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

by Michael Pollan

Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.

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.

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

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.

But what I can say is that there are three public parks bordering the wide-open mouth of the Columbia—Fort Stevens, Cape Disappointment, and the Lewis and Clark National Historical Park—and we stayed at one of them.

In washington

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

One of the most interesting things about a psychedelic experience is that it sharpens one’s sensitivity to one’s own mental states, especially in the days immediately following. The

hotter searches, diffused attention, more mental noise (or entropy), magical thinking, and little sense of a self that is continuous over time.

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.

“We don’t die well in America. Ask people where do you want to die, and they will tell you, at home with their loved ones. But most of us die in an ICU.