What Have We Forgotten? The Medicines Growing Around Us

My dad has Alzheimer's, so anything I see about new research into the brain, memory or Alzheimer's tends to get my attention pretty quickly, because when somebody you love has this disease, curiosity becomes very personal.

Watching Alzheimer's gradually change somebody is incredibly difficult, because it isn't simply about forgetting names or where something has been put, it is watching conversations change, familiar abilities disappear and parts of the personality you have known your whole life become harder to reach, and there is a very frustrated part of me that keeps thinking:

After decades of research, surely there must be more that we can do?

Which is why an article I came across recently stopped me completely.

It affected me enough that I first wrote about it from a very personal perspective on LinkedIn — as a therapist fascinated by the brain, but more importantly, as a daughter watching her dad live with Alzheimer's.

It described an extraordinary case involving a woman in her 80s with advanced Alzheimer's who had experienced around ten years of cognitive decline and whose speech had reportedly been largely reduced to single words for approximately five years, yet after taking psilocybin-containing mushrooms she began spontaneously talking about autobiographical memories, alongside other reported changes in her functioning. Frontiers

Magic mushrooms.

Now you've got my attention.

But what really fascinated me was:

Where had those memories been?

If somebody appears to have lost access to memories and suddenly starts talking about them again, what happened inside her brain, what became accessible and, perhaps most importantly, what could that teach us?

Those questions have stayed with me.

Nature has always been our pharmacy

Perhaps this story resonated so strongly because I already have a deep interest in plant medicines, natural remedies and traditional approaches to healing, and I've increasingly come to believe that while we've made extraordinary medical and technological advances over the last century, we've also lost an enormous amount of knowledge, skill and connection with the natural world along the way.

We've become detached from nature and from its apothecary.

For most of human existence, knowledge of plants, fungi, roots, bark, minerals and foods was passed through generations and developed through observation and experience, whereas today most of us could walk through a woodland surrounded by plants and fungi and have absolutely no idea what we're looking at.

We've become incredibly technologically sophisticated while becoming remarkably disconnected from what is growing immediately around us.

Nature is the original pharmacy.

A woodland is chemistry, a hedgerow is chemistry, a mushroom is chemistry, and the fact that previous generations didn't have our scientific terminology doesn't mean the chemistry wasn't happening.

Psilocybin isn't something we've just discovered

This is what makes the current excitement around psilocybin so fascinating.

We talk about psychedelics as an exciting new area of research, except psilocybin isn't new.

We are.

Humans have had a relationship with psychedelic plants and fungi for centuries and, in some cases, millennia, yet many of these substances are now attracting renewed scientific attention for precisely the areas that interest me most — consciousness, memory, trauma, depression, addictive behaviour and the extraordinary workings of the human brain.

And psilocybin is far from the only example.

Ayahuasca has a long history of ceremonial and healing use among Indigenous peoples of the Amazon, and the traditional preparation itself is fascinating: plants containing DMT are combined with the Banisteriopsis caapi vine, whose compounds prevent DMT from being rapidly broken down in the body, making it orally active — something we can now describe in terms of DMT, beta-carbolines and monoamine oxidase inhibition, while the people preparing it somehow discovered the combination long before any of those words existed. Modern researchers are now investigating ayahuasca in relation to depression, anxiety, substance-use problems, emotional processing and the brain, with scientific interest increasing markedly since the turn of the millennium. PubMed

Then there is iboga, used for generations in West and Central African traditions and ceremonies, whose naturally occurring alkaloid ibogaine has attracted decades of scientific interest for its unusual effects on craving, withdrawal and addictive behaviour; and mescaline-containing peyote and San Pedro cacti, with evidence of mescaline use stretching back thousands of years, are now being revisited by researchers interested in mental wellbeing, depression and alcohol and nicotine dependence. PubMed

There is something about this pattern that I find impossible not to question.

Known. Used. Suppressed. Lost. Rediscovered. Studied.

And perhaps eventually prescribed.

We tend to think progress means discovering something nobody knew before.

Perhaps sometimes progress means rediscovering what we've forgotten.

What have we lost?

We imagine human knowledge as a straight line moving upwards, with every generation knowing more than the one before, but I don't believe knowledge works like that.

Knowledge disappears.

When skills stop being practised, they disappear; when oral traditions aren't passed down, they disappear; when cultures and traditional practices are suppressed, knowledge disappears, and when we stop teaching our children about the natural world around them, that understanding disappears too.

I believe we have lost an enormous amount.

This is one reason I've been interested in the work of naturopathic physician Dr Michael Murray and his approach to nutritional and botanical medicine, because I find the idea of bringing traditional knowledge and natural medicine into conversation with modern research far more interesting than pretending the two belong in separate worlds.

I see the natural world as an enormous living apothecary, much of which we have barely begun to understand.

And ayahuasca particularly makes me wonder: how did somebody discover that combination?

Of all the thousands of plants growing in the Amazon rainforest, how did generations of people discover that combining particular plants produced a profoundly different effect, something modern science can now explain through pharmacology?

That isn't a throwaway question.

It's fascinating.

And it makes me wonder what else we've forgotten, what knowledge disappeared before anybody thought to study it, and how much is currently growing beneath our feet while we're spending billions looking for answers elsewhere.

Then a woman with Alzheimer's takes a mushroom...

And this is why I keep coming back to that case.

A woman with advanced Alzheimer's, who had barely spoken beyond single words for years, takes psilocybin-containing mushrooms and subsequently begins talking about autobiographical memories.

How can you not want to understand that?

What changed in her brain?

Where did those memories come from?

Were they still there but somehow inaccessible?

What did psilocybin do?

And what could that teach us about Alzheimer's itself?

The researchers considered what happened sufficiently remarkable to publish the case and call for further investigation, and for me, that's where the interesting part starts. Frontiers

Maybe we've become too clever to remember how much we don't know

We know an extraordinary amount about the human brain.

And we understand nowhere near all of it.

We can scan it, map it and study its chemistry, yet memory, consciousness and the relationship between the brain, body and human experience still contain enormous mysteries, and I find that exciting because “we don't understand this yet” leaves room for discovery.

Traditional knowledge gives us generations of human observation, while modern science gives us extraordinary tools for investigating those observations, and I think bringing those worlds back together could be one of the most interesting areas of medicine.

The chemistry was always there. - We just didn't have names for it.

Which brings me back to Dad

When it's your dad who has Alzheimer's, these questions stop being academically interesting.

I want answers.

I want to understand why that woman apparently regained access to memories and abilities that seemed to have disappeared, what happened inside her brain and whether there is anything within that observation that could eventually help us understand people like my dad.

And I can't ignore the fact that the substance at the centre of this extraordinary story didn't originate in a multimillion-pound laboratory.

It came from a mushroom.

Something growing in nature that humans have known about for generations.

At a time when we're racing forwards with artificial intelligence, genetics, pharmaceuticals and increasingly sophisticated technology, I think we should also be looking backwards at what we've left behind, because I believe we've lost knowledge, we've become disconnected from nature and its apothecary, and there is an enormous amount about plants, fungi, traditional medicines and our own brains that we simply don't understand yet.

Perhaps some of the medicines of the future won't be new inventions at all.

Perhaps they'll be rediscoveries.

Perhaps the natural world has been holding an extraordinary pharmacy around us all along.

We've just forgotten how to look to nature for the answer.

And that leaves me with a much bigger question than whether psilocybin might one day teach us something about Alzheimer's:

What else have we forgotten — and what might we discover if we're open-minded enough to look again?