There’s little that millionaire biohacker Bryan Johnson won’t try in furtherance of his goal to defy aging.
He’s swapped blood with his teenaged son, he wears a device on his penis to track his overnight erections and his last cheat meal was four years ago.
In his latest self-experiment, the infamous health guru injected himself with the powerful hallucinogen Ketamine for 15 days to see what happened to his brain.
The 47-year-old used a helmet to track his brain activity while in an altered state of consciousness.
Before taking ketamine, images of his brain showed a vibrant, multicolor network of neural pathways, illustrating the constant communication between different brain regions. After ketamine, many of those pathways temporarily dissolved, and his brain activity quieted down, entering a state akin to deep meditation.
Ketamine is a powerful drug that, at low doses, causes distortions in sensory perception, changes in thought patterns, and a dream-like state.
Elon Musk is confirmed to use the drug, which can cause a profound dissociative state, where users may feel detached from their body or environment, sometimes described as a K-hole.
At the same time, the drug has been a subject of mental health treatment research for decades, culminating in FDA approval of a ketamine derivative called Esketamine for the treatment of severe depression.
For five days before Bryan Johnson received a 57.75-milligram ketamine injection, researchers used the Kernel helmet to track his baseline brain activity, resembling a busy network of highways. After each infusion, the scanner showed a dramatic rewiring, as if those highways had dissolved
Mr Johnson said: ‘Psychedelics like ketamine, which have recently been FDA approved for limited use as therapeutics, are interesting because of their unique potential to improve mental wellness.
‘Our brain activity patterns know things that we don’t. Wisdom we want, need and must know. Now we can.’
Johnson was given almost 60 milligrams of ketamine, a moderate-sized dose that ravers might take to experience dissociation, altered perception of time and space, and mild hallucinations.
For five days before the experiment he wore a helmet that uses advanced light-based technology to map brain activity in real time, to monitor his baseline brain activity.
Without the drug in his system, his brain scan showed the normal tangled cluster of connections among different regions of the brain, like cars zooming from one part to another on a crowded network of highways.
But with the ketamine, the scans showed that some of those highways dissolved, meaning the usual flow of ‘traffic’ (signals sent by brain cells) between brain regions slowed down or stopped entirely.
The brain’s activity became quieter, as if the highways had emptied out, leading to a state of reduced connectivity and dissociation.
Mr Johnson said this week: ‘In a world-first we answered the question “what happens to the brain before, during, and after ketamine treatment?” We also discovered how long it took for my brain to return to “normal.”’
Mr Johnson’s company Kernel was created to monitor real-time brain activity before, during, and after psychedelic experiences. Unlike older methods that depended on subjective patient accounts, Flow lets researchers to gather real-time data on brain function during studies of psychedelic therapies
The study found that the Mr Johnson’s brain activity remained consistent during the five days before ketamine administration. Major changes occurred during the ketamine session. Afterward, his brain connectivity decreased for several days before gradually returning to its original baseline
Early results from the pilot study showed that the effects of ketamine on brain activity lasted for several days after it was taken.
For about a week and a half, the Kernel headset took quick, 7-minute snapshots of Mr Johnson’s brain activity every day. This included five days before taking ketamine, the day he took it, and five days after.
According to the study’s findings: ‘Subject’s functional connectivity was stable for days 1-5 prior to ketamine. Their brain showed large changes during the ketamine session.
‘Subject’s functional connectivity decreases for days and then begins trending to normalize back to his baseline.’
Bryan Johnson spends millions on treatments every year in a bid to cheat death and restore his youth, from injecting himself with his teenage son’s plasma and sending shockwaves into his penis, to meditating in hyperbaric oxygen chambers and using electrical stimulation devices to enhance muscle recovery and brain function.
His search for answers in ketamine has been years in progress. He embarked on this experiment in 2022, with Mr Johnson enlisting as the first trial participant to determine how well the Kernel helmet was able to track even the most minute network changes in the brain when on ketamine.
Johnson told Bloomberg: ‘We’ve never had a regime with the brain where you do measurements beforehand, issue a treatment and then measure the results after to see how the treatment is doing.
‘We can bring the same scientific engineering and rigor to the brain that we use for other aspects of our health.’
Mr Musk’s illegal drug use could potentially breach federal policies, putting SpaceX’s multi-billion-dollar government contracts at risk
The drug, touted by Tesla mogul Elon Musk who said he microdoses regularly to treat depression and takes larger doses at parties, has been used for decades as a tranquilizer as well as a party drug.
Mental health professionals strongly discourage people from taking their treatment into their own hands.
