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

by Michael Pollan

One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience.

Yeah, I am sure pitching it like that will get the volunteers in droves.

Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place. Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head.

So hallucinations with a dash of real lived in experiences huh?

“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”

Okay, sign me up then.

The study demonstrated that a high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably “occasion” a mystical experience—typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe.

Holy moly. This is like in Gumball when the cloud counsellor gasps and says, "I've meditated so long that I've become one with the universe!"

What was most remarkable about the results reported in the article is that participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable “to the birth of a first child or death of a parent.”

The volunteers reported significant improvements in their “personal well-being, life satisfaction and positive behavior change,” changes that were confirmed by their family members and friends.

What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego—that may be the key to changing one’s mind.

illegal. Grof began teaching instead something called Holotropic Breathwork, a technique for inducing a psychedelic state of consciousness without drugs, by means of deep, rapid, and rhythmic breathing, usually accompanied by loud drumming.

Need to try this holotropic breathwork thing. Sounds like Kenny getting high on live.

Why did they evolve the ability to produce a chemical compound so closely related to serotonin, the neurotransmitter, that it can slip across the blood-brain barrier and temporarily take charge of the mammalian brain? Was it a defense chemical, intended to poison mushroom eaters?

Even the most secular among them come away from their journeys convinced there exists something that transcends a material understanding of reality: some sort of a “Beyond.” It’s not that they deny a naturalistic basis for this revelation; they just interpret it differently.

The Nahuatl word for the mushrooms—flesh of the gods—must have sounded to Spanish ears like a direct challenge to the Christian Sacrament, which of course was also understood to be the flesh of the gods, or rather of the one God. Yet the mushroom sacrament enjoyed an undeniable advantage over the Christian version. It took an act of faith to believe that eating the bread and wine of the Eucharist gave the worshipper access to the divine, an access that had to be mediated by a priest and the church liturgy. Compare that with the Aztec sacrament, a psychoactive mushroom that granted anyone who ate it direct, unmediated access to the divine—to visions of another world, a realm of the gods. So who had the more powerful sacrament?

But the laws of probability suggest that a few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the individual, the group, and possibly the species to adapt to rapid changes in their environment.

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.

For Huxley, there was no question but that the drugs gave him access not to the mind of the madman but to a spiritual realm of ineffable beauty. The most mundane objects glowed with the light of a divinity he called “the Mind at Large.” Even “the folds of my gray flannel trousers were charged with ‘is-ness,’” he tells us, before dilating on the beauty of the draperies in Botticelli’s paintings and the “Allness and Infinity of folded cloth.” When he gazed upon a small vase of flowers, he saw “what Adam had seen on the morning of his creation—the miracle, moment by moment, of naked existence . . . flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged.”

“He said, ‘Now hate them.’ They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said, ‘Love them,’ and they came back brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to me. I realized that you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.”

Perhaps the most useful document on the website is the “Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides.”

(He had mentioned earlier a single fatality attributed to Holotropic Breathwork: a man who had had an aneurism.)

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?”

I had ever seen, a waterfall of diamonds cascading into a pool, breaking its surface into a billion clattering fractals of light.

This raises an interesting question: Is it possible that the perceptions of schizophrenics, people tripping on psychedelics, and young children are, at least in certain instances, more accurate—less influenced by expectation and therefore more faithful to reality—than those of sane and sober adults?

Never before has a piece of music pierced me as deeply as this one did now. Though even to call it “music” is to diminish what now began to flow, which was nothing less than the stream of human consciousness, something in which one might glean the very meaning of life and, if you could bear it, read life’s last chapter.

(Can a recognition of one’s shallowness qualify as a profound insight?)

Sigh.

That seemed exactly right: having died, I was now being reborn. Yet as soon as I looked closely at this new being, it morphed smoothly into Isaac, my son. And I thought, how fortunate—how astounding!—for a father to experience the perfect physical intimacy that heretofore only mothers have ever had with their babies. Whatever space had ever intervened between my son and me now closed, and I could feel the warm tears sliding down my cheeks.

