For families living with Alzheimer’s disease, one of the hardest realities is accepting that certain abilities, once lost, rarely return.
As the disease progresses, speech can fade, memories disappear, independence slips away, and eventually even close family members may become unrecognisable. Modern medicine has made progress in understanding Alzheimer’s, but when it reaches its later stages, treatment options remain limited and recovery is generally not expected.
That’s why a recently published case report has attracted so much attention.
Researchers writing in Grenzen in Neurowetenschappen describe an 80-year-old woman with advanced Alzheimer’s disease who experienced a surprising and dramatic improvement in multiple areas of functioning after taking psilocybin mushrooms.
It’s important to emphasise what this study is… and what it isn’t. This was a single patient, not a clinical trial. It doesn’t prove that psilocybin can treat Alzheimer’s disease.
But it does raise a fascinating possibility: what if some abilities lost during advanced neurodegeneration aren’t entirely gone, but temporarily inaccessible?
A Decade of Decline
According to the report, the woman was a Japanese-American patient who had experienced around ten years of progressive cognitive decline. For the previous five years, her condition had become particularly severe. She had been reduced largely to monosyllabic speech, required extensive assistance with daily tasks, struggled with mobility, experienced chronic urinary incontinence, and showed very little outward emotional expression.
Clinically, this was advanced Alzheimer’s disease, and expectation in such cases is continued decline.
Then researchers administered 5 grams of Enigma psilocybin mushrooms, a particularly potent variety known for its dense growth pattern and strong psychoactive effects.
The Experience Took an Unexpected Turn
The first part of the experience was challenging. Researchers reported agitation, heavy sweating, and what they described as a “prolonged deep sleep-like state.” The sleep was so profound that caregivers reportedly wondered whether she had become unconscious.
Then, approximately 19 hours after administration, something changed. The woman woke up and began speaking in complete sentences.
Not only that, she started recounting memories and life events she had been unable to communicate for years. Conversations reportedly continued for hours. Over the following days and weeks, further improvements emerged. According to the researchers, she regained urinary continence after more than five years, began dressing herself independently, recognised family members, maintained eye contact, engaged in spontaneous conversations, and laughed.
A month later, many of those improvements remained. Researchers then administered a second, lower dose of 3 grams. During that experience, she described positive imagery involving “surfing with her son on a peaceful island.” Her walking ability, facial expressiveness, humour, and overall engagement reportedly improved even further.
At one point she spontaneously remarked:
“It is pleasant to come here.”
Could Psilocybin Have Unlocked Dormant Function?
The authors are careful not to overstate their findings.
“There’s no control group, no formal neuroimaging, and no standardised cognitive assessment,” they note. Causation cannot be established from a single case report.
Still, they propose an intriguing hypothesis.
Rather than being completely destroyed, some functional abilities may remain present in advanced Alzheimer’s disease but become difficult or impossible to access under normal circumstances. Psilocybine may have temporarily altered brain activity in a way that allowed those abilities to re-emerge.
In simple terms, the functions may not have vanished entirely. They may have been disconnected.
What Might Be Happening in the Brain?
Psilocybin primarily works by activating serotonin 5-HT2A receptors, which are found throughout the brain’s cortex. This receptor activity produces widespread changes in how different brain networks communicate.
Researchers point to two mechanisms that could be relevant.
Het standaard modus netwerk
The first involves what’s known as the Default Mode Network, or DMN. The DMN is a collection of interconnected brain regions associated with self-reflection, autobiographical memory, and habitual patterns of thought. In psychedelic research, psilocybin is well known for temporarily disrupting this network.
In healthy people, this can contribute to experiences such as ego ontbinding or shifts in perspective.
With Alzheimer’s disease, researchers speculate that disrupting rigid and dysfunctional network activity might temporarily loosen some of the bottlenecks that prevent information from flowing effectively through the brain.
Increased Brain Connectivity
The second mechanism involves what neuroscientists call global functional integration. Put simply, psilocybin appears to encourage different regions of the brain to communicate more freely than usual.
A 2024 study published in Natuur found that psilocybin temporarily increases communication between brain networks that don’t normally interact as strongly. Researchers describe this as a form of neural “desynchronisation” that creates new patterns of connectivity.
In a brain affected by Alzheimer’s, where communication pathways may have become disrupted, this temporary increase in connectivity could potentially provide alternative routes for information processing.
The Role of Neuroplasticity
Researchers also point to another area of growing interest: neuroplasticity. Neuroplasticity refers to the brain’s ability to reorganise itself by forming new neural connections. Animal and laboratory studies have shown that psychedelics may promote dendritic growth and synaptic remodelling — the physical structures that allow neurons to communicate.
Whether these effects meaningfully translate to advanced Alzheimer’s disease remains unknown. But they offer another possible explanation for why some researchers are increasingly interested in psychedelics beyond their psychiatric applications.
A Radical Idea Hidden in the Conclusions
Perhaps the most thought-provoking aspect of the paper appears near the end. The researchers suggest that advanced Alzheimer’s may not always represent complete loss of function. In some cases, abilities that appear gone could instead reflect systems that are present but disconnected.
They compare the process to opening a jammed drawer. The contents haven’t disappeared, they’ve simply become inaccessible.
Psilocybin, they suggest, may temporarily reorganise brain activity in a way that allows access to those hidden capacities. At this stage, that remains a hypothesis.
But it’s a hypothesis supported strongly enough by this case that researchers believe it deserves further investigation.
What This Doesn’t Mean
As remarkable as this report is, it’s important to remain grounded in the evidence. The researchers explicitly state that this is not proof that psilocybin cures Alzheimer’s disease. The woman’s underlying neurodegeneration continued, and there was no long-term follow-up beyond the initial weeks.
One case report cannot establish a medical treatment, but what it can do is generate questions worth exploring. And this case raises a particularly important one.
If even a small degree of residual function remains hidden within some cases of advanced Alzheimer’s disease, could psychedelic-assisted approaches help temporarily restore access to it?
A New Frontier for Psychedelic Research
Much of the current excitement around psychedelics has focused on depressie, PTSD, verslaving, and anxiety. But neurodegenerative disease may represent another frontier entirely. More than 55 million people worldwide are currently living with dementia, and available treatments remain limited.
Even temporary periods of restored communication, recognition, or connection could have profound implications — not necessarily for changing the course of the disease itself, but for improving quality of life. For families facing Alzheimer’s, a lucid conversation, a shared memory, a moment of recognition, or the chance to say goodbye can mean everything.
As the researchers conclude, the mushroom didn’t cure this woman’s disease, but, for a period of time, it appeared to bring part of her back.
And that’s a possibility that deserves careful, rigorous investigation.
