Selome | ሰሎሜ

Bryan Johnson is one week out from his 5-MeO-DMT experience. He's called it the most profound experience of his life and said he feels "psychologically younger by decades." He may be more right about that than he realizes. In 2023, Gül Dölen's lab at Johns Hopkins published a landmark paper in Nature showing that psychedelics reopen what's called the 'critical learning period.' This is the window of heightened brain plasticity we all experience as young children, roughly ages 3 to 5, when our brains are extraordinarily open to forming attachment patterns, building trust, and absorbing new behaviors with almost no friction. By your mid-twenties, that window has mostly closed, and old patterns get harder to change. Dölen's team found that psychedelics temporarily reopen it, and the duration maps directly to the drug's acute effects. Ketamine opens it for about 48 hours. Psilocybin, roughly two weeks. LSD, about three. And 5-MeO-DMT opens it for approximately four weeks. Which means right now, Bryan Johnson's brain is likely in a state of plasticity he hasn't experienced since early childhood. The extracellular matrix that holds neural wiring in place has softened. Oxytocin-mediated plasticity has been restored. His brain is ready to rewire in ways that are extraordinarily difficult to access under normal conditions. This is the part that almost never gets the attention it deserves. Everyone focuses on the peak experience because that's the dramatic part. But the research tells us something different: the experience opens the door, and what you do in the weeks after determines whether lasting change actually takes root. Dölen herself compared the post-psychedelic window to recovery from open heart surgery. You wouldn't walk out of cardiac surgery and go straight back to a high-stress life. But that's exactly what most people do after a psychedelic experience. So, if I could give Bryan, or anyone in this window, a few practical notes for the next three weeks, they would be as follows: 1. Slow down and protect the window. 2. Be intentional about what you're learning, because new relational patterns and behavioral habits will encode far more easily right now than they will in a month. 3. Work with someone who understands structured integration. 4. Pay attention to the body, because the nervous system clearing that starts during the experience doesn't stop when the molecule wears off. I'm curious what Bryan's integration plan actually looks like. Because if the research is right, these next three weeks matter more than the experience itself.

Cos I watch anything Tom Hardy is in 🤭