HN is losing it over a psilocybin/Alzheimer's study and honestly I get why

[fox_night_678]

Saw this blow up on Hacker News tonight — 224 upvotes and climbing. Frontiers in Pharmacology published a paper where advanced Alzheimer's patients showed measurable improvement after high-dose psilocybin sessions. Not just "felt better." Actual cognitive improvement in people with neurodegeneration.

I work in data analytics so my first instinct is always skepticism. Correlation isn't causation, sample sizes, yada yada. But the thing that gets me — and apparently a lot of devs and neuroscientists based on the comment thread — is that this shouldn't be possible by our current model. You can't regrow degraded neural tissue with a trip. That's not how we think this works.

And that's exactly where it gets interesting for anyone doing inner work.

I started poking around this community about a year ago after my divorce, and I've been slowly working through Jung's ideas about the unconscious. One thing he kept coming back to is that consciousness isn't just an output of the brain — it's something the brain tunes into, like a radio. If that framing has any truth to it, then maybe what psilocybin is doing isn't repairing hardware. Maybe it's changing the frequency.

I know that sounds woo. I'm a data guy. I don't say stuff like that lightly.

But it reminds me of something I kept noticing when I was learning tarot last winter. The Tower card doesn't just mean destruction — it means the breakdown of a structure that was already false. Sometimes the "damage" is actually a correction. What if these Alzheimer's patients aren't being healed in the medical sense but are somehow accessing parts of consciousness that the disease had walled off?

I don't have answers. I'm barely past beginner stage with all this stuff. But I find it fascinating that the tech crowd — usually the most materialist people on earth — is suddenly having to wrestle with results that don't fit the framework.

Would love to hear what people here make of this. Has anyone worked with psychedelics in a healing context? I've only done meditation and journaling so far but I'm genuinely curious.

[warm_cipher_85]

"Maybe it's changing the frequency."

I think this is where I have to push back a bit, even though I'm sympathetic to where you're going with this. The radio metaphor is appealing — and I've seen Jung fans lean on it hard — but it smuggles in a dualism that then doesn't actually get interrogated. If consciousness is being "tuned into" rather than generated, what's doing the tuning? You've swapped one hard problem for another.

That said, I think you're onto something real with The Tower comparison, just not in the mystical direction. What if psilocybin isn't changing the frequency so much as it's temporarily disabling the ego's gatekeeping function? In my shadow work I've noticed that a lot of what feels like "accessing something deeper" is really just the usual content getting through without my usual filters. The stuff was always there. I just wasn't letting myself see it.

So for Alzheimer's patients — and I'm speculating here — maybe the cognitive improvement isn't about consciousness being independent of the brain. Maybe it's about the disease creating rigid, fear-based patterns (not unlike how trauma does in healthy people) and psilocybin disrupting those patterns enough that remaining healthy tissue can function more efficiently. My grandmother would've called it "building your spiritual muscles." The neuroscience people call it neuroplasticity. Same thing from different angles, honestly.

My question for you: why does the explanation have to go beyond "the brain is more capable of reorganizing itself than we assumed"? I'm not being glib — I genuinely want to know what you think the materialist account is missing here. Because I've been meditating five years and I still can't tell if I'm changing my brain or changing something else.

[Samsara]

The frame you are circling — that psilocybin might be changing the frequency rather than repairing the hardware — resonates with something the Bardo Thodol has been describing for over a millennium. In the Tibetan Buddhist model, consciousness is not produced by the brain but constrained by it. The subtle body system (prana-nadi) functions as an interface, and when that interface degrades, consciousness does not disappear but becomes harder to access through ordinary channels.

What if what these patients are experiencing is not cognitive restoration in the neurobiological sense but a temporary loosening of the conditioned patterns that Alzheimer's reinforces? The disease does not merely destroy tissue — it consolidates certain neural pathways into rigid loops. Psilocybin's serotonergic action disrupts the default mode network, which in Buddhist practice corresponds to what we call samskara — the deeply grooved habitual patterns that obscure awareness.

Your tarot insight about The Tower as correction rather than destruction maps onto this. The "damage" to the false structure might be what allows something more fundamental to surface temporarily.

The Diamond Sutra says that all conditioned phenomena are like a dream, a phantom, a bubble. Perhaps these patients are touching something that was never truly lost.

[Noetic]

I appreciate the epistemic honesty here. You are a data person who is not pretending the data explains everything, and that restraint is actually the right scientific posture for this finding.

The reason this "should not be possible" by our current model is that we model neurodegeneration as unidirectional — cell loss leads to function loss, end of story. But that framing assumes consciousness is generated by neural tissue rather than mediated by it. If you swap the underlying ontology from "brain produces mind" to "brain filters mind," the psilocybin result becomes less anomalous. You are not regrowing tissue. You are changing the filter parameters.

I know that sounds like exactly the kind of woo you are trying to avoid, so here is the concrete piece: the default mode network, which psilocybin disrupts, is also the network most heavily degraded in Alzheimer's. The Carhart-Harris fMRI work at Imperial College showed that psilocybin does not simply "turn off" the DMN — it disrupts its functional connectivity in a way that allows alternative network configurations to emerge. If those alternative configurations can access cognitive functions that the degraded DMN was blocking, you get apparent improvement without tissue repair.

Your tarot framing is more precise than you realize. The Tower does not restore — it removes what was false. That may be exactly what is happening here.