How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

by Michael Pollan

“problem solving in engineering always involves irreducible complexity. You’re always balancing complex variables you can never get perfect, so you’re desperately searching to find patterns. LSD shows you patterns. “I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley.”

Timothy Leary’s ego. (It is one of the many paradoxes of psychedelics that these drugs can sponsor an ego-dissolving experience that in some people quickly leads to massive ego inflation.

“The thing that impressed me is, on one hand he looked like a carpetbagger con man, and on the other he had these most impressive people in the world in his lap, basically backing him.” But Leary’s legendary charm never had much traction with Hubbard, a deeply conservative and devout man who disdained both the glare of publicity and the nascent counterculture.

Alpert and Leary appear to be the only Harvard professors fired in the twentieth century. (Technically, Leary wasn’t fired, but Harvard stopped paying him several months before his contract ended.) The story became national news, introducing millions of Americans to the controversy surrounding these exotic new drugs.

But although there is surely truth to the charge that researchers were often biased by their own experiences using the drugs, the obvious alternative—abstinence—posed its own set of challenges, with the result that the loudest and most authoritative voices in the debate over psychedelics during the 1960s were precisely the people who knew the least about them. To psychiatrists with no personal experience of psychedelics, their effects were bound to look a lot more like psychoses than transcendence.

LSD was now regarded as a cause of mental illness rather than a cure. In 1965, Bellevue Hospital in Manhattan admitted sixty-five people for what it called LSD-induced psychoses. With the media now in full panic mode, urban legends about the perils of LSD spread more rapidly than facts.* The same was often true in the case of ostensibly scientific findings. In one widely publicized study, a researcher reported in Science that LSD could damage chromosomes, potentially leading to birth defects. But when the study was later discredited (also in Science), the refutation received little attention. It didn’t fit the new public narrative of LSD as a threat.

Yet it was true that the mid-1960s saw a surge of people on LSD showing up in emergency rooms with acute symptoms of paranoia, mania, catatonia, and anxiety, as well as “acid flashbacks”—a spontaneous recurrence of symptoms days or weeks after ingesting LSD. Some of these patients were having genuine psychotic breaks. Especially in the case of young people at risk for schizophrenia, an LSD trip can trigger their first psychotic episode, and sometimes did. (It should be noted that any traumatic experience can serve as such a trigger, including the divorce of one’s parents or graduate school.) But in many other cases, doctors with little experience of psychedelics mistook a panic reaction for a full-blown psychosis. Which usually made things worse.

What doomed the first wave of psychedelic research was an irrational exuberance about its potential that was nourished by the drugs themselves—that, and the fact that these chemicals are what today we would call disruptive technologies.

of consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human nature, of human potentialities, of existence. The game is about to be changed, ladies and gentlemen. Man is about to make use of that fabulous electrical network he carries around in his skull. Present social establishments had better be prepared for the change. Our favorite concepts are standing in the way of a floodtide, two billion years building up. The verbal dam is collapsing. Head for the hills, or prepare your intellectual craft to flow with the current.”

It was one thing to use these drugs to treat the ill and maladjusted—society will indulge any effort to help the wayward individual conform to its norms—but it is quite another to use them to treat society itself as if it were sick and to turn the ostensibly healthy into wayward individuals.

So maybe this, then, is the enduring contribution of Leary: by turning on a generation—the generation that, years later, has now taken charge of our institutions—he

helped create the conditions in which a revival of psychedelic research is now possible.

For me, standing on the threshold of such an experience, it was reassuring to learn that the underground community of psychedelic guides, which I had assumed consisted of a bunch of individuals all doing pretty much their own thing, operated like professionals, working from a body of accumulated knowledge and experience and in a set of traditions that had been handed down from psychedelic pioneers such as Al Hubbard, Timothy Leary, Myron Stolaroff, Stan Grof, and Leo Zeff. They had rules and codes and agreements, and many elements of the work had been more or less institutionalized.

managed to express the most far-fetched ideas in a disarmingly modest, even down-to-earth way. I had the impression he had no agenda beyond feeding his own curiosity, whether with psychedelics or books on paranormal phenomena.

It embarrasses me to write these words; they sound so thin, so banal. This is a failure of my language, no doubt, but perhaps it is not only that. Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. Emotions arrive in all their newborn nakedness, unprotected from the harsh light of scrutiny and, especially, the pitiless glare of irony. Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth. Love is everything. Okay, but what else did you learn? No—you must not have heard me: it’s everything!

I never achieved a transcendent, “non-dual” or “mystical-like” experience, and as I recapped the journey with Fritz the following morning, I registered a certain disappointment. But the novel plane of consciousness I’d spent a few hours wandering on had been interesting and pleasurable and, I think, useful to me. I would have to see if its effects endured, but it felt as though the experience had opened me up in unexpected ways. Because the acid had not completely dissolved my ego, I never completely lost the ability to redirect the stream of my consciousness or the awareness it was in fact mine. But the stream itself felt distinctly different, less subject to will or outside interference. It reminded me of the pleasantly bizarre mental space that sometimes opens up at night in bed when we’re poised between the states of being awake and falling asleep—so-called hypnagogic consciousness. The ego seems to sign off a few moments before the rest of the mind does, leaving the field of consciousness unsupervised and vulnerable to gentle eruptions of imagery and hallucinatory snatches of narrative. Imagine that state extended

indefinitely, yet with some ability to direct your attention to this or that, as if in an especially vivid and absorbing daydream. Unlike a daydream, however, you are fully present to the contents of whatever narrative is unfolding, completely inside it and beyond the reach of distraction. I had little choice but to obey the daydream’s logic, its ontological and epistemological rules, until, either by force of will or by the fresh notes of a new song, the mental channel would change and I would find myself somewhere else entirely.

“The mushroom teacher helps us to see who we really are,” Mary said, “brings us back to our soul’s purpose for being here in this lifetime.”

Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience, and when it comes to faces, they have boatloads of experience: faces are always convex, so this hollow mask must be a prediction error to be corrected.

Yet it turns out that Bayesian inference breaks down in some people: schizophrenics and, according to some neuroscientists, people on high doses of psychedelic drugs, neither of whom “see” in this predictive or conventionalized manner. (Nor do young children, who have yet to build the sort of database necessary for confident predictions.) This raises an interesting question: Is it possible that the perceptions of schizophrenics, people tripping on psychedelics, and young children are, at least in certain instances, more accurate—less influenced by expectation and therefore more faithful to reality—than those of sane and sober adults?

Everything I once was and called me, this self six decades in the making, had been liquefied and dispersed over the scene. What had always been a thinking, feeling, perceiving subject based in here was now an object out there. I was paint!

And although there was no self left to feel, exactly, there was a feeling tone, which was calm, unburdened, content. There was life after the death of the ego. This was big news.

Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. Yet this by itself strikes me as a remarkable gift: that we can let go of so much—the desires, fears, and defenses of a lifetime!—without suffering complete annihilation. This might not come as a surprise to Buddhists, transcendentalists, or experienced meditators, but it was sure news to me, who has never felt anything but identical to my ego. Could it be there is another ground on which to plant our feet? For the first time since embarking on this project, I began to understand what the volunteers in the cancer-anxiety trials had been trying to tell me: how it was that a psychedelic journey had granted them a perspective from which the very worst life can throw at us, up to and including death, could be regarded objectively and accepted with equanimity.

Yet, twenty-four hours later, my old ego was back in uniform and on patrol, so what long-term good was that beguiling glimpse of a loftier perspective? Mary suggested that having had a taste of a different, less defended way to be, I might learn, through practice, to relax the ego’s trigger-happy command of my reactions to people and events. “Now you have had an experience of another way to react—or not react. That can be cultivated.” Meditation, she suggested, was one way to do that.

Trip Three: 5-MeO-DMT (or, The Toad)

“Is this what death

feels like? Could this be it?” That was the thought, though there was no longer a thinker to have it.

Here words fail. In truth, there were no flames, no blast, no thermonuclear storm; I’m grasping at metaphor in the hope of forming some stable and shareable concept of what was unfolding in my mind. In the event, there was no coherent thought, just pure and terrible sensation. Only afterward did I wonder if this was what the mystics call the mysterium tremendum—the blinding unendurable mystery (whether of God or some other Ultimate or Absolute) before which humans tremble in awe. Huxley described it as the fear “of being overwhelmed, of disintegr...

With the rediscovery of my body, I felt an inexplicable urge to lift my knees, and as soon as I raised them, I felt something squeeze out from between my legs, but easily and without struggle or pain. It was a boy: the infant me. That seemed exactly right: having died, I was now being reborn. Yet as soon as I looked closely at this new being, it morphed smoothly into Isaac, my son. And I thought, how

fortunate—how astounding!—for a father to experience the perfect physical intimacy that heretofore only mothers have ever had with their babies. Whatever space had ever intervened between my son and me now closed, and I could feel the warm tears sliding down my cheeks.

Next came an overwhelming wave of gratitude. For what? For once again existing, yes, for the existence of Isaac and Judith too, but also for something even more fundamental: I felt for the first time gratitude for the very fact of being, that there is anything whatsoever. Rather than being necessarily the case, this now seemed quite the miracle, and something I resolved never again to take for granted. Everybody gives thanks for “being alive,” but who stops to offer thanks for the bare-bones gerund that comes before “alive”? I had just come fr...

Rocío had asked me, as she asks everyone who meets the toad, to search the experience for a “peace offering”—some idea or resolution I could bring back and put to good use in my life. Mine, I decided, had to do with this question of being and what I took to be its opposite term, “doing.”

