The US Food and Drug Administration has described psilocybin as a breakthrough medicine, showing promise in combating anxiety, anorexia, PTSD, cluster headaches, obsessive-compulsive disorder and various forms of substance abuse including alcoholism. These non addictive, life-changing psilocybin-containing mushrooms, given in a therapeutic setting, can make dramatic and long-lasting changes in people suffering from treatment-resistant major depressive disorder, which typically does not respond to traditional antidepressants.

What do these mushrooms do?

The molecular structure of psilocybin, a naturally occurring psychedelic compound, allows it to penetrate the central nervous system directly affecting the Default Mode Network, limiting its supply of energy: including blood, nutrients and oxygen. This has the immediate effect of increasing the supply to the rest of the brain. Scientists can see changes in brain neuron connectivity in the lab “within 30 minutes,” said pharmacologist Brian Roth, a professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The immediate effect is neuroplasticity: an increase in neuronal outgrowth, the branching of neurons, so that they can increase synapses.
“One of the most interesting things we’ve learned about the classic psychedelics is that they have a dramatic effect on the way brain systems synchronize, or move and groove together,” said Matthew Johnson, a professor in psychedelics and consciousness at Johns Hopkins Medicine.

How an over-active DMN damps down our optimism, creativity and freedom

Our Default Mode Network is a hub that interconnects many parts of the brain so as to make our movements and functions more efficient. As you go through your day, observe how much of your activity is coming from a hardwired automated response From picking up a glass, bringing it to your lips and drinking to pouring liquid, riding a bike, hammering, a nail sweeping the floor. You don’t have to think of how to do that each time because it is automated, therefore making your activities more efficient in terms of the amount of energy that your brain has to use in order to do those tasks. (Remember that your brain uses more energy than your muscles or even your heart.) So the DMN evolved for a reason and does have a raison-d’etre, and don’t forget, it is the part of the brain that creates the sense of self.

But when we are over focussed on ourselves, and on efficiency, we are sending increasing amounts of energy to the DMN. As a result, the DMN continues to be more efficient by creating automated responses to smaller and smaller degrees of stimuli. It acts as a reducing valve: reducing the amount of input from the environment so that only what might be seen as a threat or an incredible opportunity is perceived by the organism, so it can immediately respond in a pre-programmed way.

When, in our culture, we become over focused on ourselves, or our “efficiency”, we are super charging our DMN and reducing our ability to perceive things such as beauty diversity, variety, and the movement of the whole .

Our experience of the world is gradually limited to what is in our memory banks and related to survival rather than seeing or hearing what is actually there. If someone is known to criticize me, I will only hear criticisms from that person, and my brain will interpret whatever they say as criticism. Over time one has the sense that the world has nothing to offer. Everything has been seen and done and it is impossible to see anything new with new eyes.

We can feel less creative, less open and less responsive because the organism becomes more and more reliant on automated responses. Logically, there will be a heightened anticipatory anxiety of the prospect of something unpredictable happening because the plasticity has been so greatly reduced to hardwired responses and the overactive overly fed DMN is constantly limiting the brain’s ability to make new synopsis or see new possibilities so unpredictability is perceived as threatening. The world becomes one that is reduced to concepts, and that has lost its dynamic, interconnected wholeness.

What Brain scans show with psilocybin

The brain scans of people who have ingested psilocybin show, that if we can deprive the DMN of nutrients and oxygen, even for a few moments, the body is immediately free from the fight and flight response, defenses, anxiety, and self focus, and the brain is fully aware, in the present, free from both future planning and rumination about the past. It is free in those moments to make many more synopses, be more creative, more optimistic, more open to possibilities and showing more plasticity, it becomes like a child’s mind open, relaxed, and soft.

In fact, results show that just reducing the flow to the DMN for a few minutes can cause greater optimism, better relationships, more freedom of choice – basically everything that we would see in our FORCES score! FORCES is the Patient self rated health evaluation that we use at MICH to evaluate an individual’s response to a homeopathic remedy. See the link to our Health Quiz below. It evaluates one’s F: Freedom to respond in various ways to challenge, O: Openness to Possibilities: relies on Optimism and Objectivity, R: Relationships (to ourselves, others and the world), C: Calmness, Chronic Conditions, Complaints, E: Energy, Environment (awareness) and S: Susceptibility, Symptoms, Sensations, Spontaneity

What do psilocybin and MICH homeopathy have in common?

The MICH Method is used to find the remedy that directly targets the mitochondria in the neurons involved in the Default Mode Network. The MICH Method has been developed to enable us to prescribe a homeopathic remedy based on the increased susceptibility to narrow stimuli and conditioned, automated responses based on unconsciously perceived survival threats.

In the microseconds of the mitochondria receiving the homeopathic quantum signal, they bring the excessive use of energy by the DMN back down to a healthy level. Thus, energy is freed up for the rest of the brain. The individual immediately feels more open, less restricted, more creative, optimistic, and open to possibilities.

The Gift of the MICH Method

In order to be able to apply the method, our homeopaths need to loosen slightly from our restrictive conditioning and reconnect with the dynamic, natural world and the natural flow of life.

Our exercises are designed to help them rediscover the dynamic relationship between the human being and its natural surroundings. Coming to MICH isn’t just a change in paradigm. It is not seeing the world from a different point of view: it is breaking out of our survival conditionings, and the illusion of a self that is separate.

MICH education is the “educare” that draws out the reality of wholeness from the very cells in your own body.