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

by Michael Pollan

songs.These medicines may help us construct meaning, if not discover it.

But however it works, and whatever vocabulary we use to explain it, this seems to me the great gift of the psychedelic journey, especially to the dying: its power to imbue everything in our field of experience with a heightened sense of purpose and consequence.

Especially in the absence of faith, these medicines, in the right hands, may offer powerful antidotes for the existential terrors that afflict not only the dying.

Patrick’s psychedelic journey had shifted his perspective, from a narrow lens trained on the prospect of dying to a renewed focus on how best to live the time left to him.

Johnson believes the value of psilocybin for the addict is in the new perspective—at once obvious and profound—that it opens onto one’s life and its habits.

Of course, this re-contextualization of an old habit doesn’t just happen; countless people have taken psilocybin and continued to smoke. If it does happen, it’s because breaking the habit is the avowed intention of the session, strongly reinforced by the therapist in the preparatory meetings and the integration afterward.

This is why it is important to understand that “psychedelic therapy” is not simply treatment with a psychedelic drug but rather a form of “psychedelic-assisted therapy,” as many of the researchers take pains to emphasize.

Perhaps this is one of the things psychedelics do: relax the brain’s inhibition on visualizing our thoughts, thereby rendering them more authoritative, memorable, and sticky.

Matt Johnson believes that psychedelics can be used to change all sorts of behaviors, not just addiction. The key, in his view, is their power to occasion a sufficiently dramatic experience to “dope-slap people out of their story. It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people can let go of the mental models we use to organize reality.”

This underlying addiction to a pattern of thinking, or cognitive style, links the addict to the depressive and to the cancer patient obsessed with death or recurrence.

Dying, depression, obsession, eating disorders—all are exacerbated by the tyranny of an ego and the fixed narratives it constructs about our relationship to the world. By temporarily overturning that tyranny and throwing our minds into an unusually plastic state (Robin Carhart-Harris would call it a state of heightened entropy), psychedelics, with the help of a good therapist, give us an opportunity to propose some new, more constructive stories about the self and its relationship to the world, stories that just might stick.

Addiction is, among other things, a radical form of selfishness. 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.

The study was modest in scale and not randomized, but it demonstrated that psilocybin was well tolerated in this population, with no adverse events, and most of the subjects had seen benefits that were marked and rapid.*

Watts’s interviews uncovered two “master” themes. The first was that the volunteers depicted their depression foremost as a state of “disconnection,” whether from other people, their earlier selves, their senses and feelings, their core beliefs and spiritual values, or nature. Several referred to living in “a mental prison,” others to being “stuck” in endless circles of rumination they likened to mental “gridlock.” I was reminded of Carhart-Harris’s hypothesis that depression might be the result of an overactive default mode network—the site in the brain where rumination appears to take place.

The second master theme was a new access to difficult emotions, emotions that depression often blunts or closes down completely. Watts hypothesizes that the depressed patient’s incessant rumination constricts his or her emotional repertoire. In other cases, the depressive keeps emotions at bay because it is too painful to experience them.

More than half of the Imperial volunteers saw the clouds of their depression eventually return, so it seems likely that psychedelic therapy for depression, should it prove useful and be approved, will not be a onetime intervention.

None of these psychedelic therapies have yet proven themselves to work in large populations; what successes have been reported should be taken as promising signals standing out from the noise of data, rather than as definitive proofs of cure.

“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.”

Most of the researchers in the field—from Robin Carhart-Harris to Roland Griffiths, Matthew Johnson, and Jeffrey Guss—have become convinced that psychedelics operate on some higher-order mechanisms in the brain and mind, mechanisms that may underlie, and help explain, a wide variety of mental and behavioral disorders, as well as, perhaps, garden-variety unhappiness.

A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes; depression, anxiety, obsession, and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it.

The therapeutic value of psychedelics, in Carhart-Harris’s view, lies in their ability to temporarily elevate entropy in the inflexible brain, jolting the system out of its default patterns. Carhart-Harris uses the metaphor of annealing from metallurgy: psychedelics introduce energy into the system, giving it the flexibility necessary for it to bend and so change. The Hopkins researchers use a similar metaphor to make the same point: psychedelic therapy creates an interval of maximum plasticity in which, with proper guidance, new patterns of thought and behavior can be learned.

