Michael Pollan

It's as if we made entering gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets!' When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mindis a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.

The New Science of Psychedelics

How to Change Your Mind

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018 A New York Times Notable Book The #1 New York Times bestseller. A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists inadvertently catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research. A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Insight regarding time travel and what it means to be more present

Juan Agrón

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.) Mental time travel is constantly taking us off the frontier of the present moment. This can be highly adaptive; it allows us to learn from the past and plan for the future. But when time travel turns obsessive, it fosters the backward-looking gaze of depression and the forward pitch of anxiety. Addiction, too, seems to involve uncontrollable time travel. The addict uses his habit to organize time: When was the last hit, and when can I get the next?

David Kessler, the physician and former head of the FDA, recently published a book called Capture: Unraveling the Mystery of Mental Suffering that makes the case for such an approach. “Capture” is his term for the common mechanism underlying addiction, depression, anxiety, mania, and obsession; in his view, all these disorders involve learned habits of negative thinking and behavior that hijack our attention and trap us in loops of self-reflection.

“Every time we respond [to a stimulus], we strengthen the neural circuitry that prompts us to repeat” the same destructive thoughts or behaviors.

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. (In this experiment, conducted in a eucalyptus grove on the Berkeley campus, volunteers spent a minute looking either at the trees or at the façade of a nearby building. Then a confederate walked toward the participants and stumbled, scattering pens on the ground. Bystanders who had looked at the trees proved more likely to come to her aid than those who had looked at the building.) In another experiment, Keltner’s lab found that if you ask people to draw themselves before and after viewing awe-inspiring images of nature, the after-awe self-portraits will take up considerably less space on the page. An experience of awe appears to be an excellent antidote for egotism.

Addiction is, among other things, a radical form of selfishness. One of the challenges of treating the addict is getting him to broaden his perspective beyond a consuming self-interest in his addiction, the behavior that has come to define his identity and organize his days. Awe, Hendricks believes, has the power to do this.

“Keltner believes that awe is a fundamental human emotion, one that evolved in us because it promotes altruistic behavior. We are descendants of those who found the experience of awe blissful, because it’s advantageous for the species to have an emotion that makes us feel part of something much larger than ourselves.”

It’s well known in the field of drug abuse research that rats in a cage given access to drugs of various kinds will quickly addict themselves, pressing the little levers for the drug on offer in preference to food, often to the point of death. Much less well known, however, is the fact that if the cage is “enriched” with opportunities for play, interaction with other rats, and exposure to nature, the same rats will utterly ignore the drugs and so never become addicted. The rat park experiments lend support to the idea that the propensity to addiction might have less to do with genes or chemistry than with one’s personal history and environment.

“Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?” is the key question Matt Johnson takes away from the rat park experiment.

“People come out of these experiences seeing the world a little more like a playground.”

Casper Schipper

Andrew John Kinney

Additional comment 1/9/2019: I've shared this review with non-Goodreads friends and got a bit of side eye. So I'd like to share some context. I have never taken LSD or mushrooms, or for that matter any non-prescribed drug other than a minuscule amount of pot in college. So my point here is not to promote psilocybin because I use it, because I never have, but rather to provide a review of a very interesting book.


How to Change Your Mind is an investigation by journalist and writer Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire) into the history, use, and benefits of psychedelic compounds. I probably would have passed over this book had I not previously read Omnivore’s Dilemma; I know the quality of Pollan’s research and writing, and that convinced me to give this book a try. I’m glad I did! It turns out that most of what I thought I knew about psilocybin (magic mushrooms) and LSD (the pharmaceutical version of the mushroom) is wrong. 

LSD and psilocybin have been illegal in the US since the ‘60’s, and are classed (along with heroin) as a Schedule 1 illegal drug. As Pollan describes in his book, the idea of LSD or psilocybin as dangerous is mostly an artifact of ‘60’s anxiety about the counterculture rather than being based on actual evidence of danger from the drug / mushroom. Psilocybin is not addictive, and the number of “bad trips” resulting in injury or death is vanishingly rare. The major concern about psilocybin use is for people who have psychotic tendencies or schizophrenia, because in a few cases the drug may further unhinge them. Many of the reasons that were cited to categorize LSD / psilocybin as a Schedule 1 illegal drug are simply without factual basis. For instance, one claim, which I remember from my youth, is that LSD “damages chromosomes”; there is simply no evidence for this. 

Pollan reviews, at length, the history of the drug, and the research done on LSD in the 1950’s and ‘60’s, and he shows that scientists then believed that LSD was a promising treatment for depression and addiction. Unfortunately, most of this research was filed away or flushed when the government made LSD illegal and cut off research funds, and even before that scientists were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the promotion of LSD by Timothy Leary and others as a recreational “consciousness-expanding” drug. And yet, expansion of consciousness is apparently one of the real values of psilocybin / LSD. 

