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

by Michael Pollan

I’ve begun to wonder if perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set. Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

“Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,”

“Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.”

The most straightforward and yet hardest to accept explanation is that it’s simply true: the altered state of consciousness has opened the person up to a truth that the rest of us, imprisoned in ordinary waking consciousness, simply cannot see. Science has trouble with this interpretation, however, because, whatever the perception is, it can’t be verified by its customary tools. It’s an anecdotal report, in effect, and so has no value. Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too.

Descriptions of such experiences always sound a little thin, at least when compared with the emotional impact people are trying to convey; for a life-transforming event, the words can seem paltry. When I mentioned this to Richards, he smiled. “You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’ Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. We’ve got five crayons when we need fifty thousand different shades.”

On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.

“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”

Brian Turner, who at the time of his journey was a forty-four-year-old physicist working for a military contractor (with a security clearance), put it this way: I could feel my body dissolving, beginning with my feet, until it all disappeared but the left side of my jaw. It was really unpleasant; I could count only a few teeth left and the bottom part of my jaw. I knew that if that went away I would be gone. Then I remembered what they told me, that whenever you encounter anything scary, go toward it. So instead of being afraid of dying I got curious about what was going on. I was no longer trying to avoid dying. Instead of recoiling from the experience, I began to interrogate it. And with that, the whole situation dissolved into this pleasant floaty feeling, and I became the music for a while.

At the depths of this delirium I conceived that I was either dying or, most bizarrely, I was already dead. All points of secure attachment to a trustworthy sense of reality had fallen away. Why not think that I am dead? And if this is dying, I thought, then so be it. How can I say no to this? At this point, at the greatest depth of the experience, I felt all my organizing categories of opposition—dreaming and wakefulness, life and death, inside and outside, self and other—collapse into each other . . . Reality appeared to fold in on itself, to implode in a kind of ecstatic catastrophe of logic. Yet in the midst of this hallucinatory hurricane I was having a weird experience of ultra-sublimity. And I remember repeating to myself again and again, “Nothing matters, nothing matters any more. I see the point! Nothing matters at all.”

During the last few hours, reality began slowly, effortlessly, to stitch itself back together. In sync with some particularly wowing choral music, I had an incredibly moving sense of triumphant reawakening, as if a new day were dawning after a long and harrowing night.

felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, including the distinct sense that death was illusory, in the sense that it is a door we walk through into another plane of existence, that we’re sprung from an eternity to which we will return.

“So what happens after you die? All I need is one percent [of uncertainty]. I can’t think of anything more interesting than what I may or may not discover at the time I die. That’s the most interesting question going.” For that reason, he fervently hopes he isn’t hit by a bus but rather has enough time to “savor” the experience without the distraction of pain. “Western materialism says the switch gets turned off and that’s it. But there are so many other descriptions. It could be a beginning! Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

Roland Griffiths possesses a large measure of what Keats, referring to Shakespeare, described as “negative capability,” the ability to exist amid uncertainties, mysteries, and doubt without reaching for absolutes, whether those of science or spirituality. “It makes no more sense to say I’m 100 percent convinced of a material worldview than to say I’m 100 percent convinced of the literal version of the Bible.”

Cancer? Stamets’s extract of turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor) has been shown to help cancer patients by stimulating their immune systems.

Bioterrorism? After 9/11, the federal government’s Bioshield program asked to screen hundreds of the rare mushroom strains in Stamets’s collection and found several that showed strong activity against SARS, smallpox, herpes, and bird and swine flu. (If this strikes you as implausible, remember that penicillin is the product of a fungus.)

Colony collapse disorder (CCD)? After watching honeybees visiting a woodpile to nibble on mycelium, Stamets identified several species of fungus that bolster the bees’ resistance to infection and CCD.

Insect infestation? A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a “mycopesticide”—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that, after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them, but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in its environment and then ...

Did you know that 23 primates (including humans) consume mushrooms and know how to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’?”

Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors “access to realms of supernatural power,” “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,” and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.” This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the senses that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts. Hence, the stoned ape: by giving us the gifts of language and self-reflection psilocybin mushrooms made us who we are, transforming our primate ancestors into Homo sapiens.

