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

Casper Schipper

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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.”

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.”

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.

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.

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

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?

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