Magic Mushrooms

At a much younger age I worked at a job that provided me with access to an autoclave large enough to fit the contents of two or three normal-sized dishwashers.  For anyone unfamiliar, autoclaves are vessels used to sterilize such things as medical equipment.  They provide sterilization by subjecting whatever is put inside them to heat and steam under high pressure.

As a bachelor, I was tempted to use the autoclave for my crusty stacks of dishes.

By day, the autoclave was used to kill such things as venereal disease and tuberculosis.  But on at least one after-hours occasion a friend and I used the autoclave to sterilize growth medium for magic mushrooms.  We poured the medium we made into Pyrex cookware (with covers) and sterilized everything before inoculating the medium with the mycelium of Psilocybe cubensis (the stuff that grows into magic mushrooms).

I kept my cookware under my bed and in a few weeks grew a continuous crop of mushrooms.

I enjoyed small quantities of the mushrooms and experienced only mild and rather pleasurable hallucinations.  Once, for example, all of the people dancing on a nightclub floor suddenly assumed the same pattern as some nearby wallpaper as I watched them dancing.

Wow, I thought!  You don’t see that every day.

Just yesterday, I found an article at livescience.com, which revealed some surprising facts about how psilocybin works in the brain.  The compounds of the mushrooms actually increase the level of connectivity in the brain.  In a broad sense the magic mushrooms make your brain hyper-efficient.

When researchers produced MRI connectivity maps for the brains of people under the influence of magic mushrooms they discovered that their brains were synchronizing activities among areas that do not normally connect.

Additionally, the compounds in magic mushrooms appear to decrease activity in the thalamus region of the brain.  The thalamus region acts as something of a traffic cop.  The thalamus keeps thoughts from colliding into senseless puddles and keeps random thoughts from running all over the place and doing such things as convincing your math thoughts to perform a striptease for your building-a-shed-for-the-lawn-mower thoughts.

I don’t know what a math-thought striptease looks like, and I will not tell you that magic mushrooms made me or my friends any smarter, but I may consider volunteering for more research.

--Mitchell Hegman