Pollan describes the experiences of many, many peoples’ “trips”, including his own, and the words various people use to describe the experience are remarkably similar: a description of diminution or elimination of the ego; a visual review of their lives, sometimes meeting long-dead relatives or friends; an overwhelming feeling of love and empathy toward other people as well as toward plants and animals; and in some cases the feeling of meeting or being one with “God”. Pollan delves deep into the biological basis for this effect, and the general sense is that the drug increases neuroplasticity on a temporary basis, though some of the effects last for months or longer. Pollan expands upon this later in the book, explaining that the default mode network (DMN) of the brain, which allows rapid processing of new information based on prior experience, is temporarily off-line, and so each new experience, whether it is seeing a leaf, or an insect, or a person, seems as new and wonderful or strange as it would to a young child. Hallucinations also occur, as is well known.

And all of the above might be interesting reading with a sort of “so what?” conclusion, if not for the evidence of some truly astounding results in improving outcomes in a number of otherwise intractable conditions. In a study involving smokers who wanted to quit, use of psilocybin resulted in an 80% cessation rate. For those of you who have known smokers trying to quit, this is amazing, to say the least, and it is a better result than any other known approach. Among people suffering from “treatment-resistant-depression”, results appear to be equally high compared to other treatments. A preliminary study of alcoholics treated with psilocybin showed >50% success. One of the most moving stories in the book is about the use of psychedelics to treat anxiety among those with cancer. In many cases, people simply lost their fear of death, and in others it was greatly reduced, and this allowed the cancer patients to have a much better and loving engagement with loved ones, and an improved quality of life as the end grew near.

And why does this happen? It appears that the experience of ego dissolution allows people, during, and for a while after their trips, to view themselves truly objectively, while enhancing their love and empathy toward others. The answers people gave to the question, “what happened?”, seem banal or obvious, but they gain profundity through the changed behavior of the post-psilocybin-using patients. When one person who quit smoking was asked how she could do it, she said, “Smoking was no longer relevant”. Others said things like: “I could see now that this was bad for me – so why would I continue?” All these were things that they knew intellectually prior to their trips, but after the trips they knew and they believed. Other effects cited by Pollan, though harder to quantify, are increased creativity, renewed interest in one’s career, and increased love and empathy for others.

Pollan makes an enlightening comment about some of the more obscure assertions of 18th & 19th Century writers about transcendence, trance-like states, etc. – maybe they were achieving an ego-less state via meditation, breathing exercises, or some other trance-inducing mechanism; perhaps even psychedelic substances. The same goes for some of the more obscure statements in the Bible, like God speaking from the burning bush. This could have been a psychedelic experience. Almost all cultures have some sort of substance that brings on psychedelic experiences.
 
As the NYT points out: “You don’t necessarily need drugs to enter this strange, egoless realm of consciousness: Near-death experiences, meditation and fasting can get you there, too.” But the psychedelic drugs get people there reliably. Many people, after their trips, begin a meditation regimen which allows them to partly regain the ego-less state and some of its benefits. Experienced meditators, observed in scientific studies, exhibit similar brain function as people who take psilocybin.

All in all, this is a very interesting book, highly recommended. Psychedelics are beginning to be studied again at various universities, so I expect we will hear more on this subject in the coming years.

P.S. The only reason I did not give this five stars is that Mr. Pollan, god bless him, really does go on at length about certain things that could be dealt with more succinctly. But I love that he has obviously done his research.

Rohit Arondekar

A fascinating journey through the rise, fall and re-discovery of psychedelics by Michael Pollan. He is honest about his learnings, interviews and experiments. If you've wondered what all the fuss is about and want a non-spiritual take on alternative states of consciousness, then I highly recommend this book. It didn't convince me to try out the drugs mentioned but left me hopeful that we can learn more about the models our brain builds to understand, survive and thrive.

Bouke van der Bijl

A very hopeful book about the newly nascent science of psychedelic-assisted therapy, which has the potential to revolutionize how we treat many ailments of the soul, including depression, addiction, and to allow people to deal with their impending death. I don’t think I can come up with a better person who could’ve written this, the writer was around 60 before doing mushrooms for the first time which makes his experience more valid than that of some 20-year old kid. 

This book also just wants me to do psychedelics again so it’s about time I order some truffles.

Fascinating read on developing treatments in the medical field. 

Diamond Jim

Lord Aragorn

Great review of the science and spirituality of psychedelics and the modern history of their use. I like the author's descriptions of his own personal "trips" and appreciated that he started off as a skeptic. Interesting to see where the study of psychedelics takes us in the future.

