How to Change Your Mind Quotes

“Shortly after Carhart-Harris published his results in a 2012 paper in PNAS (“Neural Correlates of the Psychedelic State as Determined by fMRI Studies with Psilocybin”*), Judson Brewer, a researcher at Yale* who was using fMRI to study the brains of experienced meditators, noticed that his scans and Robin’s looked remarkably alike. The transcendence of self reported by expert meditators showed up on fMRIs as a quieting of the default mode network. It appears that when activity in the default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes, and the usual boundaries we experience between self and world, subject and object, all melt away.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Leary reported eye-popping results: ten months after their release, only 25 percent of the psilocybin recipients had ended up back in jail, while the control group returned at a more typical rate of 80 percent. But when Rick Doblin at MAPS meticulously reconstructed the Concord experiment decades later, reviewing the outcomes subject by subject, he concluded that Leary had exaggerated the data; in fact, there was no statistically significant difference in the rates of recidivism between the two groups.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” This sense of having temporarily surrendered to a superior force often leaves the person feeling as if he or she has been permanently transformed.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Curtis Wright, a new administrator at the FDA (and, as it happens, a former student of Roland Griffiths’s at Hopkins), had signaled that research protocols for psychedelics would be treated like any other—judged on their merits.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Ineffability is of course a hallmark of the mystical experience. “The awareness transcends any particular sensory modality,” he explained, unhelpfully. Was it scary? “There was no terror, only fascination and awe.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“What opened up before me was, for lack of a better word, a space, but not our ordinary concept of space, just the pure awareness of a realm without form and void of content. And into that realm came a celestial entity, which was the emergence of the physical world. It was like the big bang, but without the boom or the blinding light. It was the birth of the physical universe. In”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Despite his behaviorist orientation as a scientist, Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology—the subjective experience of consciousness.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The first event, which looked back but also forward like a kind of historical hinge, was the centennial of the birth of Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD. This was an unusual centennial in that the man being feted was very much in attendance. Entering his second century, Hofmann appeared in remarkably good shape, physically spry and mentally sharp, and he was able to take an active part in the festivities, which included a birthday ceremony followed by a three-day symposium. The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat. Two hundred journalists from around the world were in attendance, along with more than a thousand healers, seekers, mystics, psychiatrists, pharmacologists, consciousness researchers, and neuroscientists, most of them people whose lives had been profoundly altered by the remarkable molecule that this man had derived from a fungus half a century before. They had come to celebrate him and what his friend the Swiss poet and physician Walter Vogt called “the only joyous invention of the twentieth century.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Since the revival of sanctioned psychedelic research beginning in the 1990s, nearly a thousand volunteers have been dosed, and not a single serious adverse event has been reported.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“the critical influence of “set” and “setting.” Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Ralph Waldo Emerson crossing a wintry New England commons in “Nature”: Standing on the bare ground,—my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space,—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball. I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“idea accepted without question by most scientists—“is a metaphysical assumption, not a scientific fact.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“the idea that brains create consciousness—an”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“As for the guides themselves, they are already being trained and certified: late in 2016, the California Institute of Integral Studies graduated its first class of forty-two psychedelic therapists.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“In the last several years, he and his wife, Ekaterina Malievskaia, a Russian-born physician, have devoted their considerable energy and resources to winning approval for psilocybin-assisted therapy in the European Union.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“What had been as recently as 2010 a modest gathering of psychonauts and a handful of renegade researchers was now a six-day convention-cum-conference that had drawn more than three thousand people from all over the world to hear researchers from twenty-five countries present their findings.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Institutions generally like to mediate the individual’s access to authority”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“a cross between a spa/retreat and a gym, where people can experience psychedelics”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“If we limit psychedelics just to the patient,” she explains, “we’re sticking to the old medical model”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“I don’t work with crazies anymore”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Two years after his departure from Harvard, Alpert embarked on a spiritual journey to India and returned as Ram Dass”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“allowing him to conduct clinical research on LSD in the United States—this even though he had a third-grade education”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“ordained Zen monk,”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“whenever we hired someone, they would receive a couple of LSD sessions as part of their training”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence