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

by Michael Pollan

fourth

is

“pass...

“The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped a...

Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations,

Charnay’s

journey

solidified her commitment to her...

lasting improvements in well-being,

“openness to experience.”

(the other four are conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeablenes...

What’s unique about the psychedelics is the meaning that comes out of the experience.”

During the session he takes notes, selects the music, and checks in every twenty minutes or so. “I’ll ask you not how you are but where you are.

“I’m here just for you, to hold the space, so you don’t have to worry about anything or anyone else. Not the wife, not the child. So you can really let go—and

difficulties that might arise: “paranoia, spooky places, the feeling you’re losing your mind or that you are dying. “It’s like when you see a mountain lion,” he suggested. “If you run, it will chase you. So you must stand your ground.” I was

reminded of the “flight instructions” that the guides employed at Johns Hopkins: instead of turning away from any monster that appears, move toward it, stand your ground, and demand to know, “What are you doing in my mind? What do you have to teach me?”

first birthday

a dim tide of anxiety began to build. Recalling the flight instructions, I told myself there was nothing to do but let go and surrender to the experience. Relax and float downstream

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.

the second of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, performed by Yo-Yo Ma.

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.)

the drop-off in blood flow and oxygen consumption in the default network, the more likely a volunteer was to report the loss of a sense of self.* Shortly after Carhart-Harris published his results in a 2012 paper in PNAS (“Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin”*), Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale* who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin’s looked remarkably alike. The transcendence of self reported by expert meditators showed up on fMRIs as a quieting of the default mode network. It appears that when activity in the default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes,

Bossis suggested that Patrick use the phrase “Trust and let go” as a kind of mantra for his journey. Go wherever it takes you, he advised: “Climb staircases, open doors, explore paths, fly over landscapes.”

But the most important advice for the journey he offered is always to move toward, rather than try to flee, anything truly threatening or monstrous you encounter—look it straight in the eyes. “Dig in your heels and ask, ‘What are you doing in my mind?’ Or, ‘What can I learn from you?’”

Many of the volunteers I interviewed reported initial episodes of intense fear and anxiety before giving themselves up to the experience, as the guides encourage them to do. This is where the flight instructions come in. Their promise is that if you surrender to whatever happens (“trust, let go, and be open” or “relax and float downstream”), whatever at first might seem terrifying will soon morph into something else, and likely something pleasant, even blissful.

As in the cancer-anxiety studies, the volunteers who had the most complete mystical experiences had the best outcomes;

After interviewing cancer patients confronted with the prospect of death, people who had had epic journeys in which they confronted their cancers and traveled to the underworld,

I wondered how the experience would compare when the stakes were lower: What kinds of journeys would ordinary people simply hoping to break a bad habit have, and w...

the lead investigator, reported a strong correlation between the “strength of the experience and the effect” on drinking behavior.

“Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?”

“awe,”

the experience of awe might offer the psychological key to explain the power of psychedelics to alter deeply rooted patterns of behavior.

One of the challenges of treating the addict is getting him to broaden his perspective beyond a consuming self-interest in his addiction, the behavior that has come to define his identity and organize his days. Awe, Hendricks believes, has the power to do this.

“Normally, when Dad comes up in my head, I just push the thought away. But this time I went the other way.” His guide had told him he should “go in and through” any frightening material that arose during his journey.

life. For me, trying to resist emotions just amplified them.

More than half of the Imperial volunteers saw the clouds of their depression eventually return,

“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.” Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense.

the Mystery of Mental Suffering that makes the case for such an approach. “Capture” is his term for the common mechanism underlying addiction, depression, anxiety, mania, and obsession; in his view, all these disorders involve learned habits of negative thinking and behavior that hijack our attention and trap us in loops of self-reflection. “What started as a pleasure becomes a need; what was once a bad mood becomes continuous self-indictment; what was once an annoyance becomes persecution,” in a process he describes as a form of “inverse learning.” “Every time we respond [to a stimulus], we strengthen the neural circuitry that prompts us to repeat” the same destructive thoughts or behaviors.

psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity.

mentally “stuck,” captured in ruminative loops they felt powerless to break. They talked about “prisons of the self,” spirals of obsessive introspection that wall them off from other people, nature, their earlier selves, and the present moment.

thinking about thinking.

specifically in the posterior cingulate cortex)

the work performed by the so-called autobiographical or experiential self: the mental operation responsible for the narratives that link our first person to the world, and so help define us. “This is who I am.” “I don’t deserve to be loved.” “I’m the kind of person without the willpower to break this addiction.” Getting overly attached to these narratives, taking them as fixed truths about ourselves rather than as stories subject to revision, contributes mightily to addiction, depression, and anxiety. Psychedelic therapy seems to weaken the grip of these

narratives, perhaps by temporarily disintegrating the parts of the default mode ne...

itself. Or maybe the lesson was more universal, something about plants themselves and how we underestimate them. My plant teacher, as I began to think of the vine, was trying to tell me something about itself and the green kingdom it represents, a kingdom that has always figured largely in my work and my imagination. That plants are intelligent I have believed for a long time—not necessarily in the way we think of intelligence, but in a way appropriate to themselves. We can do many things plants can’t, yet they can do all sorts of things we can’t—escaping from steel cages, for example, or eating sunlight. If you define intelligence as the ability to solve the novel problems reality throws at the living, plants surely have it. They also possess agency, an awareness of their environment, and a kind of subjectivity—a set of interests they pursue and so a point of view. But though these are all ideas I have long believed and am happy to defend, never before have I felt them to be true, to be as deeply rooted as I did after my psychedelic journeys. The un-cageable vine reminded me of that first psilocybin trip, when I felt the leaves