The default mode network appears to be the seat not only of the ego, or self, but of the mental faculty of time travel as well. The two are of course closely related: without the ability to remember our past and imagine a future, the notion of a coherent self could hardly be said to exist; we define ourselves with reference to our personal history and future objectives.

when time travel turns obsessive, it fosters the backward-looking gaze of depression and the forward pitch of anxiety. Addiction, too, seems to involve uncontrollable time travel. The addict uses his habit to organize time: When was the last hit, and when can I get the next?

Another type of mental activity that neuroimaging has located in the DMN (and specifically in the posterior cingulate cortex) is 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.

And then there is the ego, perhaps the most formidable creation of the default mode network, which strives to defend us from threats both internal and external. When all is working as it should be, the ego keeps the organism on track, helping it to realize its goals and provide for its needs, notably for survival and reproduction. It gets the job done. But it is also fundamentally conservative. “The ego keeps us in our grooves,” as Matt Johnson puts it. For better and, sometimes, for worse. For occasionally the ego can become tyrannical and turn its formidable powers on the rest of us.* Perhaps this is the link between the various forms of mental illness that psychedelic therapy seems to help most: all involve a disordered ego—overbearing, punishing, or misdirected.*

OF ALL THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL EFFECTS that people on psychedelics report, the dissolution of the ego seems to me by far the most important and the most therapeutic. I found little consensus on terminology among the researchers I interviewed, but when I unpack their metaphors and vocabularies—whether spiritual, humanistic, psychoanalytic, or neurological—it is finally the loss of ego or self (what Jung called “psychic death”) they’re suggesting is the key psychological driver of the experience.

Is it any wonder we would feel one with the universe when the boundaries between self and world that the ego patrols suddenly fall away?

The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.

Buddhists believe that attachment is at the root of all forms of mental suffering; if the neuroscience is right, a lot of these attachments have their mooring in the PCC, where they are nurtured and sustained.

Yet the graph was somewhat jagged, with several bars leaping above baseline. Brewer explained that this is what happens when you’re trying too hard to meditate and become conscious of the effort. There it was in black and white: the graph of my effortfulness and self-criticism.

It is true that a psychedelic session lasts several hours and usually requires two therapists be present for the duration, but if the therapy works as it’s supposed to, there won’t be a lot of repeat business. It’s not at all clear what the business model might be. Yet.

150 M American adults paying several hundreds of dollars every few years to help fix their psychology isn’t a business model?

George Goldsmith envisions a network of psychedelic treatment centers, facilities in attractive natural settings where patients will go for their guided sessions. He has formed a company called Compass Pathways to build these centers in the belief they can offer a treatment for a range of mental illnesses sufficiently effective and economical that Europe’s national health services will reimburse for them.

“The betterment of well people” is very much on the minds of most of the researchers I interviewed,

Jesse would like to see the drugs administered by trained guides working in what he calls “longitudinal multigenerational contexts,” which, as he describes them, sound a lot like churches.

Everyone speaks of the importance of well-trained psychedelic guides—“board certified”—and the need to help people afterward integrate the powerful experiences they have had in order to make sense of them and render them truly useful.

“A spiritual experience does not by itself make a spiritual life.”

California Institute of Integral Studies

Institutions generally like to mediate the individual’s access to authority of whatever kind—whether medical or spiritual—whereas the psychedelic experience offers something akin to direct revelation, making it inherently antinomian.

would hate to be alone when that happens. For me, working one-on-one with an experienced guide in a safe place removed from my everyday life turned out to be the ideal way to explore psychedelics.

Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map—and not the only map.

the idea that “normal” consciousness is but the tip of a large and largely uncharted psychic iceberg is now for me something more than a theory; the hidden vastness of the mind is a felt reality.

It’s difficult not to slip back into the familiar grooves of mental habit; they are so well worn; the tidal pull of what the Buddhists call our “habit energies” is difficult to withstand.

For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation.

My psychedelic adventures familiarized me with this mental territory, and, sometimes, not always, I find I can return to it during my daily meditation. I don’t know if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be when I’m meditating, but I’m always happy to find myself floating in this particular mental stream. I would never have found it if not for psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.