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

by Michael Pollan

Psychologists call these self-fulfilling prophecies “expectancy effects,” and they turn out to be especially powerful in the case of psychedelics.

perspective from which the very worst life can throw at us, up to and including death, could be regarded objectively and accepted with equanimity.

Mine, I decided, had to do with this question of being and what I took to be its opposite term, “doing.” I meditated on this duality, which came to seem momentous, and concluded that I was too much occupied with the latter term in my life and not enough with the former.

They increase the amount of entropy in the brain, with the result that the system reverts to a less constrained mode of cognition.

“It’s not just that one system drops away,” he says, “but that an older system reemerges.”

in fact may signify precisely the opposite: a petrifaction of thought. Think of it as predictive coding on the scale of life; the priors—and by now I’ve got millions of them—usually have my back, can be relied on to give me a decent enough answer, even if it isn’t a particularly fresh or imaginative one. A flattering term for this regime of good enough predictions is “wisdom.”

It was as if he had been relieved of the duty of caring about the details of life, and he could let all that go. Now it was about being with people, enjoying his sandwich and the walk on the promenade.

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

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.

we can learn “to be with our thoughts and cravings without getting caught up in them.”