I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self. To savor whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. (Huxley struggled with the same aspiration during his mescaline journey: “If one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”) Even now, borne along on this pleasant contemplative stream, I had to resist the urge to drag myself onto shore and tell Rocío about my big breakthrough. No! I had to remind myself: just be with it.

So that was my peace offering: to be more and do less. But as soon as I put it that way, I realized there was a problem—a big problem, in fact. For wasn’t the very act of resolving to favor being a form of doing? A betrayal of the whole idea? A true connoisseur of being would never dream of making resolutions! I had tied myself up in a philosophical knot, constructed a paradox or koan I was clearly not smart enough or sufficiently enlightened to untangle. And so what had begun as one of the most shattering experiences of my life ended half an hour later with a wan smile.

But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that’s exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty.

So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when “all mean egotism vanishes.”

Some scientists have raised the possibility that consciousness may pervade the universe, suggesting we think of it the same way we do electromagnetism or gravity, as one of the fundamental building blocks of reality.

Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav Grof.

“Freud said dreams were the royal road to the unconscious,” he reminded me. “Psychedelics could turn out to be the superhighway.” Carhart-Harris’s demeanor is modest, even humble, offering no clue to the audacity of his ambition. He likes to quote Grof’s grand claim that what the telescope was for astronomy, or the microscope for biology, psychedelics will be for understanding the mind.

Nodes in the default network are thought to be responsible for autobiographical memory, the material from which we compose the story of who we are, by linking our past experiences with what happens to us and with projections of our future goals. The achievement of an individual self, a being with a unique past and a trajectory into the future, is one of the glories of human evolution, but it is not without its drawbacks and potential disorders. The price of the sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation from others and nature. Self-reflection can lead to great intellectual and artistic achievement but also to destructive forms of self-regard and many types of unhappiness. (In an often-cited paper titled “A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind,” psychologists identified a strong correlation between unhappiness and time spent in mind wandering, a principal activity of the default mode network.) But, accepting the good with the bad, most of us take this self as an unshakable given, as real as anything we know, and as the foundation of our life as conscious human beings. Or at least I always took it that way, until my psychedelic experiences led me to wonder.

Perhaps the most striking discovery of Carhart-Harris’s first experiment was that the steepest drops in default mode network activity correlated with his volunteers’ subjective experience of “ego dissolution.” (“I existed only as an

idea or concept,” one volunteer reported. Recalled another, “I didn’t know where I ended and my surroundings began.”) The more precipitous the drop-off in blood flow and oxygen consumption in the default network, the more l...

The psychedelic experience of “non-duality” suggests that consciousness survives the disappearance of the self, that it is not so indispensable as we—and it—like to think.

Another trippy thought experiment is to try to imagine the world as it appears to a creature with an entirely different sensory apparatus and way of life. You quickly realize there is no single reality out there waiting to be faithfully and comprehensively transcribed. Our senses have evolved for a much narrower purpose and take in only what serves our needs as animals of a particular kind. The bee perceives a substantially different spectrum of light than we do; to look at the world through its eyes is to perceive ultraviolet markings on the petals of flowers (evolved to guide their landings like runway lights) that don’t exist for us.

THE HUMAN BRAIN is an inconceivably complex system—perhaps the most complex system ever to exist—in which an order has emerged, the highest expression of which is the sovereign self and our normal waking consciousness. By adulthood, the brain has gotten very good at observing and testing reality and developing reliable predictions about it that optimize our investments of energy (mental and otherwise) and therefore our chances of survival.

The question at its heart is, do we pay a price for the achievement of order and selfhood in the adult human mind?

Magical thinking gives way to “a more reality-bound style of thinking, governed by the ego.” Borrowing from Freud, he calls this more highly evolved mode of cognition “secondary consciousness.” Secondary consciousness “pays deference to reality and diligently seeks to represent the world as precisely as possible” in order to minimize “surprise and uncertainty (i.e. entropy).”

When the memory and emotion centers are allowed to communicate directly with the visual processing centers, it’s possible our wishes and fears, prejudices and emotions, begin to inform what we see—a hallmark of primary consciousness and a recipe for magical thinking.

I found that when I put my mind to it, I could locate my own state of consciousness on a spectrum ranging from contraction to expansion. When, for example, I’m feeling especially generous or grateful, open to feelings and people and nature, I register a sense of expansion. This feeling is often accompanied by a diminution of ego, as well as a falloff in the attention paid to past and future on which the ego feasts. (And depends.)

Gopnik asks us to think about child consciousness in terms of not what’s missing from it or undeveloped but rather what is uniquely and wonderfully present—qualities that she believes psychedelics can help us to better appreciate and, possibly, reexperience.