The stoned ape theory is not really susceptible to proof or disproof. The consumption of mushrooms by early hominids would be unlikely to leave any trace in the fossil record, because the mushrooms are soft tissue and can be eaten fresh, requiring no special tools or processing methods that might have survived. McKenna never really explains how the consumption of psychoactive mushrooms could have influenced biological evolution—that is, selected for changes at the level of the genome. It would have been easier for him to make an argument for psychoactive fungi’s influence on cultural evolution—such

Samorini calls this a “depatterning factor.” There are times in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population.

honeybees like to visit woodpiles is to medicate themselves, by nibbling on a saprophytic mycelium that produces just the right antimicrobial compound that the hive needs to survive,

As the literary theorists would say, the psychedelic experience is highly “constructed.” If you are told you will have a spiritual experience, chances are pretty good that you will, and, likewise, if you are told the drug may drive you temporarily insane, or acquaint you with the collective unconscious, or help you access “cosmic consciousness,” or revisit the trauma of your birth, you stand a good chance of having exactly that kind of experience. Psychologists call these self-fulfilling prophecies “expectancy effects,” and they turn out to be especially powerful in the case of psychedelics.

Yet a third challenge was how to fit psychedelics into the existing structures of science and psychiatry, if indeed that was possible. How do you do a controlled experiment with a psychedelic? How do you effectively blind your patients and clinicians or control for the powerful expectancy effect? When “set” and “setting” play such a big role in the patient’s experience, how can you hope to isolate a single variable or design a therapeutic application?

The fact that such a vanishingly small number of LSD molecules could exert such a profound effect on the mind was an important clue that a system of neurotransmitters with dedicated receptors might play a role in organizing our mental experience. This insight eventually led to the discovery of serotonin and the class of antidepressants known as SSRIs.

use a single high-dose LSD session to induce an episode of madness in an alcoholic that would simulate delirium tremens, shocking the patient into sobriety. Over the next decade, Osmond and Hoffer tested this hypothesis on more than seven hundred alcoholics, and in roughly half the cases, they reported, the treatment worked: the volunteers got sober and remained so for at least several months.

When the therapists began to analyze the reports of volunteers, their subjective experiences while on LSD bore little if any resemblance to the horrors of the DTs, or to madness of any kind. To the contrary, their experiences were, for the most part, incredibly—and bafflingly—positive. When Osmond and Hoffer began to catalog their volunteers’ session reports, “psychotic changes”—hallucinations, paranoia, anxiety—sometimes occurred, but there were also descriptions of, say, “a transcendental feeling of being united with the world,” one of the most common feelings reported. Rather than madness, most volunteers described sensations such as a new ability “to see oneself objectively”; “enhancement in the sensory fields”; profound new understandings “in the field of philosophy or religion”; and “increased sensitivity to the feelings of others.”* In spite of the powerful expectancy effect, symptoms that looked nothing like those of insanity were busting through the researchers’ preconceptions. For many of the alcoholics treated at Weyburn hospital, the core of the LSD experience seemed to involve something closer to transcendence, or spiritual epiphany, than temporary psychosis. Osmond and Hoffer began to entertain doubts about their delirium tremens model and, eventually, to wonder if perhaps the whole psychotomimetic paradigm—and name for these drugs—might need retooling. They received a strong push in that direction from Aldous Huxley after his mescaline experience, which he d...

when Cohen finally tried LSD himself in October 1955, he “was taken by surprise.” Expecting to find himself trapped inside the mind of a madman, Cohen instead experienced a profound, even transcendent sense of tranquillity, as if “the problems and strivings, the worries and frustrations of everyday life [had] vanished; in their place was a majestic, sunlit, heavenly inner quietude . . . I seemed to have finally arrived at the contemplation of eternal truth.”

“unsanity”: “a state beyond the control of the ego.”

As often happens in science when a theoretical paradigm comes under the pressure of contrary evidence, the paradigm totters for a period of time as researchers attempt to prop it up with various amendments and adjustments, and then, often quite suddenly and swiftly, it collapses as a new paradigm rises to take its place.

As it happened, the psychotomimetic paradigm was replaced not by one but by two distinct new theoretical models: the psycholytic and, later, the psychedelic model. Each was based on a different conception of how the compounds worked on the mind and therefore how they might best be deployed in the treatment of mental illness.

The so-called psycholytic paradigm was developed first and proved especially popular in Europe

Coined by an English psychiatrist named Ronald Sandison, “psycholytic” means “mind loosening,” which is what LSD and psilocybin seem to do—at least at low doses. Therapists who administered doses of LSD as low as 25 micrograms (and seldom higher than 150 micrograms) reported that their patients’ ego defenses relaxed, allowing them to bring up and discuss difficult or repressed material with relative ease.

The supreme virtue of the psycholytic approach was that it meshed so neatly with the prevailing modes of psychoanalysis, a practice that the drugs promised to speed up and streamline, rather than revolutionize or render obsolete. The big problem with psychoanalysis is that the access to the unconscious mind on which the whole approach depends is difficult and limited to two less-than-optimal routes: the patient’s free associations and dreams.

