How Psilocybin Can Rewire Our Brain, Its Therapeutic Benefits & Its Risks

The concentration of psilocybin in most so-called magic mushrooms is about 1%. So, 1g of mushrooms... means that it contains approximately—and again, it's approximately—10mg of psilocybin. And in most of the clinical studies, it's been shown that the dosage of 25-30mg given, or I should say taken, once or twice... is what's leading to the most pronounced therapeutic outcomes.

It's very clear that having an eye mask... something that ensures that one's eyes are closed for the majority, if not the entire, psilocybin session is going to be very useful ... That going inward by staying in the eye mask, at least for the majority of the time, seems to be a very, if not the, critical feature of making the psilocybin journey effective.

In all the clinical studies that I read, it was advised that people not have any food in their gut at the time at which they ingest or injected with the psilocybin. That's particularly true of people who are going to be taking psilocybin mushrooms ... The acidity of the gut is going to be impacted by the various foods that people eat. And so, that's one of the major reasons why people are advised to not eat for at least 4 hours prior to the psilocybin journey.

The most evidence for positive therapeutic outcomes in response to psilocybin... is for cancer-related depression, cancer-related anxiety, and treatment-resistant depression.

People with depression often feel as if music no longer has the same impact; it just doesn't really lift them up very much. This study found that people who have taken psilocybin... can get a return of the elevated emotionality, the positive emotions, associated with music that formerly made them feel good. In other words, they can feel music again; they can feel good in response to music again.

If you look at the number of people who take this 25mg dose twice in sessions spaced about a week apart, what you will find is that anywhere from 60-75% of the people... experienced substantial positive relief for major depression in ways that other treatments that they've explored—including antidepressant drugs, cognitive behavioral therapy, and other types of therapy—alone could not provide.

Psilocybin mainly binds to and activates the so-called serotonin 2A receptor ... Serotonin 2A is expressed in particular areas of the brain—and even on particular areas of neurons in the brain—that allow for very specific types of changes in neural circuitry to take place, not just when one is under the influence of psilocybin but afterwards as well.

Clinical trials for psilocybin are outperforming standard therapy and outperforming so-called SSRIs and various other antidepressants in terms of providing depression relief in ways that are frankly staggering—not just to me but to the psychiatric community at large.

There is a very, very, very high expression of serotonin 2A receptors in the visual cortex, and that is one of the reasons why psilocybin triggers visual hallucinations.

As I'll talk about a little bit later in terms of what constitutes a useful psilocybin session... is that people not have their eyes open for at least the majority of the psilocybin session.

I think the best way to think about psilocybin and other psychedelics is that they initiate the neuroplasticity process, but they are not the neuroplasticity process itself ... Think about them as a wedge that gets underneath the boulder that is the neuroplasticity that gets rolling forward.

One of the key features, if not the key feature, of a positive 'psychedelic experience' is this sense of oceanic boundlessness occurring at some point during the psychedelic journey.

The experience of unity, the sense that the psilocybin journey was spiritual, the experience of bliss at some point inside of the psilocybin journey, the sense that there were insights... When those things were experienced very strongly, that correlated with the person being what was called a responder to the psilocybin treatment, meaning they got relief from their depression.

Non-responders, that is people who did psilocybin but did not have a positive therapeutic outcome in comparison to the responders, those non-responders tended to have higher subjective ratings of anxiety than did the responders.

Psilocybin is what's called a tryptamine ... The tryptamine psychedelics very closely resemble serotonin itself.