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

by Michael Pollan

Was it possible that a single psychedelic experience—something

Actually change one’s mind in enduring ways?

In The Botany of Desire, I explored at some length what I had been surprised to discover is a universal human desire to change consciousness.

That such a curious and seemingly maladaptive desire should exist alongside our desires for nourishment and beauty and sex—all of which make much more obvious evolutionary sense—cried out for an explanation. The simplest was that these substances help relieve pain and boredom. Yet the powerful feelings and elaborate taboos and rituals that surround many of these psychoactive species suggest there must be something more to it.

After trying them once, animals will not seek a second dose, and repeated use by people robs the drugs of their effect.*

After more than half a century of its more or less constant companionship, one’s self—this ever-present voice in the head, this ceaselessly commenting, interpreting, labeling, defending I—becomes perhaps a little too familiar. I’m not talking about anything as deep as self-knowledge here. No, just about how, over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy.

The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.

which means that other psychedelics that are equally interesting and powerful but more difficult to bring into the laboratory—such as ayahuasca—receive less attention.

Hoping to escape those associations and underscore the spiritual dimensions of these drugs, some researchers have proposed they instead be called “entheogens”—from the Greek for “the divine within.” This strikes me as too emphatic. Despite the 1960s trappings, the term “psychedelic,” coined in 1956, is etymologically accurate. Drawn from the Greek, it means simply “mind manifesting,” which is precisely what these extraordinary molecules hold the power to do.

(He tells the story, memorably, in his 1979 memoir, LSD, My Problem Child.) As a young chemist working in a unit of Sandoz Laboratories

(One theory of the Salem witch trials blames ergot poisoning for the behavior of the women accused.)

account takes a slightly mystical turn. Normally, when a compound showing no promise was discarded, he explained, it was discarded for good. But Hofmann “liked the chemical structure of the LSD molecule,”

Another mysterious anomaly occurred when he synthesized LSD-25 for the second time. Despite the meticulous precautions he always took when working with a substance as toxic as ergot, Hofmann must somehow have absorbed a bit of the chemical through his skin, because he “was interrupted in my work by unusual sensations.”

It is also the only LSD trip ever taken that was entirely innocent of expectation.

(Today LSD devotees celebrate “Bicycle Day” each year on April 19.)

Once the acute effects wore off, Hofmann felt the “afterglow” that frequently follows a psychedelic experience, the exact opposite of a hangover. When

The Doors of Perception—would

his experience with LSD-25 convinced the molecule offered civilization not only a potential therapeutic but also a spiritual balm—by opening a crack “in the edifice of materialist rationality.”

Like so many who followed after him, the brilliant chemist became something of a mystic, preaching a gospel of spiritual renewal and reconnection with nature.

the scientist told the assembled that “the feeling of co-creatureliness with all things alive should enter our consciousness more fully and counterbalance the materialistic and nonsensical technological developments in order to enable us to return to the roses, to the flowers, to nature, where we belong.” The audience erupted in applause.

THE SECOND WATERSHED EVENT of 2006 came only five weeks later when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision written by the new chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., ruled that the UDV, a tiny religious sect that uses a hallucinogenic tea called ayahuasca as its sacrament, could import the drink to the United States, even though it contains the schedule I substance dimethyltryptamine, or DMT. The ruling was based on the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, which had sought to reinstitute the right (under the First Amendment’s religious freedom clause) of Native Americans to use peyote in their ceremonies,

UDV. (The initials stand for União do Vegetal, or Union of the Plants, because

ayahuasca is made by brewing together two Amazonian plant species, Banisteriopsis caapi and Psychotria viridis.)

UDV

Griffiths’s landmark paper, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance,”

All of the commentators treated the publication as a major event. Herbert D. Kleber, a former deputy to William Bennett, George H. W. Bush’s drug czar, and later director of the Division on Substance Abuse at Columbia University, applauded the paper for its methodological rigor and acknowledged there might be “major therapeutic possibilities” in psychedelic research “merit[ing] NIH support.” Charles “Bob” Schuster, who had served two Republican presidents as director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA), noted that the term “psychedelic” implies a mind-expanding experience and expressed his “hope that this landmark paper will also be ‘field expanding.’” He suggested that this “fascinating” class of drugs, and the spiritual experience they occasion, might prove useful in treating addiction.

