How to Change Your Mind Quotes

“The second or third time I watched Stamets show a video of a Cordyceps doing its diabolical thing to an ant—commandeering its body, making it do its bidding, and then exploding a mushroom from its brain in order to disseminate its genes—it occurred to me that Stamets and that poor ant had rather a lot in common. Fungi haven’t killed him, it’s true, and he probably knows enough about their wiles to head off that fate. But it’s also true that this man’s life—his brain!—has been utterly taken over by fungi; he has dedicated himself to their cause, speaking for the mushrooms in the same way that Dr. Seuss’s Lorax speaks for the trees. He disseminates fungal spores far and wide, helping them, whether by mail order or sheer dint of his enthusiasm, to vastly expand their range and spread their message.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“I would never have found it if not for psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor: “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction. “Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.” When the snow is freshest, the mind is most impressionable, and the slightest nudge—whether from a song or an intention or a therapist’s suggestion—can powerfully influence its future course. Robin Carhart-Harris’s theory of”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“I’m struck by the fact there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight—another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities—call them spirits if you like—other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“The mental health system reaches only a fraction of the people suffering from mental disorders, most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment by its cost, social stigma, or ineffectiveness. There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. “Broken” does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Sigmund Freud wrote that “there is nothing of which we are more certain than the feeling of our self, our own ego.” Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as we would see if it would just shut up. And that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind

“This hall of epistemological mirrors was just one of the many challenges facing the researchers who wanted to bring LSD into the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy: psychedelic therapy could look more like shamanism or faith healing than medicine. Another challenge was the irrational exuberance that seemed to infect any researchers who got involved with LSD, an enthusiasm that might have improved the results of their experiments at the same time it fueled the skepticism of colleagues who remained psychedelic virgins. Yet a third challenge was how to fit psychedelics into the existing structures of science and psychiatry, if indeed that was possible. How do you do a controlled experiment with a psychedelic? How do you effectively blind your patients and clinicians or control for the powerful expectancy effect? When “set” and “setting” play such a big role in the patient’s experience, how can you hope to isolate a single variable or design a therapeutic application?”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map—and not the only map.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree. Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Amanda Feilding, who was born in 1943, is an eccentric as only the English aristocracy can breed them. (She’s descended from the house of Habsburg and two of Charles II’s illegitimate children.) A student of comparative religion and mysticism, Feilding has had a long-standing interest in altered states of consciousness and, specifically, the role of blood flow to the brain, which in Homo sapiens, she believes, has been compromised ever since our species began standing upright. LSD, Feilding believes, enhances cognitive function and facilitates higher states of consciousness by increasing cerebral circulation. A second way to achieve a similar result is by means of the ancient practice of trepanation. This deserves a brief digression.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“it would be a big mistake if medicalization is all that happens.” Why a mistake? Because Bob Jesse was ultimately less interested in people’s mental problems than with their spiritual well-being—in using entheogens for the betterment of well people.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Jesse’s curiosity about psychedelics was first piqued during a drug education unit in his junior high school science class. This particular class of drugs was neither physically nor psychologically addictive, he was told (correctly);”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“(The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“Not only does he choose his own words with great care, but he insists that you do too, so, for example, when I carelessly deployed the term “recreational use,” he stopped me in mid-sentence. “Maybe we need to reexamine that term. Typically, it is used to trivialize an experience. But why? In its literal meaning, the word ‘recreation’ implies something decidedly nontrivial. There is much more to be said, but let’s bookmark this topic for another time. Please go on.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Yet the new research into psychedelics comes along at a time when mental health treatment in this country is so “broken”—to use the word of Tom Insel, who until 2015 was director of the National Institute of Mental Health—that the field’s willingness to entertain radical new approaches is perhaps greater than it has been in a generation. The pharmacological toolbox for treating depression—which afflicts nearly a tenth of all Americans and, worldwide, is the leading cause of disability—has little in it today, with antidepressants losing their effectiveness* and the pipeline for new psychiatric drugs drying up. Pharmaceutical companies are no longer investing in the development of so-called CNS drugs—medicines targeted at the central nervous system. The mental health system reaches only a fraction of the people suffering from mental disorders, most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment by its cost, social stigma, or ineffectiveness. There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. “Broken” does not seem too harsh a characterization of such a system.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“(Grof did extensive research trying to correlate his patients’ recollections of their birth experience on LSD with contemporaneous reports from medical personnel and parents. He concluded that with the help of LSD many people can indeed recall the circumstances of their birth, especially when it was a difficult one.)”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“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. The biggest taboo in America is the conversation about death. Sure, it’s gotten better; now we have hospices, which didn’t exist not so long ago. But to a doctor, it’s still an insult to let a patient go.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“if the therapy works as it’s supposed to, there won’t be a lot of repeat business.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Maybe the problem with “the box” is that it is singular.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The Philosophical Baby),”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The price of the sense of an individual identity is a sense of separation from others and nature.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

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

“I saw that if I can name and admit a feeling, confess it to someone, it would let go. A little older and wiser, now I can do this for myself.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Psilocybin Project crashed and burned in 1963. Not even Berkeley, it seemed, was ready to go there again, at least not yet. Third data point: The dinner table conversation jogged a vague memory that a few years before somebody had e-mailed me a scientific paper about psilocybin research. Busy with other things at the time, I hadn’t even opened it, but a quick search of the term “psilocybin” instantly fished the paper out of the virtual pile of discarded e-mail on my computer. The paper had been sent to me by one of its”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“William James gave a name to this conviction: the noetic quality. People feel they have been let in on a deep secret of the universe, and they cannot be shaken from that conviction. As James wrote, “Dreams cannot stand this test.” No doubt this is why some of the people who have such an experience go on to found religions, changing the course of history or, in a great many more cases, the course of their own lives. “No doubt” is the key.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence