This Is Your Mind on Plants

by Michael Pollan

Much depends on where you stand on the trade-offs of modern life and, especially, those of capitalism.

oh? socialists are sleeping away a life of leisure? sign me up

Michel Foucault’s concept of “body discipline”

it’s necessary to understand something about the pharmacology of caffeine. Caffeine is a tiny molecule that happens to fit snugly into an important receptor in the central nervous system, allowing it to occupy it and therefore block the neuromodulator that would normally bind to that receptor and activate it. That neuromodulator is called adenosine; caffeine, its antagonist, keeps adenosine from doing its job by getting in its way. Adenosine is a psychoactive compound that has a depressive and hypnotic (that is, sleep-inducing) effect on the brain when it binds to its receptor. It diminishes the rate at which our neurons fire. Over the course of the day, adenosine levels gradually rise in the bloodstream, and as long as no other molecule is blocking its action, it begins to slow mental operations in preparation for sleep. As adenosine builds up in your brain, you begin to feel less alert and a mounting desire to go to bed—what scientists call sleep pressure. But when caffeine beats adenosine to those receptor sites, the brain no longer receives the signal to begin turning out the mental lights. Even so, the adenosine is still circulating in your brain—in fact, its levels continue to rise—but because the receptors have been hijacked, you don’t feel its effects. Instead, you feel wide-awake and alert. Are you really? Yes and no. How you feel is how you feel, it’s true, but as Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and sleep researcher, explains, since adenosine continu...

the chemical also has several indirect effects, including increases in adrenaline, serotonin, and dopamine. The release of dopamine is typical in drugs of abuse, and probably accounts for caffeine’s mood-enhancing qualities—the cup of optimism!—as well as the fact that it is habit-forming. Caffeine is also a vasodilator and can be mildly diuretic. It temporarily raises blood pressure and relaxes the body’s smooth muscles, which may account for coffee’s laxative effect. (This could explain some of coffee’s early popularity; constipation was a serious matter in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.)

Regular coffee consumption is associated with a decreased risk of several cancers (including breast, prostate, colorectal, and endometrial), cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and possibly depression and suicide. (Though high doses can produce nervousness and anxiety, and chances of committing suicide climb among those who drink eight or more cups a day.)

Coffee and tea are also the leading source of antioxidants in the American diet, a fact that may by itself account for many of the health benefits of coffee and tea. (And you can get these antioxidants by drinking decaf.)*

He is single-minded in his mission: to alert the world to an invisible public-health crisis, which is that we are not getting nearly enough sleep, the sleep we are getting stinks, and a principal culprit in this crime against body and mind is caffeine. Caffeine itself might not be bad for you, but the sleep it’s stealing from you may have a price: According to Walker, research suggests that insufficient sleep may be a key factor in the development of Alzheimer’s disease, arteriosclerosis, stroke, heart failure, depression, anxiety, suicide, and obesity. “The shorter you sleep,” he bluntly concludes, “the shorter your lifespan.”

none of the sleep researchers or experts on circadian rhythms whom I interviewed for this story use caffeine.

“How many times a night do you wake up?” he asked. I’m up three or four times a night (usually to pee), but I almost always fall right back to sleep. He nodded gravely. “That’s really not good, all those interruptions. Sleep quality is just as important as sleep quantity.” The interruptions were undermining the amount of “deep,” or “slow wave,” sleep I was getting, something above and beyond the REM sleep I had always thought was the measure of a good night’s shut-eye. But it seems that deep sleep is just as important to our health, and the amount we get tends to decline with age.

During deep sleep, low-frequency brain waves set out from the frontal cortex and travel toward the back of the brain, in the process synchronizing many thousands of brain cells into a kind of neural symphony. This harmonizing of our neurons helps us distill and consolidate the blizzard of information we’ve taken in during the day. Memories are carried on these slow waves from sites of short-term daily storage to more permanent locations. Picture the mental desktop being cleared off and reorganized at the end of the workday, as the brain’s files are stowed in their proper place or trashed.

