How to Change Your Mind
There was cosmic humor in having received the large print edition of Michel Pollan’s tour of the psychedelic, How to Change your Mind, after ordering the standard edition from that online behemoth rather than my local bookstore. Though it was asking to be read for this fact alone, the book sat on my shelf for nearly two years before I finally decided to pick it up.
I’ve not read other works by Pollan but he’s enough a part of the cultural zeitgeist that I had a sense of what I’d be in for. A self-avowed material realist, Pollan does not enter the world of psychedelics with the evangelical or even openly curious disposition of many that have come before him. This is a strength and also at times an annoyance of the book. Perhaps the tone of rational caution, what some might call skepticism, is something of a conceit that amplifies the ensuing profundity that greets Pollan on the other side of a guided acid trip, a mystical encounter with psilocybin and a somewhat baffling rocket launch of the toad. These, and other encounters with psychedelics, are documented in the book and take Pollan not only to places but to meanings he didn’t expect to find.
Above all, Pollan is a consummate storyteller and the story he tells about the early history of psychedelic research and the surrounding culture is filled with trippy characters, interesting facts and a few mysteries. The history of psychedelics’ conversion with the growth of silicon valley and the field psychopharmacology are especially interesting. Research of the chemical compounds in LSD in the 1950’s led to the development of the first antidepressants. And acid trips guided by the first pioneers of psychedelic therapy turned on the technocrati to insights and breakthroughs that helped to create the hub of innovation that silicon valley is today. Though pharmaceuticals and technology have greatly expanded frontiers of consciousness, the havoc their shadow sides can reap on the human mind have become more clear and ever more present in daily life. A perennial ouroboros. Perhaps this is the ongoing offering psychedelics have to offer us culturally; a molecule that continues to find itself, and continues to reveal ourselves.
Encounters with meaning are where Pollan seem to find a measure of peace in his personal journey to reconcile his faith in science with the transcendence of the psychedelic experience, asking if psychedelics can not only “directly imbue otherwise irrelevant sensory information with meaning” but in their “egolytic effects” allow us to reconceive the world and our place in it with less fear and less attachment to an illusory conception of self. Here, Pollan’s mind seems to have changed, but not opened completely to the possibility that perhaps the frontier of meaning is to be free of it.
The chapter on therapeutic uses of psychedelics for the dying, addicted and depressed offer compelling accounts from people who have received “psychedelic-assisted therapy” and it is clear, regardless of any scientific, religious or mystical explanation that might be offered to explain the how’s and why’s, that these experiences are profound and life changing for many. It is worth noting that the environment, intention, and care given by a trained guild in preparing for, experiencing and integrating a psychedelic experience seem to corollate with significantly more positive experiences and longer lasting effects. This seems to underscore not only the suggestibility of consciousness but also the importance of ritual and the creation of a social frame within which an individual’s transcendence can be met, held, and affirmed.
Some of the most interesting research in the book is that of Robin Carhart-Harris, a researcher at Imperial College London. Carhart-Harris hypothesizes that many psychological “disorders” stem from excess order or rigidity in thinking and perceiving. “A high-dose psychedelic experience has the power to ‘shake the snow globe’, he says, disrupting unhealthy patterns of thought and creating a space of flexibility—entropy—in which more salubrious patterns and narratives have an opportunity to coalesce as the snow slowly resettles.” Brain imaging of research participants on psychedelics in Carhart-Harris’ studies show that specialize neural networks become disintegrated while the brain as a whole becomes more integrated, allowing for more flexible communication and greater interconnectedness between various parts of the brain.
The neuroscientific study of psychedelics and the brain seem to have generated more possibilities, more questions, than they have answered. Why these effects on consciousness? Why do they appear in nature as they do? Why are we so interested in them again now? The self-taught mycologist and tireless psilocybin advocate Paul Stamets understands it this way: “We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support, I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.” This view parallels ethnobotanist Giorgio Samorini’s “depatterning factor.” Samorini suggests that during times of crisis or rapid change novel behaviors in a species may be adaptive, and that psychedelics generate that kind of novelty.
All compelling questions and theories. Perhaps Pollan summarizes it well: “It’s still early days in our understanding of consciousness and no single one of our vocabularies for approaching the subject—the biological, the psychological, the philosophical, or the spiritual—has yet earned the right to claim it has the final word.”