Hypothesis # 2: It’s related to serotonin receptors
Though Brad had his doubts about whether shrooms could actually help improve anosmia, he said if they could, his guess would be that it comes down to psilocybin’s effects on the brain.
The way magic mushrooms create their wild psychedelic effects is by modulating certain serotonin receptors — turning them up or down, or changing how signals are sent from one cell to another.
And serotonin may be involved in some of the regions that process smells.
“Theoretically, if you were turning up serotonin signals — and some of those circuits are using serotonin — somebody could have an olfactory perception change as a downstream effect of that,” he said.
This idea resonated with Chris von Bartheld, a professor of physiology and cell biology at the University of Nevada School of Medicine, who, like Brad, has been studying COVID-related anosmia.
“Psilocybin is known to have changes in perception, and so I could imagine that — let’s say you have COVID, you lost your sense of smell,” he said. “So for weeks or even months, there has been no activity in your olfactory nerve. And so the parts of the brain that normally receive this information, they noticed that, well, there’s nothing coming in.”
As a result, Chris said, those parts of the brain may stop paying attention.
“So maybe what the psychedelic mushrooms do is to basically hit a reset button,” he said. “And so, whatever is coming in is now being perceived … then the cortical areas that normally receive olfactory information are kind of, ‘Oh, there is something,’ and then they pay more attention to it.”
In other words, maybe the psilocybin is waking up the part of the brain that processes smells.
Hypothesis #3: It’s neither of those!
Brad added that there’s a catch with his and Chris’ serotonin hypotheses: They’re both centered on the brain.
Early on, that’s exactly where many scientists speculated the problem was — damage to olfactory neurons and possibly the brain.
But what a growing number of studies (including this one that Brad worked on) have found, is that COVID-19 isn’t attacking olfactory neurons or the brain — but instead, is infecting cells that support olfactory neurons. And that is what’s causing people to lose their sense of smell.
“Damage is almost certainly in the nose, at the olfactory epithelium, not in the brain cortex,” Brad said. “So a drug that modulates cortical synapses, not involved in the damage, is not likely to be directly impacting repair or recovery.”
In other words, a solution that targets the brain is unlikely to fix a problem located in the nose.
Hypothesis #4: It’s all an illusion
Get ready for whiplash — because maybe the explanation has to do with the brain after all.
How, you ask? By doing what shrooms do best.
“I mean, it’s a hallucinogen,” Brad said. “And so I could see why eating a hallucinogen that stimulates…
Read more:COVID smell loss: Could shrooms be a cure? Science weighs in