Book Review: How to Change Your Mind

“I hope whatever you’re doing,

you’re stopping now and then

and

not doing it at all.”

“Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.”

How To Change Your Mind is a book by Michael Pollan about psychedelics (mainly, LSD and shrooms). I had heard about this book when it came out and then promptly forgot about it. A few weeks ago, I was looking for some new reading material and did a search for something like “books that will change your mind”. I’d been thinking lately about challenging my beliefs instead of confirming them, and wanted to find some reads that would change my mind. This book coincidentally showed up in the search results because it has “change your mind” in the title, but, it also succeeded in being a book that changed my mind. I had never thought or read too much about psychedelics before – this book replaced some of my mistaken ideas with the facts.

What you need to know about psychedelics

A few ideas recur throughout the book. First, that the environment – both inside and outside your brain – in which you take psychedelics has a big impact on how the experience unfolds. The phrase “set” and “setting” comes up over and over again. This means that bad trips are much less likely if you are in a safe location, with a guide and with the mental preparation for what the trip will be like. Pollan says this also means each trip has its own unique aspects: “psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever’s already going on both inside and outside one’s head.”

People tend to report that they have understood something profound about the universe, or consciousness, or love, etc. after a trip: “the conviction that some profound objective truth has been disclosed to you is a hallmark of the mystical experience”. There’s two points to stress about this: first, that these insights feel extremely real to the people who experience them; they feel very different from something that can be waved away as just ‘being on drugs’ or being the kind of fantasy that we all experience in dreams.

The second point about these profound experiences is that they often take the shape of ideas or phrases that we’ve heard many times, but don’t truly hear. ‘Everything is love’, for example. We can believe it without really feeling. We can hear it and then forget it immediately. As Pollan puts it: “The mystical journey seems to offer a graduate education in the obvious. Yet people come out of the experience understanding these platitudes in a new way”. Or later: “Psychedelics can make even the most cynical of us into fervent evangelists of the obvious.”

Psychedelics can make people more ‘spiritual’, or feel ‘God’s love’, or feel that consciousness is a property that resides throughout the universe instead of in our brains. Pollan’s take on this is similar to how I expect I’d feel if I tripped: “I have no problem using the word “spiritual” to describe elements of what I saw and felt, as long as it is not taken in a supernatural sense.” A common occurrence is to feel the dissolution of one’s ego. Pollan describes feeling like his consciousness was spread over the environment like “paint”:

The “personal” had been obliterated. Everything I once was and called me, this self six decades in the making, had been liquefied and dispersed over the scene. What had always been a thinking, feeling, perceiving subject based in here was now an object out there. I was paint!

I like the funny irony he notes about these ego-dissolving experiences:

It is one of the many paradoxes of psychedelics that these drugs can sponsor an ego-dissolving experience that in some people quickly leads to massive ego inflation. Having been let in on a great secret of the universe, the recipient of this knowledge is bound to feel special, chosen for great things.

Psychedelics are not usually considered addictive in humans. The same is true in laboratory animals: “animals, given the choice, will not self-administer a psychedelic more than once”. In fact, they’re generally considered not very dangerous:

In his own way, David Nutt is as notorious in England as Amanda Feilding. Nutt, who is a large, jolly fellow in his sixties with a mustache and a booming laugh, achieved his particular notoriety in 2009. That’s when the home secretary fired him from the government’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, of which he had been chair. The committee is charged with advising the government on the classification of illicit drugs based on their risk to individuals and society. Nutt, who is an expert on addiction and on the class of drugs called benzodiazepines (such as Valium), had committed the fatal political error of quantifying empirically the risks of various psychoactive substances, both legal and illegal. He had concluded from his research, and would tell anyone who asked, that alcohol was more dangerous than cannabis and that using Ecstasy was safer than riding a horse.

“But the sentence that got me sacked,” he told me when we met in his office at Imperial, “was when I went on live breakfast television. I was asked, ‘You’re not seriously telling us that LSD is less harmful than alcohol, are you?’ Of course I am!”

