How to Change Your Mind Quotes

“I asked him where he was in all this. “I was a diffusely located observer.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Hofmann must somehow have absorbed a bit of the chemical through his skin, because he “was interrupted in my work by unusual sensations.” Hofmann went home, lay down on a couch, and “in a dreamlike state, with eyes closed . . . I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colors.” Thus unfolds the world’s first LSD trip, in neutral Switzerland during the darkest days of World War II. It is also the only LSD trip ever taken that was entirely innocent of expectation.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“«El verdadero método del conocimiento es la experimentación».”
― Michael Pollan, Cómo cambiar tu mente: Lo que la nueva ciencia de la psicodelia nos enseña sobre la conciencia, la muer

“If not for the brain’s filtering mechanisms, the torrent of information the senses make available to our brains at any given moment might prove difficult to process—as indeed is sometimes the case during the psychedelic experience. “The question,” as David Nutt puts it, “is why the brain is ordinarily so constrained rather than so open?” The answer may be as simple as “efficiency.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Along the way, Ott made an offhand reference to the "placebo sacraments" of the Catholic Eucharist.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“It could be as straightforward as the notion of a "mental reboot"- Matt Johnson's biological control-alt-delete key- that jolts the brain out of destructive patterns (such as Kessler's "capture"), affording an opportunity for new patterns to take root. It could be that, as Franz Vollenweider has hypothesized, psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity. The myriad new connections that spring up in the brain during the psychedelic experience, as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial College, and the disintegration of well traveled old connections, may serve simply to "shake the snow globe," in Robin Carhart-Harris's phrase, a predicate for establishing new pathways.
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 become 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 therapists's suggestion- can powerfully influence its future course. p384”
― 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 car 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. p335”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“The response of most patients in the depression trial... has been remarkably positive, as least in the short term. Over dinner at a restaurant in West London, Robin told me about one severely depressed woman in the trial whom over the course of several meetings he had never once seen smile. As he sat with her during her psilocybin journey, "she smiled for the very first time.
"'It's nice to smile,' she said.
"After it was over, she told me she had been visited by a guardian angel. She described a presence of some kind, a voice that was entirely supportive and wanted her to be well. It would say things like 'Darling, you need to smile more, hold your head up high, stop looking down at the ground. Then it reached over and pushed up my cheeks,' she said, 'lifting the corners of my mouth.'
"That must have been what was happening in her mind when I observed her smiling," Robin said, now smiling himself, broadly if a bit sheepishly. In the aftermath of her experience, the woman's depression score dropped from thirty-six to four.
"I have to say, that was a very nice feeling." p330”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“As a psychonaut acquaintance put it to me, "If it were possible to temporarily experience another person's mental state, my guess is that it would feel more like a psychedelic state than a 'normal' state, because of its massive disparity with whatever mental state is habitual with you." p309”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“Beginning in 1973, Stanislav Grof, the Czech émigré psychiatrist who is one of the pioneers of LSD-assisted psychotherapy, served as scholar in residence at Esalen, but he had conducted workshops there for years before. Grof, who has guided thousands of LSD sessions, once predicted that psychedelics “would be for psychiatry what the microscope is for biology or the telescope is for astronomy. These tools make it possible to study important processes that under normal circumstances are not available for direct observation.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Of the two, Rick Doblin has been at it longer and is by far the more well known. Doblin founded the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) all the way back in the dark days of 1986—the year after MDMA was made illegal and a time when most wiser heads were convinced that restarting research into psychedelics was a cause beyond hopeless. Doblin, born in 1953, is a great shaggy dog with a bone; he has been lobbying to change the government’s mind about psychedelics since shortly after graduating from New College, in Florida, in 1987. After experimenting with LSD as an undergraduate, and later with MDMA, Doblin decided his calling in life was to become a psychedelic therapist. But after the banning of MDMA in 1985, that dream became unachievable without a change in federal laws and regulations, so he decided he’d better first get a doctorate in public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School. There, he mastered the intricacies of the FDA’s drug approval process, and in his dissertation plotted the laborious path to official acceptance that psilocybin and MDMA are now following.”
― 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 post-doc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more extended snow metaphor. “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow”, he told me, “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 pre-existing trails, almost like a magnet. Those main trails represent the most traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network.”
“In time,” he says, “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.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“The myriad new connections that spring up during the psychedelic experience as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial College and the disintegration of well-travelled old connections may serve simply to shake the snow globe, in Robin Carhart-Harris’ phrase, a predicate for establishing new pathways.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“But perhaps Hubbard’s most enduring contribution to psychedelic therapy emerged in, of all places, the treatment room. […]
Though he never used those terms, Hubbard was the first researcher to grasp the critical importance of set and setting in shaping the psychedelic experience. He instinctively understood that the white walls and fluorescent lighting of the sanitised hospital room were all wrong. So he brought pictures and music, flowers and diamonds into the treatment room where he would use them to prime patients for a mystical revelation or divert a journey when it took a terrifying turn. He liked to show people paintings by Salvador Dali or pictures of Jesus or to ask them to study the facets of a diamond he carried. On patient he treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralysed by social anxiety recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during a LSD session. “He said, ‘Now hate them’. They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said ‘Love them’ and they came back, brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to me. I realised you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.’”
What Hubbard was bringing into the treatment room was something well-known to any traditional healer. Shamans have understood for millennia that a person in the depths of a trance or under the influence of a powerful plant medicine can be readily manipulated with the help of certain words, special objects, or the right kind of music. Hubbard understood intuitively how the suggestibility of the human mind during an altered state of consciousness could be harnessed as an important resource for healing—for breaking destructive patterns of thought and for proposing new perspectives in their place.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“Under the influence of both Hubbard and Huxley, whose primary interest was in the revelatory import of pschedelics, Osmond abandoned the psychotomimetic model. It was Hubbard who first proposed to him that the mystical experience many subjects had on a single high dose of mescaline or LSD might itself be harnessed as a mode of therapy and that the experience was more important than the chemical. The psychedelic experience could, like the conversion experience, forcibly show people a new, more encompassing perspective on their lives that would help them to change.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“the experience of psychedelics is powerfully influenced by one’s expectation; no other class of drugs are more suggestible in their effects.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“What this means for cognition and learning can be best understood by looking at machine learning, or artificial intelligence, Gopnik suggests. In teaching computers how to learn and solve problems, AI designers speak in terms of “high temperature” and “low temperature” searches for the answers to questions. A low-temperature search (so-called because it requires less energy) involves reaching for the most probable or nearest-to-hand answer, like the one that worked for a similar problem in the past. Low-temperature searches succeed more often than not. A high-temperature search requires more energy because it involves reaching for less likely but possibly more ingenious and creative answers—those found outside the box of preconception. Drawing on its wealth of experience, the adult mind performs low-temperature searches most of the time.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Alison Gopnik and Robin Carhart-Harris come at the problem of consciousness from what seem like completely different directions and disciplines, but soon after they learned of each other’s work (I had e-mailed a PDF of Robin’s entropy paper to Alison and told him about her superb book, The Philosophical Baby), they struck up a conversation that has proven to be remarkably illuminating, at least for me. In April 2016, their conversation wound up on a stage at a conference on consciousness in Tucson, Arizona, where the two met for the first time and shared a panel.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“consciousness is a property of the universe, not brains. On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. “If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night,” Richards offered by way of an analogy, “you wouldn’t look for her in the TV set.” The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“In a college commencement address he delivered three years before his suicide, David Foster Wallace asked his audience to “think of the old cliché about ‘the mind being an excellent servant but a terrible master.’ This, like many clichés, so lame and unexciting on the surface, actually expresses a great and terrible truth,” he said. “It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in the head. They shoot the terrible master.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“The loudest and most authoritative voices in the debate over psychedelics in the 1960s were precisely the people who knew the least about them.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