“Some people say they can drink coffee at night and fall right to sleep,” Walker said, a note of pity in his voice. “That might be the case, but the amount of slow-wave sleep will drop by fifteen to twenty percent,” he said. “For me to decrease your deep sleep by that much, I’d have to age you by twenty percent.”

Caffeine is not the sole cause of our sleep crisis; screens, alcohol (which is as hard on REM sleep as caffeine is on deep sleep), pharmaceuticals, work schedules, noise and light pollution, and anxiety can all play a role in undermining both the duration and quality of our sleep. But caffeine is at or near the top of the list of culprits.

Here’s what’s uniquely insidious about caffeine: the drug is not only a leading cause of our sleep deprivation; it is also the principal tool we rely on to remedy the problem. Most of the caffeine consumed today is being used to compensate for the lousy sleep that caffeine causes. Which means that caffeine is helping to hide from our awareness the very problem that caffeine creates.

Charles Czeisler, an expert on sleep and circadian rhythms at Harvard Medical School, put the matter starkly several years ago in a National Geographic article by T. R. Reid: The principal reason that caffeine is used around the world is to promote wakefulness. But the principal reason that people need that crutch is inadequate sleep. Think about that: We use caffeine to make up for a sleep deficit that is largely the result of using caffeine.

tea and sugar, which became paired in England soon after tea’s introduction—somewhat surprisingly, since tea in China was never sweetened. No one knows exactly why the practice took root, but the tea imported by Great Britain tended to be bitter and, as a hot beverage, could readily absorb large amounts of sugar. In fact, one of the principal uses of sugar in Britain was as a sweetener of tea, and the custom drove a substantial increase in sugar consumption—which in turn drove an expansion of slavery to run the sugar plantations of the Caribbean. (An estimated 70 percent of the slave trade supported sugar production.) Coffee was even more directly implicated in the institution of slavery, especially in Brazil, where coffee growers imported large numbers of slaves from Africa to work on their plantations.

The British East India Company’s tea trade with China bore a moral stain of another kind. Since the company had to pay for tea in sterling, and China had little interest in English goods, England began running a ruinous trade deficit with China. The East India Company came up with two clever strategies to improve its balance-of-payments position: It turned to India, a country it controlled that had no history of large-scale tea production, and transformed it into a leading producer of tea—and opium. The tea was exported to England and the opium, over the strenuous objections of the Chinese government, was smuggled into China, in what would quickly become a ruinous and unconscionable flood.

For every four-dollar latte, only a few pennies ever reach the farmers who grew the beans, most of whom are smallholders working a few steeply raked acres in some rural corner of a tropical country.

and if those farmers didn’t have a way to distribute their beans then they may not have a market to sell in anyways so just calm down

At the higher end of the market, a handful of companies like Starbucks and certification schemes like Fairtrade International are seeking to improve the lot of coffee farmers by paying them a guaranteed price.

aww shame on capitalism

hundreds of different molecules found in tea and coffee—the esters, terpenes, amines, acids, ketones, lactones, pyrazines, pyridines, phenols, furans, thiophenes, and thiols that together make up our sensory experience of these beverages.

“People are badly deceived when it comes to taste,” Roland Griffiths, the Johns Hopkins drug researcher, explained. “It’s like saying ‘I like the taste of Scotch.’ No! This is an acquired, conditioned taste preference. When you pair a taste with a reinforcer like alcohol or caffeine, you will confer a specific preference for that taste.”

I could almost feel the tiny molecules of caffeine spreading through my body, fanning out along the arterial pathways, sliding effortlessly through the walls of my cells, slipping across the blood-brain barrier to take up stations in my adenosine receptors. “Well-being” was the term that best described the first feeling I registered, and this built and spread and coalesced until I decided “euphoria” was warranted. And yet there was none of the perceptual distortion that I associate with most other psychoactive drugs; my consciousness felt perfectly transparent, as if I were intoxicated on sobriety.

with so many addictions, the slope is slippery; the mind concocts elaborate arguments for the purpose of undermining its best intentions.

Native Americans I had interviewed claimed that their peyote ceremonies had done more to heal the wounds of genocide, colonialism, and alcoholism than anything else they had tried.

“Aspirin is a drug,” the shaman replied. “Peyote is sacred.”

The Doors of Perception, Aldous Huxley’s classic account of his first experience with mescaline in 1953.

rereading Huxley after having had those experiences, I could appreciate how distinct mescaline was from the other psychedelics. Huxley didn’t describe leaving the known universe, journeying to a “Beyond” populated by strange characters or decorated with extraordinary visual patterns; indeed, he reported no hallucinations. He didn’t travel inward to plumb the depths of his psyche or to recover suppressed memories. Nor did his ego dissolve, allowing him to merge with the universe or god or nature. He didn’t report the (classic) psychedelic epiphany that love is the most important thing in the universe. No, Huxley remained very much on this earth, sitting in his Los Angeles garden, observing the familiar physical world—but through completely new eyes: “This is how one ought to see,” I kept saying as I looked down at my trousers or glanced at the jeweled books in the shelves, at the legs of my infinitely more than Van-Goghian chair. “This is how one ought to see, how things really are.”

why don’t we see this way all the time? Huxley suggests ordinary consciousness evolved to keep this information from us for a good reason: to prevent us from being continuously astonished, so that we might get up from our chair now and again and go about the business of living. Huxley recognized the danger of being constantly thunderstruck by reality: “For if one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.”

“People can stay attuned to one another on mescaline,” Evelyn explained. “It doesn’t send you to Alpha Centauri, so you’re less likely to become an embarrassment to the psyche.”

He describes being able to perceive hundreds of nuances of color that he had never seen before. “More than anything else,” he wrote years later, “the world amazed me, in that I saw it as I had when I was a child.

“The most compelling insight of that day was that this awesome recall had been brought about by a fraction of a gram of a white solid, but that in no way whatsoever could it be argued that these memories had been contained within the white solid.” Rather, they came from the psyche, he realized, which, whether we realize it or not, contains an “entire universe,” and there “are chemicals that can catalyze its availability.”*

A mescaline trip can last fourteen hours. “It’s a commitment,”

psilocybin, the psychedelic typically used in experiments and drug trials, lasts less than half as long,

Another strike against mescaline is that a dose requires up to half a gram of the chemical; compare that to LSD, doses of which are measured in micrograms—millionths of a gram. In the illicit drug trade, more material means more risk. Which probably explains why LSD, virtually weightless and easy to hide, ...

As for plant sources of mescaline, most of the peyote gathered in Texas ends up in the hands of Native Americans, who have enjoyed the legal right to consume it since President Clinton signed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments in 1994. I was told it is virtually impossible to come by peyote today if you are not a tribal member. It is also a federal crime for a non-Native person to possess it, grow it, transport it, buy it, sell it, or ingest it. Which, according to many Native Americans, is exactly as it should be. Given the importance of peyote to Native Americans today, and the shortages of the cactus, surely they have a point. Then there is the San Pedro cactus, which also produces mescaline, albeit at lower concentrations. No, I had never heard of it, eit...

Trichocereus.

Trichocereus. In the years since, a perfect storm of inaccurate labeling, shoddy taxonomy on the part of so-called experts (don’t get Trout started), and rampant hybridization have contributed to the confusion now surrounding what is and is not “San Pedro.” Yet that confusion is not without its benefits: if the government wanted to stamp out San Pedro, it would first have to specify the names of the species to be criminalized (as it had done with Papaver somniferum). As a collector, however, I had hoped to pin down what species I had in my garden. “Don’t take the names seriously,” Trout told me, sensing my mounting frustration. “The plants don’t care what we call them.”

recipe for preparing San Pedro. It called for a chunk of San Pedro the length and girth of one’s forearm for each person planning to drink.

The act of slicing off a forearm would probably not by itself cross the line: the gardener might be taking a cutting to propagate a new cactus. But the act of cooking the cactus would change everything: as soon as I chunked up the flesh beneath the emerald skin and simmered it in water, I would be guilty of the federal crime of manufacturing a Schedule I substance.

