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

by Michael Pollan

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.

To believe that life has any meaning at all is of course a large presumption, requiring in some a leap of faith, but surely it is a helpful one, and never more so than at the approach of death. To situate the self in a larger context of meaning, whatever it is—a sense of oneness with nature or universal love—can make extinction of the self somewhat easier to contemplate. Religion has always understood this wager, but why should religion enjoy a monopoly? Bertrand Russell wrote that the best way to overcome one’s fear of death “is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.”

“Addiction is a story we get stuck in, a story that gets reinforced every time we try and fail to quit: ‘I’m a smoker and I’m powerless to stop.’ The journey allows them to get some distance and see the bigger picture and to see the short-term pleasures of smoking in the larger, longer-term context of their lives.” Of

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.

The “set” of the psychedelic journey is carefully orchestrated by the therapist in much the same way a shaman would use his authority and stagecraft to maximi...

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.

Keltner’s lab at Berkeley has done a clever series of experiments demonstrating that after people have had even a relatively modest experience of awe, such as looking at soaring trees, they’re more likely to come to the assistance of others.

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.

“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.” Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense.

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.

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. (As meditators eventually discover, if we can manage to stop thinking about the past or future and sink into the present, the self seems to disappear.)

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. “This is who I am.” “I don’t deserve to be loved.” “I’m the kind of person without the willpower to break this addiction.” Getting overly attached to these narratives, taking them as fixed truths about ourselves rather than as stories subject to revision, contributes mightily to addiction, depression, and anxiety. Psychedelic therapy seems to weaken the grip of these narratives, perhaps by temporarily disintegrating the parts of the default mode network where they operate. And

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. Brewer thinks that by diminishing its activity, whether by means of meditation or psychedelics, we can learn “to be with our thoughts and cravings without getting caught up in them.”

Pcc is posterior cingulate cortex

Psychiatry faces a similar dilemma: it too is wedded to interminable therapies, whether that means the daily antidepressant or the weekly psychotherapy session. 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. Several

Why does there need to be a business model

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. Tony Bossis paraphrases the religious scholar (and Good Friday Experiment volunteer) Huston Smith on this point: “A spiritual experience does not by itself make a spiritual life.” Integration is essential to making sense of the experience, whether in or out of the medical context. Or else it remains just a drug experience.

late in 2016, the California Institute of Integral Studies graduated its first class of forty-two psychedelic therapists.

medical community will embrace them. “This culture has a fear of death, a fear of transcendence, and a fear of the unknown, all of which are embodied in this work.” Psychedelics may by their very nature be too disruptive for our institutions ever to embrace them.

The images and the narratives and the insights don’t come from nowhere, and they certainly don’t come from a chemical. They come from inside our minds,* and at the very least have something to tell us about that. If dreams and fantasies and free associations are worth interpreting, then surely so is the more vivid and detailed material with which the psychedelic journey presents us. It opens a new door on one’s mind.

This, I think, is the great value of exploring non-ordinary states of consciousness: the light they reflect back on the ordinary ones, which no longer seem quite so transparent or so ordinary.

For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation. I’m speaking of a certain cognitive space that opens up late in a trip or in the midst of a mild one, a space where you can entertain all sorts of thoughts and scenarios without reaching for any kind of resolution. 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.