(Who’s Amanda Feilding, you ask? An English drug policy reformer who, in order to do some homemade science, “trepanned herself in 1970, boring a small hole in the middle of her forehead with an electric drill”. Pollan treats psychedelics very seriously, but doesn’t shy away from the fact that the field has a few...characters.)

After an initial burst of research in the years after LSD and shrooms were discovered, and then the complete cessation of (legal) research after the drugs were banned, official research has been growing again over the past twenty years. But, psychedelics are a challenge to our modern conception of science. To control for placebo effects and research bias, the ‘gold standard’ of double-blind studies says that both the researchers and the experimental subjects shouldn’t know which drug the subjects received, until after the data has been analyzed. But, for pretty obvious reasons, this doesn’t work for LSD: “conventional drug trials of psychedelics are difficult if not impossible to blind: most participants can tell whether they’ve received psilocybin or a placebo, and so can their guides.” A study back in the early days went like this:

Eight of the ten students receiving psilocybin reported a powerful mystical experience, while only one in the control group did. (Telling them apart was not difficult, rendering the double blind a somewhat hollow conceit: those on the placebo sat sedately in their pews while the others lay down or wandered about the chapel, muttering things like “God is everywhere” and “Oh, the Glory!”)

The History of Psychedelics

“It’s often said that in the 1960s psychedelics “escaped from the laboratory,” but it would probably be more accurate to say they were thrown over the laboratory wall”

A solid chunk of the books recounts the history of psychedelics. Here are a few points that stood out to me.

I’d never thought about it before, but it’s kind of wild that the “world’s first LSD trip” happened less than 100 years ago. Ten thousand years of civilization but no one had ever had that particular experience before! Speaking of firsts in society, Pollan suggests that the uniqueness of this experience may have played into the culture wars of the 1960s: “For at what other time in history did a society’s young undergo a searing rite of passage with which the previous generation was utterly unfamiliar?” This was a unique experience that had truly never before happened in Western culture. Pollan mentions this as perhaps a good sign that psychedelics will have more success this time around, given that they aren’t quite so unimaginable anymore.

Imagine how much different things were back in the early 1970s that this sentence is true: “In 1971, Richard Nixon declared Timothy Leary, a washed-up psychology professor, “the most dangerous man in America.”” Leary was a somewhat flamboyant Harvard professor who was involved in early research in psychedelics, and he and one of his co-investigator were “the only Harvard professors fired in the twentieth century.”

On the other hand, this study that was carried out in the 1960s would be a little hard to imagine happening today: “The Concord Prison Experiment sought to discover if the potential of psilocybin to change personality could be used to reduce recidivism in a population of hardened criminals.”

I also didn’t know that in 2006 the Supreme Court ruled that psychedelics, even though illegal, can be used legally in religious ceremonies:

The second watershed event of 2006 came only five weeks later when the U.S. Supreme Court, in a unanimous decision written by the new chief justice, John G. Roberts Jr., ruled that the UDV, a tiny religious sect that uses a hallucinogenic tea called ayahuasca as its sacrament, could import the drink to the United States, even though it contains the schedule 1 substance dimethyltryptamine, or DMT…

The Court soundly rejected the government’s argument, interpreting the 1993 law to mean that, absent a compelling state interest, the federal government cannot prohibit a recognized religious group from using psychedelic substances in their observances. Evidently, this includes relatively new and tiny religious groups specifically organized around a psychedelic sacrament, or “plant medicine,” as the ayahuasqueros call their tea.

Pollan’s Trips

The author takes a few trips, parts of which I’ve already referred to above. Here are a couple other points that stood out to me. This quote exemplifies the way modern LSD culture mixes serious ideas about medicine with a bit of “goofy New Age” culture:

In addition to having me consent to the standard “agreements” (bowing to her authority for the duration; remaining in the room until she gave me permission to leave; no sexual contact; and so on), she had me fill out a detailed medical form, a legal release, and a fifteen-page autobiographical questionnaire that took me the better part of a day to complete. All of which made me feel I was in good hands—even when those hands were flapping a crow’s wing around my head.