Matthew Royal

Not a very scientific analysis of the effect of psychedelics. Pollan is convinced that true meaning is found through their use, rather than brain misfirings attaching the "eureka feeling" of the brain to random thoughts. All you can really say from this book is that many psychoactive drugs appear to have no directly harmful effect on humans, and thus should be removed from the list of schedule 1 drugs (US) where they were placed during a Nixonian drug scare. 

It's certainly interesting to hear others' hallucinogenic experiences, and how some of them may have resulted in shaping the culture of Silicon Valley, but a lot of the stories fall into the same tropes. I'd be much more interested in hearing more about medical and therapeutic uses than recreational, and I think Pollan misses the opportunity of opening the debate on non-medical use of these and other drugs, and the right of an individual to have autonomy over their own nervous system.

Meghan Navoy

did not finish reading this book. it's interesting but the length is really intimidating and I'm just not in a place to slog through a long ass nonfiction book. A bit dry IMO which was a let down. I also already renewed it twice from library and had to return it. Maybe one day I'll pick it up again!!

Nick Gracilla

From the 1950s through the 70s, academic and pharmaceutical research into the potential benefits of psychedelics were not uncommon. Read this for an extensive, through history—from "discovery," popularization, cultural impact, and eventual demonization—as well as the potential benefits in exploration today. However, for me, reading other people's descriptions of their "indescribable," transcendental experiences is like dancing about architecture: it becomes quite the chore. Here find not just one, but perhaps dozens of in-depth attempts to describe the ineffable. Interesting at first, tedious by the end. Recommended with reservations.

Jeannette Ordas

Fascinating but a slow going read for me during these pandemic times. I loved the research and I hope the medical establishment doesn't rule out the possibilities of psychedelics to help with depression, addiction and more.

One of the most well written books on a truly profound subject 

Sophie L Smith 

Colin

Rating: 8.3/10

Really liked this one. I've always been interested in the psychedelic experience and the deeper meaning behind altered brain states and this book singlehandedly addressed all of my curiosities about the topic. Although we're starting to hear a bit more about it in mainstream culture, I had no idea that the resurgence of psychedelic research has been going on for several years now. Pollan does a great job of breaking the book into multiple sections: the past, present, and future of LSD research, his own experience and psychedelic journey, and the neuroscience behind this unbelievable hallucinogen. It got a bit boring in parts and it didn't help that I spread this book out over several months. He definitely did his due diligence when it comes to research and unfortunately, this makes the book a bit dry, especially when he takes the time to name almost every researcher or scientist involved in a particular narrative.

Despite these shortcomings, Michael Pollan has made me eager for further developments in the field of psychedelics and presented stunningly positive impacts of this often-maligned substance.

Cindy Lieberman

A fascinating look at the history of psychedelic drugs in the scientific and university environments, and within indigenous groups, plus some real-world field trips (pun intended) taken by the author with well-known guides.

'It's as if we made entering gothic cathedrals illegal, or museums, or sunsets!' When LSD was first discovered in the 1940s, it seemed to researchers, scientists and doctors as if the world might be on the cusp of psychological revolution. It promised to shed light on the deep mysteries of consciousness, as well as offer relief to addicts and the mentally ill. But in the 1960s, with the vicious backlash against the counter-culture, all further research was banned. In recent years, however, work has quietly begun again on the amazing potential of LSD, psilocybin and DMT. Could these drugs in fact improve the lives of many people? Diving deep into this extraordinary world and putting himself forward as a guinea-pig, Michael Pollan has written a remarkable history of psychedelics and a compelling portrait of the new generation of scientists fascinated by the implications of these drugs. How to Change Your Mind is a report from what could very well be the future of human consciousness.

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Bill Mazza

Really enjoyed this, but I'm a big fan of Pollan in general. Some parts dragged a bit, and I would have enjoyed a little more focus on the "sciency" part. But overall, love that this topic is being brought more attention by some of the more "main-stream" writers like Pollan, as I think we'll see the use of psychedelics become more acceptable for treating things like depression and PTSD (not to mention the benefits for those who take them recreationally, as part of a spiritual journey or "awakening" - not the folks who use them to have a good time).

"When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction, and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these ... substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third"--

Omar Fernandez

I love that this book demistified psychedelics for me. It was very interesting and informative, but after a certain point it felt repetitive.

Ervin Szerdocz

A great intro into the world (universe) of psychedelics. Meaning that it's best to read before you venture out.

Erlank Pienaar

Keeping it real. Psychedelics. Need to know. Time to evolve.

A brilliant and brave investigation by Michael Pollan, author of five New York Times best sellers, into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs--and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into the experience of various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the Sixties, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research. A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan's "mental travelogue" is not just psychedelic drugs, but the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both struggle and beauty, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.

How to Change Your Mind The New Science of Psychedelics

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