Freud called dreams “the royal road” to the subconscious, bypassing the gates of both the ego and the superego, yet the road has plenty of ruts and potholes: patients don’t always remember their dreams, and when they do recall them, it is often imperfectly. Drugs like LSD and psilocybin promised a better route into the subconscious. Stanislav Grof, who trained as a psychoanalyst, found that under moderate doses of LSD his patients would quickly establish a strong transference with the therapist, recover childhood traumas, give voice to buried emotions, and, in some cases, actually relive the experience of their birth—our first trauma and, Grof believed (following Otto Rank), a key determinant of personality. (Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients’ recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)

These therapists and their patients expected the drug to be therapeutic, and, lo and behold, it frequently was: Cohen and Eisner reported that sixteen of their first twenty-two patients showed marked improvement. A 1967 review article summarizing papers about psycholytic therapy published between 1953 and 1965 estimated that the technique’s rate of success ranged from 70 percent in cases of anxiety neurosis, 62 percent for depression, and 42 percent for obsessive-compulsive disorder. These results were impressive, yet there were few if any attempts to replicate them in controlled trials.

Cohen also began to wonder about the status of the insights that patients brought back from their journeys. He came to believe that “under LSD the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by his patient.” The expectancy effect was such that patients working with Freudian therapists returned with Freudian insights (framed in terms of childhood trauma, sexual drives, and oedipal emotions), while patients working with Jungian therapists returned with vivid archetypes from the attic of the collective unconscious, and Rankians with recovered memories of their birth traumas. This radical suggestibility posed a scientific dilemma, surely, but was it necessarily a therapeutic dilemma as well? Perhaps not: Cohen wrote that “any explanation of the patient’s problems, if firmly believed by both the therapist and the patient, constitutes insight or is useful as insight.” Yet he qualified this perspective by acknowledging it was “nihilistic,” which, scientifically speaking, it surely was. For it takes psychotherapy perilously close to the world of shamanism and faith healing, a distinctly uncomfortable place for a scientist to be. And yet as long as it works, as long as it heals people, why should anyone care? (This is the same discomfort scientists feel about using placebos. It suggests an interesting way to think about psychedelics: as a kind of “active placebo,” to borrow a term proposed by Andrew Weil in his 1972 book, The Natural Mind. They do something, surely, but most of...

Cohen’s thoughtful ambivalence about LSD, which he would continue to feel until the end of his career, marks him as that rare figure in a world densely populated by psychedelic evangelists: the open-minded skeptic, a man capable of holding contrary ideas in his head. Cohen continued to believe in the therapeutic power of LSD, especially in the treatment of anxiety in cancer patients, which he wrote about, enthusiastically, for Harper’s in 1965. There, he called it “therapy by self-transcendence,” suggesting he saw a role in Western medicine for what would come to be called applied mysticism. Yet Cohen never hesitated to call attention to the abuses and dangers of LSD, or to call out his more fervent colleagues when they strayed too far off the path of science—the path from which the siren song of psychedelics would lure so many.

Struggling to formulate a new therapeutic model for LSD, they turned to a pair of brilliant amateurs—one a famous author, Aldous Huxley, and the other an obscure former bootlegger and gunrunner, spy, inventor, boat captain, ex-con, and Catholic mystic named Al Hubbard. These two most unlikely nonscientists would help the Canadian psychiatrists reconceptualize the LSD experience and develop the therapeutic protocol that is still in use today.

The name for this new approach, and the name for this class of drugs that would finally stick—psychedelics—emerged from a 1956 exchange of letters between Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley. The two had first met in 1953, after Huxley wrote to Osmond expressing interest in trying mescaline; he had read a journal article by Osmond describing the drug’s effects on the mind. Huxley had long harbored a lively interest in drugs and consciousness—the plot of his most famous novel, Brave New World (1932), turns on a mind-control drug he called soma—as well as mysticism, paranormal perception, reincarnation, UFOs, and so on. So in the spring of 1953, Humphry Osmond traveled to Los Angeles to administer mescaline to Aldous Huxley, though not without some trepidation. In advance of the session, he confided to a colleague that he did not “relish the possibility, however remote, of finding a small but discreditable niche in literary history as the man who drove Aldous Huxley mad.” He need not have worried. Huxley had a splendid trip, one that would change forever the culture’s understanding of these drugs when, the following year, he published his account of his experience in The Doors of Perception.