Let’s start with a story about the wild power of confirmation bias in the world of psychedelics. A story about credulous people and research that affirms their pre-existing beliefs.

In late May a case study was published in Frontiers in Neuroscience telling the story of a woman in her 80s with advanced dementia who was given a big dose of magic mushrooms. The remarkable tale recounts the woman suddenly initiating “autobiographical conversation” hours after the treatment. In the days that followed the authors reported the woman displaying “increased alertness”, “improved mobility, enhanced emotional reciprocity”, and “restoration of urinary continence.”

These improvements apparently persisted for several weeks, and the subject was given a second magic mushroom dose a month later. When revisiting the clinic for this second dose the patient allegedly said, “It is pleasant to come here.”

Responding to this case study, the world of psychedelic evangelists did what it does best… Evangelise! And in 2026 the AI-powered social ecosystem churns content fast.

Just a few of the breathless (often AI-assisted) takes on the case study

I initially didn’t pay much attention to this story until a message I received privately homed in on a weird detail in the study. The article noted the dose given to the subject was 5 grams of a type of magic mushroom known as Enigma.

Enigma is a super weird magic mushroom mutant, thought to be the product of human cross-breeding creating a sterile, blob-like, super powered form of the well-known cubensis species. Most relevant to our story is the fact that Enigma is notoriously potent, carrying extraordinarily high volumes of psilocybin.

So 5 grams of Enigma is not a small dose. In fact, if I was being conservative I’d say this volume of mushroom would easily deliver 50 milligrams of psilocybin. To put that dose in perspective, most modern clinical uses of psilocybin focus on 25 milligram doses. Some trial research has pushed up to around 35 or even 40 milligrams, but not much more. Anything higher and you are getting into the territory of doses exclusively left to psychonauts looking to travel across the universe.

Here, we have a very old woman with dementia being given a ridiculously high dose of psilocybin. Surely there were strong ethical guardrails to make sure this was all done with fair oversight? So I started looking more closely at the study.

It didn’t take long to find a few more strange things in the case report.