compound found in mushrooms of the psilocybe genus, and the findings keep accumulating. Terminally ill patients have described arriving at a changed relationship with their own deaths. People stuck in the grooves of depression have reported stepping out of stubborn, self-defeating patterns of thought. There is work pointing to its use in treating trauma and addictions that resist standard approaches. A separate line of research suggests something more structural: that psilocybin can encourage the brain to grow new neurons. Taken together, these threads point toward a compound that, used carefully and in a therapeutic setting, may help build a healthier brain. Its effects also surface in less clinical ways, showing up in the personalities, behavior, and creative lives of the people studied.

One personality trait keeps coming up: openness. Left to its own devices, personality tends to settle. By around twenty-five it has mostly stabilized, and by thirty it is more or less set. What a continuing series of studies at Johns Hopkins University suggests is that the neural connectivity triggered under psilocybin loosens that fixity, returning a kind of plasticity to openness. More openness tends to feed creativity, and in a deeper sense it hands back something that usually belongs to the young.

The neurogenesis question was taken up by neuroscientist Zeno Sanchez-Ramos together with PhD student Briony Catlow. Catlow had worked out a way to measure the growth of new neurons, building on evidence that depressed patients recover at a pace tied to how long it takes a fresh neural pathway to mature. Sanchez-Ramos concentrated on the hippocampus, a region tied to particular forms of learning, and found that psilocybin affects the connections forming there. Psilocybin, along with what the research calls a highly selective serotonin agonist, acts on hippocampal neurogenesis, and that in turn bears on classical conditioning. Classical conditioning describes a learned reaction: a neutral stimulus, paired beforehand with a potent one, comes to trigger an automatic response. The upshot is that psilocybin does appear to play some part in laying down new neural pathways.

Roland Griffiths' work at Johns Hopkins may show, at the level of behavior, what Sanchez-Ramos documented in the tissue. It offers reason to think psilocybin helps people grow younger in the specific sense of growing more open. Fifty-two healthy adults took part, ranging from twenty-four to sixty-five, all educated and described as spiritually active. Each received a standardized dose, and the variable that mattered was whether a participant reported a transcendent experience. Those who described spiritual or mystical moments during their monitored sessions showed a marked rise in one of the five broad domains of personality. Out of neuroticism, extroversion, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and openness, only openness climbed sharply. That runs against the usual pattern of personality locking into place by thirty.

Follow-up testing found the heightened openness still present more than a year later. Griffiths takes the shift to be lasting, which breaks the assumption that personality has to hold steady past a certain age. He also argues that the mystical experiences psilocybin brings on are not alien to human life; they occur on their own. The catch is that they arrive rarely, and reaching that pitch of transcendence through practice alone can take years of spiritual training. Commenting on the results, Dr. Charles Grob notes that psilocybin can now summon those rare moments deliberately, and with them produce durable gains in openness.

The consequences of this reach in several directions, and two of them are especially hard to look away from: what it means for youth, and what it means for creativity. By prompting new pathways and reviving openness and plasticity, psilocybin cultivates youth in a particular way. Griffiths is not talking about smooth skin or physical stamina. Openness can show up in the body, certainly, but the youth he has in mind begins in the mind rather than the flesh. If you want to extend physical youth, youth of the mind is arguably where the attention belongs first.

Raising openness sets off a kind of mental and personal renewal. An open person has more room to revisit and revise their ideas about life, the world, and the people close to them. Openness is the capacity to hold your own frameworks up for redrafting when new information arrives and asks you to reconsider. That willingness to keep adapting is what ties the personality change to youth: you stay open to change for the sake of moving through life with more ease.

Openness also tracks with creativity. One study on the subject brings in the idea of absorption, a trait that weighs heavily on how a psilocybin session turns out. A person's readiness to give themselves over to a new experience shapes whether a mystical state takes hold at all. Absorption and the openness psilocybin unlocks reinforce each other. Being open to the inward turn of a psilocybin experience amplifies the openness you walked in with.

With evidence that psilocybin raises openness, a question about creativity practically asks itself. If openness to experience signals creative capacity, then it becomes genuinely tempting to ask how far psilocybin drives creativity. No study has yet nailed down that correlation directly, but the inference holds up when you count the musicians, poets, painters, and writers who report mystical experiences with the compound. Earlier, before today's rigid drug laws, pilot work probed the connection. A 1955 study looked at how mescaline and LSD affected four well-known graphic designers. In 1967, a looser survey of ninety-one artists collected their views on how psilocybin and other substances touched their work. Many said much the same thing: the drug stripped the superficiality out of what they made and left it carrying deeper meaning.

Isaac Abrams turns up as one case in a study on psychedelics and creativity. His first psilocybin experience led him to keep experimenting with other psychedelics under a psychotherapist who specialized in creative work. Abrams said the mushroom opened him to the rhythm of life and gave him a plain joy in the act of drawing.

Renewal of the mind, openness to experience, a widened creative reach: these are the areas where psilocybin looks most promising. Each one can reshape an individual personality, and through enough individuals, the kindness and beauty of the wider world they live in. Psilocybin can keep a mind open to life, and so open to making things.