University of Chicago psychiatrist and drug abuse expert Harriet de Wit tried to address this tension, pointing out that the quest for experiences that “free oneself of the bounds of everyday perception and thought in a search for universal truths and enlightenment” is an abiding element of our humanity that has nevertheless “enjoyed little credibility in the mainstream scientific world.” The time had come, she suggested, for science “to recognize these extraordinary subjective experiences . . . even if they sometimes involve claims about ultimate realities that lie outside the purview of science.”

Timothy Leary’s notorious psychedelic research project at Harvard had already collapsed in

Siddha Yoga.

legendary Big Sur retreat center

entheogens,”

Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)

Doblin decided his calling in life was to become a psychedelic therapist. But after the banning of MDMA in 1985, that dream became unachievable without a change in federal laws and regulations, so he decided he’d better first get a doctorate in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. There, he mastered the intricacies of the FDA’s drug approval process, and in his dissertation plotted the laborious path to official acceptance that psilocybin and MDMA are now following.

Around the same time, he arranged to have a thousand doses of MDMA sent to people in the Soviet military who were working on arms control negotiations with President Reagan. For

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

“Bob Jesse

felt as if I were going to visit the wizard. The shipshape little cabin is tight for two, so Jesse has set out among the fir trees and boulders some comfortable sofas, chairs, and tables. He’s also built an outdoor kitchen and, on a shelf of rock commanding a spectacular view of the mountains, an outdoor shower, giving the camp the feeling of a house turned inside out.

Jesse, twenty-five years old and having ingested a high dose of LSD, had a powerful “non-dual experience”

“I was lying on my back underneath a ficus tree,” he recalls. “I knew it was going to be a strong experience. And the point came where the little I still was just started slipping away. I lost all awareness of being on the floor in an apartment in Baltimore; I couldn’t tell if my eyes were opened or closed. What opened up before me was, for lack of a better word, a space, but not our ordinary concept of space, just the pure awareness of a realm without form and void of content. And into that realm came a celestial entity, which was the emergence of the physical world. It was like the big bang, but without the boom or the blinding light. It was the birth of the physical universe.

From here on, Jesse watched (or whatever you call it) the birth of . . . everything, in the unfolding of an epic sequence beginning with the appearance of cosmic dust leading to the creation of the stars and then the solar systems, followed by the emergence of life and from there the arrival of “what we call humans,” then the acquisition of language and the unfolding of awareness, “all the way up to one’s self, here in this room, surrounded by my friends. I had come all the way back to right where I was. How much clock time had elapsed? I had no idea.

He’s not certain. “But to go from being very sure that the opposite is true”—that consciousness is the product of our gray matter—“to be unsure is an immense shift.” I asked him if he agreed with something I’d read the Dalai Lama had said, that the idea that brains create consciousness—an idea accepted without question by most scientists—“is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.” “Bingo,” Jesse said. “And for someone with my orientation”—agnostic, enamored of science—“that changes everything.”

noetic

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.

“It began to occur to me that spending time in this area might actually be far more important and far more fulfilling than what I had been doing” as a computer engineer.

Jesse set up a nonprofit called the Council on Spiritual Practices (CSP),

Sasha and Ann Shulgin,

(Sasha Shulgin, who died in 2014, was a brilliant chemist who held a DEA license allowing him to synthesize novel psychedelic compounds, which he did in prodigious numbers.

He learned that there had been more than a thousand scientific papers on psychedelic drug therapy before 1965, involving more than forty thousand research subjects.

Harvard Psilocybin Project, suggesting that the enthusiasm of the experimenters had tainted the reported results.

James Fadiman and Myron Stolaroff and Willis Harman (another Bay Area engineer turned psychedelic researcher),