Before my journeys, words and phrases such as these left me cold; they seemed utterly opaque, so much quasi-religious mumbo jumbo. Now they paint a recognizable reality. Likewise, certain mystical passages from literature that once seemed so overstated and abstract that I read them indulgently (if at all), now I can read as a subspecies of journalism.

(When they come from a mushroom or a plant or a toad!) It’s worth remembering that there are many cultures where the fact that the inspiration for visionary experiences comes from nature, is the gift of other creatures, renders them more meaningful, not less.

He likes to quote Grof’s grand claim that what the telescope was for astronomy, or the microscope for biology, psychedelics will be for understanding the mind.

When it became clear no professional would oblige, she trepanned herself in 1970, boring a small hole in the middle of her forehead with an electric drill. (She documented the procedure in a short but horrifying film called Heartbeat in the Brain.)

He had concluded from his research, and would tell anyone who asked, that alcohol was more dangerous than cannabis and that using Ecstasy was safer than riding a horse. “But the sentence that got me sacked,” he told me when we met in his office at Imperial, “was when I went on live breakfast television. I was asked, ‘You’re not seriously telling us that LSD is less harmful than alcohol, are you?’ Of course I am!”

Magical thinking is one way for human minds to reduce their uncertainty about the world, but it is less than optimal for the success of the species.

By quieting the default mode network, these compounds can loosen the ego’s grip on the machinery of the mind, “lubricating” cognition where before it had been rusted stuck. “Psychedelics alter consciousness by disorganizing brain activity,” Carhart-Harris writes. They increase the amount of entropy in the brain, with the result that the system reverts to a less constrained mode of cognition.

Gopnik believes that both the young child (five and under) and the adult on a psychedelic have a stronger predilection for the high-temperature search; in their quest to make sense of things, their minds explore not just the nearby and most likely but “the entire space of possibilities.” These high-temperature searches might be inefficient, incurring a higher rate of error and requiring more time and mental energy to perform. High-temperature searches can yield answers that are more magical than realistic. Yet there are times when hot searches are the only way to solve a problem, and occasionally they return answers of surpassing beauty and originality. E=mc2 was the product of a high-temperature search.

Or drop a tab of LSD. Gopnik told me she has been struck by the similarities between the phenomenology of the LSD experience and her understanding of the consciousness of children: hotter searches, diffused attention, more mental noise (or entropy), magical thinking, and little sense of a self that is continuous over time. “The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.”

During each session, which would last the better part of a day, Patrick would lie on the couch wearing eyeshades and listening through headphones to a playlist of carefully curated music—Brian Eno, Philip Glass, Pat Metheny, and Ravi Shankar, as well as some classical and New Age compositions.

Existential distress at the end of life bears many of the hallmarks of a hyperactive default network, including obsessive self-reflection and an inability to jump the deepening grooves of negative thinking. The ego, faced with the prospect of its own extinction, turns inward and becomes hypervigilant, withdrawing its investment in the world and other people. The cancer patients I interviewed spoke of feeling closed off from loved ones, from the world, and from the full range of emotions; they felt, as one put it, “existentially alone.”

Lisa e-mailed me a photograph of Patrick she had taken a few days before he died, and when the image popped open on my screen, it momentarily took my breath away. Here was an emaciated man in a hospital gown, an oxygen clip in his nose, but with bright, shining blue eyes and a broad smile. On the eve of death, the man was beaming.

Edgar Mitchell, returning from the moon on Apollo 14, had what he has described as a mystical experience, specifically a savikalpa samadhi, in which the ego vanishes when confronted with the immensity of the universe during the course of a meditation on an object—in this case, planet Earth.

The rat park experiments lend support to the idea that the propensity to addiction might have less to do with genes or chemistry than with one’s personal history and environment.

Makes sense.

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. It is this that gives us the mystical experience, the death rehearsal process, the overview effect, the notion of a mental reboot, the making of new meanings, and the experience of awe.

Most of the time, it is normal waking consciousness that best serves the interests of survival—and is most adaptive. But there are moments in the life of an individual or a community when the imaginative novelties proposed by altered states of consciousness introduce exactly the sort of variation that can send a life, or a culture, down a new path.

It somewhat resembles hypnagogic consciousness, that liminal state perched on the edge of sleep when all kinds of images and scraps of story briefly surface before floating away.