Although this quote wasn’t from the narrative of a trip, but from actual travel to interview a psychedelic mushroom expert, it made me laugh in a similar way to the one above:

A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a “mycopesticide”—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that, after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them, but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in its environment and then bursting a mushroom from the top of its head that releases its spores to the wind.

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 later gets high on a drug he calls “the toad”, introducing it with the line: “No, I had never heard of it either. It is so obscure, in fact, that the federal government did not list 5-MeO-DMT as a controlled substance until 2011.”

Nine months of the year, the toad lives underground, protected from the desert sun and heat, but when the winter rains come, it emerges at night from its burrow for a brief orgy of eating and copulation...

“They’re not very hard to catch...They freeze in the beam of light so you can just grab them.” The toads, which are warty, sand colored, and roughly the size of a man’s hand, have a large gland on each side of their necks, and smaller ones on their legs. “You gently squeeze the gland while holding a mirror in front of it to catch the spray.” The toad is apparently none the worse for being milked. Overnight, the venom dries on the glass, turning into flaky crystals the color of brown sugar.

In its natural state, the venom is toxic—a defense chemical sprayed by the toad when it feels threatened. But when the crystals are volatilized, the toxins are destroyed, leaving behind the 5-MeO-DMT. [The guide] vaporizes the crystals in a glass pipe while the recipient inhales; before you’ve had a chance to exhale, you are gone…

...the toad has been known to Western science only since 1992. That’s when Andrew Weil and Wade Davis published a paper called “Identity of a New World Psychoactive Toad.” They had been inspired to look for such a fantastical creature by the images of frogs in Mayan art.

Consciousness:

Although I won’t focus on it too much here, much of the book is about how psychedelics relate to the way the brain works, and how they might be used to treat disorders like depression and alcoholism. Psychedelics open new pathways in the brain, and those new modes of thinking can help break old patterns: psychedelics “may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set.”

In fact, Pollan offers his opinion that young children are essentially tripping all the time: “...I think young children have ready access to these kinds of experiences [i.e., trips]...In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik draws a useful distinction between the “spotlight consciousness” of adults and the “lantern consciousness” of young children.”

Some of the ideas about consciousness weren’t new to me, as they mirrored ideas I’ve recently read on some of my favorite blogs: much like Scott Alexander’s recent post on ‘trapped priors’, and Jacob Falkovich’s recent post on confirmation bias, Pollan talks about the ‘auto-correct of our perception’:

The entropy paper asks us to conceive of the mind as an uncertainty-reducing machine …

This auto-correct feature is a hallmark of our perception, which in the sane, adult mind is based as much on educated guesswork as the raw data of the senses. By adulthood, the mind has gotten very good at observing and testing reality and developing confident predictions about it that optimize our investments of energy (mental and otherwise) and therefore our survival. So rather than starting from scratch to build a new perception from every batch of raw data delivered by the senses, the mind jumps to the most sensible conclusion based on past experience combined with a tiny sample of that data.

A ‘sensible’ conclusion is not always the best conclusion. Psychedelics can help us break out of those set modes of “educated guesswork” to see the “raw data” in a new way. This is supported both in the popular conception of what tripping is like, and in brain scans of experimental subjects who are on trips. This understanding of the brain’s function explains why psychedelics can help with issues of “too much order” (depression, anxiety, addiction) but are dangerous for people suffering from problems of “too much disorder” (psychosis).

How to Change Your Mind definitely made me more interested in psychedelics. For one, it turns out that they’re much safer than I’d assumed (especially when taken with a guide in a safe environment). For two, the trips described in this book (experience your consciousness spread over the landscape like paint. Learn the mysteries of the universe) are more compelling, to me personally, than what I had seen in popular culture (hallucinate bright colors and talking animals and…)

On the other hand, (a) I’m not suffering from any disorders that psychedelics could help me overcome, (b) I’m still young and (c) my current modes of thinking are still really fruitful (I can’ t even find time to write about most of the things I’d like to, even when writing an hour a day). So I have some interest, but don’t feel a burning desire to try psychedelics right away.

Stats:

Rating: 8/10

New words I learned: 11

Days to read: 8

Where I heard about it: searching for ‘books that will change your mind’