Transcription
Something massive just happened in neuroscience that should not be possible. These researchers took the deadliest virus on the planet. Then they rewired this thing and they used it to watch psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms, physically repair the brain in real time all the way down to the exact neurons that are involved.
What they discovered in this study changes everything that we thought we knew about consciousness and identity and trauma and even who you are as a human being. So, if you ever wondered how one psychedelic experience can change somebody's life, you're about to see the actual mechanism right here. And I don't say this as a metaphor because I know that neuroplasticity is a buzzword. Now, what I'm talking about is programmable rewiring captured with a legitimately weaponized virus. And the implications are unbelievably staggering.
So stay with me because the breakthrough isn't just what psilocybin does in the brain. It's how we can actually physically control what it's doing in the brain. The last part of this video might be the most astonishing thing that you've ever heard about the human mind. So, let me start with the part that feels like science fiction, but it's not.
Since 20121, we've known that psilocybin grows new connections between neurons, thousands and thousands, millions of them. They last weeks, and some of them are permanent. But there was a big problem with that. It's that nobody knew where specifically those connections actually went and what happened. So we basically knew that the brain grows these new little roadways, but we have no idea which cities these roads are connecting.
And this is where Cornell and the Allen Institute did something almost unthinkable. They turned to rabies. Yes, the weird thing that makes dogs foam at the mouth and and bite people and stuff. The rabies virus naturally travels backwards through your nervous system. So it jumps from one neuron and then into every neuron that sends signals to that neuron and then into every neuron upstream of all of those. It's the ultimate retrograde neuron tracing tracking system, but it's also the deadliest pathogen that we know.
So scientists engineered a version of this rabies that only jumps one neuron at a time and they deleted the gene that enables lethal replication and they added this little green actually green fluorescent marker to it and they turned this most deadly virus in the world into a biological neon green highlighter. So, it's a virus that kills and it's now just getting used in this experiment to just highlight and light up the circuitry of physiological and psychological healing within the nervous system.
So, this is exactly where everything totally changes. Let's talk about the actual study here. On day one, they injected what they called a helper virus into the frontal cortex of these mice to prime these very super specific neurons first. And that incubated for about 13 days. And on day 14, one of these groups received psilocybin. The other group just got some regular saline. On day 16, they injected this modified rabies virus with the green highlighter in it into the exact same brain region. On day 21, the virus had spread backward, just one synapse, one neuron.
Then the brains were harvested from the mice. And this is where it gets totally wild. They used something called light sheet microscopy where it's just a ton of little super thin slices, unimaginably thin. And then they photograph every slice of each mouse brain. These are millions and millions of images. Then they counted every green highlighter neuron. And this is over 500,000 inputs per brain that they scanned. And each one of these things was mapped to its exact location across uh 316 brain regions. This was the first complete map of psilocybin and how it rewires a human brain that's ever been done in history.
The results we thought were going to be random. You know, we'd expect them to be pretty chaotic and they were not at all. So the rewiring followed a pattern so statistically improbable. This value in the study is listed as P equals 0.0000.6. That's the odds of it happening by chance. So something very very specific was happening in the brain.
So the connections that got stronger up to 10% plus 10% they were all sensory and 10% is a massive deal. And the sensory parts were the primary somatensory cortex, the primary visual cortex, the motor cortex, the retrospenial cortex. And this is where we have like spatial memory where we are in in space. So in other words, psilocybin strengthens your connection to the external world. The world feels more vivid on psilocybin because your brain is literally wiring itself back into the world because those neurons are active.
And then there are some connections that got weaker in this study and they weakened by a full 15%. This is massive and this is all in regions that build our internal narrative of of who we are. And the first one is the infr area and this is uh down in the lyic system area but this is where we have some fear responses and then we have this little tiny piece of the brain called the insula. This is where we have anxiety, threat detection, stuff like that. Then we have the hippocampus. This was reduced. Memory is what the hippocampus does. Then we have the amygdala. This is our emotional center. And this other part of the brain called the orbital frontal cortex. And this is where we sit and ruminate about stuff or or we expect something. We have some kind of expectations in our life.
So let me put that in plain English for you. Psilocybin temporarily quiets the brain regions that generate you as a human being. All your fears, your memories, our little self-referential loops, the default mode network is the engine of depression and that goes quiet as well. It loses its grip completely. And this is why people say the world feels new because it literally is making a new world for you.
But there is one part of this study that nobody expected. These researchers decide to silence just one brain region during the psilocybin session. So they chemically shut this brain region down. So the silenced region did not get rewired but every other active region did. And this is massive. So the wiring is not random at all. It's very context dependent. It's experience dependent and it is programmable.
So essentially what they're saying here in the study is we've proven that when your brain grows, you become what you pay attention to. And that means something pretty extraordinary and actually I think extremely dangerous because if you know for a fact which pathways are going to be active, then you can choose which pathways are going to get strengthened. And if you can silence the ones that cause fear and rumination and anxiety and trauma, you can weaken them big time.
So we now know that if you know you want to strengthen your visual processing, you can show visual stimuli during the session. If you want to reduce anxiety loops, you can quiet down the insula or the amydala during peak plasticity moments. If you want to reshape an entire human identity, you can guide someone's attention into new self models while the old ones are offline. Right now, we are crossing a massive threshold, a huge threshold in neuroscience, maybe the biggest one ever.
So, for the first time in the history of neuroscience, we're not just watching a brain go through some changes. We can now watch what the brain is becoming. So, this discovery shows us something that I think is pretty damn beautiful. Our brains, our mind is not fixed. It's extremely evolving and dynamic. And we're witnessing our brain's ability to to essentially rewire itself. And now we can see and then edit the script of that rewiring.
So you might think this is maybe it's a therapy breakthrough or maybe it's all about uh trauma and depression, but this is the first time in science we've identified the exact circuits that change during a transformative experience like this. We are seeing the real life blueprint of what's going on when we read these stories about how somebody's healed in a single session or PTSD just kind of disappears. And we're seeing all of that neuron by neuron.
So once you can see all of that circuitry, now you can design it. And that's the dangerous part because this also means identity. This thing that I call chase, the thing that you call you is not a constant. Identity is a product of whatever networks are active. Then those networks can now be turned up or turned down. this is your personality, memories, reactions, fears, all of that. They're not as permanent as they feel. And I think that truth is a double-edged sword. It's liberating, but it's extremely unsettling for some people.
And here's what I think this truly means as a whole. Whoever controls your attention during a psychedelic window, they control what gets strengthened. They control what gets weakened. and they control which version of you comes out on the other end of that experience. So this is a discovery with the power to heal millions and millions of people. It's also the power to manipulate them.
So I think we are entering an era just with this study being published where consciousness itself can be pretty much engineered. But I think the most astonishing and beautiful part about this is that the breakthrough doesn't just show us how psilocybin changes the human brain. This shows us that consciousness may not be a static property at all. In this study, for the first time, we can see real code in all of that stuff. And once you see it, you're not going to unsee it.
So if you want to understand the next layer, why the brain relaxes its grip on reality during these states and how your predictive model shapes everything that you experience, watch the next few videos that we have coming out this week and next week because once you understand the brain's prediction engine, everything about this breakthrough gets even more weird. If you're into this study, you want to look into it, I'll put a link down in the description underneath this video. So this is a huge deal. This is a massive discovery for neuroscience and I appreciate you hanging out with me for a bit. Please consider hitting that button down there that I won't even say the name of it, but you know what I'm talking about. See you next time. This is a really cool study. Take care.