Magic Mushrooms, the Brain, and the Return of Psychedelic Research

Mushrooms grow nearly everywhere, and there are more than 200 species scattered across the planet. Plenty of them end up in cooking, prized for the flavor they add. The non-toxic ones, anyway. Set apart from the culinary varieties sits psilocybe cubensis, the fungus most people simply call magic mushrooms. These are the ones that produce a trip.

Humans and these mushrooms go back a long way. Evidence points to use roughly 9,000 years ago near the Sahara, possibly woven into religious gatherings. Traces of mushrooms have also turned up in Aztec and Mayan ruins. Researchers suspect those cultures leaned on them, along with peyote and morning glory, to slip into trances, bring on visions, and feel closer to their gods.

A study run at King's College a few years back changed how scientists pictured what the drug does. The researchers found that psilocybin pushed the brain into a kind of synchronized activity, linking regions that normally stay separate. They had expected the opposite. The assumption going in was that a drug like this would act as a stimulant and rev the brain up.

What they saw instead was a dip in activity, specifically in the thalamus. That slowing seems to be exactly what lets information move around the brain more freely. When the slowdown is absent, the brain can go into overdrive, and that overactivity gets tied to rumination and obsessive loops of thought. The same overactive pattern shows up in cases of depression.

The aftereffects stuck around. For as long as fourteen months after the session, participants said they felt more open to whatever came their way. People who already carried open personalities started responding to art differently, and that spilled into more creativity than they had shown before. They also reported placing more weight on emotion, which made them more empathetic toward others.

Psychedelics like LSD and psilocybin were not strangers to Western medicine. Back in the 1950s, in the America that followed the Second World War, psychiatry put them to work treating mental illness and addiction at a time when anxiety and PTSD were widespread. Thousands of papers came out of that era, drawing on roughly 40,000 people treated with these substances for addictions and assorted disorders.

So what sidelined them? Before the fifties, pushback came largely from religious quarters, mainstream Christianity in particular, which worked to keep psychedelics out of treatment for mental illness and addiction. Then the 1960s arrived. During the counterculture years, the drugs spread into recreational hands, and with so many college kids tripping, some of them badly enough to fall from balconies after taking far too much, the government moved to ban them outright. Misuse might be the truer word for what happened.

The stigma has not vanished over the past two decades, yet the clinical use of these drugs for behavioral health has been creeping back. Dr. Stephen Ross, a principal investigator at NYU, has said his training covered the psychosis and chromosomal damage that supposedly led to insanity, but nothing about any benefit. Only recently did he start looking at the other side of the ledger.

That digging turned up stories he had not expected. Ross came across an atheist who walked away from a psychedelic experience believing in God. He also learned that Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous, got sober after his own mystical psychedelic episode. Wilson actually wanted to fold that experience into the organization's bylaws, though it was rejected at the time.

Ross has argued that the country would be healthier if more of its citizens spent time in a spiritual frame of mind rather than wired to tubes in a hospital bed. He describes that state as one that dissolves the ego, leaving a person more selfless and more connected to the universe around them. The idea echoes Buddhism and Hinduism, traditions that treat the ego as the illusion convincing us we are separate, self-directed, and ultimately more selfish for it.

Aldous Huxley, writing from Britain, made a related case. He believed everyday awareness captures only a sliver of what we could actually perceive, just enough to keep us alive and functioning. The research fits that picture. Slowing the brain down appears to widen the aperture of consciousness and leave people feeling fused with something larger.

On dosing, a first-timer is usually told to start at a single gram. The standard measure is 3.5 grams, an eighth of an ounce, which happens to be the only way the drug is sold in the United States, carrying a street price near $20. Somewhere between a quarter gram and a full gram gives a mild lift. One to 2.5 grams lands in moderate territory. Past 2.5 grams you are into intense, heavy-dose range.

Can it hook you? In theory, nearly anything can become a habit. But psilocybin tends to ease addiction and mental illness rather than breed dependence, so it seems an unlikely candidate for addiction itself. A single dose can leave someone feeling lighter, more generous, and more hopeful for months afterward. The drug also appears to open a part of the brain usually active only in sleep, which is why people describe the lingering effect as drifting through a waking dream.

Erwin Bishop