“ours is not the first culture to feel threatened by psychedelics: the reason R. Gordon Wasson had to rediscover magic mushrooms in Mexico was that the Spanish had suppressed them so effectively, deeming them dangerous instruments of paganism. “That says something important about how reluctant cultures are to expose themselves to the changes these kinds of compounds can occasion,” he told me the first time we met. “There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“At times I beheld visions of dazzling beauty—visions so rapturous, so unearthly, that no artist will ever paint them.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually “realized being” as simply a person with “an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything.” Faith need not figure.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Stamets had recommended that I “cook” the mushrooms to destroy the compounds that can upset the stomach.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Wasson concluded from his experience that his working hypothesis about the roots of the religious experience in psychoactive fungi had been vindicated. “In man’s evolutionary past . . . there must have come a moment in time when he discovered the secret of the hallucinatory mushrooms. Their effect on him, as I see it, could only have been profound, a detonator to new ideas. For the mushrooms revealed to him worlds beyond the horizons known to him, in space and time, even worlds on a different plane of being, a heaven and perhaps a hell . . . One is emboldened to the point of asking whether they may not have planted in primitive man the very idea of a God.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Exactly what kind of scientist I didn’t completely understand until a few weeks later, when I happened to read a wonderful biography of Alexander von Humboldt, the great early nineteenth-century German scientist (and colleague of Goethe’s) who revolutionized our understanding of the natural world. Humboldt believed it is only with our feelings, our senses, and our imaginations—that is, with the faculties of human subjectivity—that we can ever penetrate nature’s secrets. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice” that is “familiar to his soul.” There is an order and beauty organizing the system of nature—a system that Humboldt, after briefly considering the name “Gaia,” chose to call “Cosmos”—but it would never have revealed itself to us if not for the human imagination, which is itself of course a product of nature, of the very system it allows us to comprehend. The modern conceit of the scientist attempting to observe nature with perfect objectivity, as if from a vantage located outside it, would have been anathema to Humboldt. “I myself am identical with nature.”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Mushrooms have taught me the interconnectedness of all life-forms and the molecular matrix that we share,” he explains in another one. “I no longer feel that I am in this envelope of a human life called Paul Stamets. I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.” Stamets sounded very much like the volunteers I met at Hopkins who had had full-blown mystical experiences, people whose sense of themselves as individuals had been subsumed into a larger whole—a form of “unitive consciousness,” which, in Stamets’s case, had folded him into the web of nature, as its not so humble servant. “I think Psilocybes have given me new insights that may allow me to help steer and speed fungal evolution so that we can find solutions to our problems.” Especially in a time of ecological crisis, he suggests, we can’t afford to wait for evolution, unfolding at its normal pace, to put forth these solutions in time. Let the depatterning begin. As”
― Michael Pollan, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence