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

by Michael Pollan

may be the products of an overactive defaul...

when time travel turns obsessive, it fosters the backward-looking gaze of depression and the forward pitch of anxiety.

The addict uses his habit to organize time: When was the last hit, and when can I get the next?

Psychedelic therapy seems to weaken the grip of these narratives, perhaps by temporarily disintegrating the parts of the default mode network where they operate.

“This will be far too valuable to limit to sick people.”

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.