Taking ketamine for science

Hi, it’s Ashlee in Palo Alto, California. The inventor of a brain-scan helmet decided to test his device by taking ketamine. But first…Today [View in browser]( [Bloomberg]( Hi, it’s Ashlee in Palo Alto, California. The inventor of a brain-scan helmet decided to test his device by taking ketamine. But first… Today’s must-reads: • China ordered government and state-owned firms to [dump foreign PCs]( • Amazon [fired managers]( at the Staten Island warehouse where workers unionized • Hundreds of workers at an Apple China plant [clashed with officials]( over lockdowns A special experiment Several weeks ago, Bryan Johnson laid down on a couch, and a doctor used an intramuscular injection to administer 57.75 milligrams of ketamine into his bloodstream. A helmet attached to Johnson’s head monitored what happened next as the hallucinogen triggered a profound neuronal rewiring and sent Johnson into an altered state. Johnson was, as our drug-using forebearers would say, tripping, and a very sophisticated device was taking in the show right alongside him. Researchers have observed the brain activity of people taking drugs before, although never quite like this. Test subjects on ketamine, a substance sometimes used to treat depression but also a popular recreational drug known as Special K, are traditionally placed inside of a large MRI machine at a hospital or laboratory. They hallucinate and try to open their third eyes while trapped in a confined tube and pelted by fluorescent lights. Since MRIs are expensive, a pain to conduct and not ideal for the participant, their use for this type of research has been limited. As a consequence, our knowledge of what really happens when we’re on drugs has been limited, too. Johnson realized he was working on something that could help. He’s the founder and chief executive officer of a company called Kernel that designs and manufactures [brain-scanning helmets](. A Kernel device is about the size of a bicycle helmet and takes a couple of minutes to put on correctly. Instead of conducting a single test on ketamine, Johnson wore the helmet for a few days prior to his trip, during the actual trip and for a few days after. And he could do all this while laying back on a couch and taking in views of the Pacific Ocean from a doctor’s office or at his company headquarters or home. The before, during and after results appeared to show major changes in the wiring of Johnson’s brain. Leading up to the injection, there were clear patterns of strong connections between various regions of his brain. The images produced by the Kernel helmet depicted something akin to the map of major highways with varying amounts of traffic flowing across these roads. But after about 20 minutes on ketamine, many of those pathways began to dissolve. Johnson’s brain appeared to quiet itself down and approach something of a meditative state. Doctors aren’t totally sure why ketamine can effectively treat depression in some people or what it does to the brain in the short or long term. The study Johnson performed on himself is part of a larger trial with about 15 patients being conducted by Kernel and Cybin, a startup looking to make therapeutics based on psychedelics. While the companies will not release full details of their study until later this year, they’re hoping the research will provide a groundbreaking set of data on how the brain reacts to ketamine. This type of work illuminates an intersection of two technological trends. Researchers in the U.S. have gained new freedoms to test and study psychedelics for medicinal use. Meanwhile, Kernel is one of a handful of companies, including Elon Musk’s Neuralink Corp. and Synchron Inc., that have developed brain devices that could usher in a new era in which we acquire much more data about the brain and get to watch it in action. Johnson’s big quest with Kernel is to make it possible for doctors and humans to obtain health information about their brains, just like they would for the rest of the body. If, for example, you have heart issues, doctors can order a battery of tests and prescribe treatments, which have years’ worth of data behind them. “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,” Johnson said. “We can bring the same scientific engineering and rigor to the brain that we use for other aspects of our health.” —[Ashlee Vance](mailto:avance3@bloomberg.net) The big story Elon Musk’s fixer is a guy named Jared Birchall. He [runs the family office]( for the world’s richest man and helped him line up financing for the Twitter deal. That transaction is now being [challenged by a Florida pension fund](, and Cathie Wood’s ARK ETFs are [dumping almost all of their shares of Twitter](. What else you need to know Revolut, a banking startup valued at $33 billion, has a problem in the U.K.: Officials [haven’t yet given it the green light]( to be a bank there. Palantir deepened its relationship with the U.K. Ministry of Defense. It won a $12.5 million software contract, its [largest with the department](. Palantir reports financial results Monday. Crypto enthusiasts want to keep NFT mania going. ApeCoin owners are considering [locking up the tokens](. And there’s a new venture capital fund that will [invest almost exclusively in nonfungible tokens inside video games](. 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