In a shocking 1990 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Native American Church lost its right to practice its religion. Up to that point, the courts had held that the government could not deny one’s First Amendment right unless it could demonstrate a “compelling state interest.” But in Employment Division, Department of Human Resources of Oregon v. Smith (Alfred Leo Smith was a member of the Klamath Nation who was fired from his job when he refused to stop attending Native American Church meetings), Scalia threw out the compelling state interest standard. Calling America’s religious pluralism “a luxury,” he held that the criminal law and the police power must take precedence over the free exercise of religion. (As the attorneys for the Church commented, the decision, in effect, “rewrote the First Amendment to read, ‘Congress shall make no laws except criminal laws that prohibit the free exercise of religion.’”)

In 1993 Congress passed the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which restored the compelling state interest standard.

On October 6, 1994, President Clinton signed the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments. Henceforth, “the use, possession, or transportation of peyote by an Indian for bona fide traditional ceremonial purposes in connection with the practice of a traditional Indian religion is lawful, and shall not be prohibited by the United States, or any State.”

(Entheogen means, roughly, “manifesting the god within.”)

Some people call it the flesh of our ancestors, because that’s what it is, you know, and at the same time it’s a spirit. Different people have different experiences with the medicine. It talks to you at different levels: about what it is you need to see, what it is that you need to feel, or experience. The medicine knows you before you even know yourself. It is like a mirror. When people get up and look in the mirror, they can fix themselves, brush their teeth and see if they look okay, you know, presentable for society. But this medicine is a mirror that allows you to see inside yourself, into the core of your heart and spirit. The peyote knows you. So when you start to think about something, maybe something that needs healing, what you’re thinking about, what you’re saying, the medicine can hear you. It’s not like taking out the DSM, and getting a diagnosis. It’s our way of life, talking to things and realizing the life force in all things.

You always want to know everything. We just experience it.”

Huxley’s trip had convinced him that the function of ordinary consciousness is to protect us from reality by a process of reduction or filtration—he spoke of consciousness as a “reducing valve,”

The notion that there is so much more out there (or in here) than our conscious minds allow us to perceive is consistent with the neuroscientific concept of predictive coding. According to this theory, our brain admits the minimum amount of information needed to confirm or correct its best guesses as to what is out there or, in the case of our unconscious feelings, in here. These top-down predictions of reality and prior beliefs are a bit like maps to sensory and psychological experience, and as long as they represent the actual territory well enough for us to navigate it successfully, there’s no need to flood the system with lots of unnecessary detail.

How exactly would this place and moment in time feel if I was experiencing it in the knowledge my death was imminent? Weeks or even days away? All of it would feel infinitely precious and poignant. Every detail of the scene I would prize as a gift, to be tightly held in the embrace of the senses: the blush of the fragrant apricots in that blue bowl, the reflection of the clouds in the glass of the water at ebb tide, the plaintive cry of a gull reaching us from across the bay. How it would feel, I realized with a jolt, is exactly as it feels right now.

So why not feel like that always? Well, it would be exhausting, surely, to turn life into this sort of unending observance. Ordinary consciousness probably didn’t evolve to foster this kind of perception, focused as it is on being—contemplation—at the expense of doing. But that, it seems to me, is the blessing of this molecule—of these remarkable cacti!—that it can somehow crack open the doors of perception and recall us to this truth, obvious but seldom registered: that this is exactly where we live, amid these precious gifts in the shadow of that oncoming moment.

“Had mescaline shown me the door in the wall?” If so, then the door was—just as Sandor Iron Rope had tried to tell me!—more like a mirror, for everything I needed to learn was not on the other side of it but right here in front of me, and it had been right here all along.

Chop off a piece of Wachuma cactus, leave it anywhere—on the ground or on pavement, in the sun or darkness—and it will soon sprout a new cactus from the amputated limb. As long as it doesn’t freeze hard, the plant will grow anywhere: city or country, in the mountains or at sea level, indoors or out; is happy to be watered but will go months without a drop; will send up new growth from any cut or injury and, for a cactus, grows fast—easily a foot a year. Though it flowers spectacularly and can produce seed, its principal reproductive strategy would seem to depend on disaster: getting whacked by machetes or toppled by the wind. Whatever befalls this plant it takes in stride, just another opportunity to send up new life. Compared to poky and vulnerable peyote, Wachuma is indomitable.