How to Change Your Mind_ What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

✏️ Highlights

Called teonanácatl by the Aztecs, or “flesh of the gods,” the mushroom was brutally suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church after the Spanish conquest and driven underground.

Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson sampled the magic mushroom in the town of Huautla de Jiménez in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

(In 1957, knowledge of LSD was mostly confined to the community of researchers and mental health professionals.)

The advent of LSD can be linked to the revolution in brain science that begins in the 1950s, when scientists discovered the role of neurotransmitters in the brain.

psychedelics found their way into psychotherapy, where they were used to treat a variety of disorders, including alcoholism, anxiety, and depression.

By the end of the decade, psychedelic drugs—which had been legal in most places—were outlawed and forced underground.

psychotherapists, and so-called psychonauts, believing that something precious had been lost from both science and culture, resolved to recover it.

A new generation of scientists, many of them inspired by their own personal experience of the compounds, are testing their potential to heal mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, trauma, and addiction.

By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the “neural correlates” of the sense of self and spiritual experience.

I must have been in junior high school when a scientist reported (mistakenly, as it turned out) that LSD scrambled your chromosomes; the entire media, as well as my health-ed teacher, made sure we heard all about it.

worked on me: I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked.

Years later, in my late twenties and feeling more settled, I did try magic mushrooms two or three times. A friend had given me a Mason jar full of dried, gnarly Psilocybes, and on

perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set. Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

I had failed to recognize the potential of these molecules as a tool for both understanding the mind and, potentially, changing it.

spring of 2010, a front-page story appeared in the New York Times headlined “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again.” It reported that researchers had been giving large doses of psilocybin—the active compound in magic mushrooms—to terminal cancer patients as a way to help them deal with their “existential distress” at the approach of death.

many of the volunteers reported that over the course of a single guided psychedelic “journey” they reconceived how they viewed their cancer and the prospect of dying. Several of them said they had lost their fear of death completely.

One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms,

One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection.

yielding surprising insights into the “neural correlates”

was learning about the third-person history of psychedelic research made me want to explore this novel landscape of the mind

Coming from a baby boomer, that might sound improbable, a dereliction of generational duty.

particularly remember was the preternatural vividness of the greens in the woods, and in particular the velvety chartreuse softness of the ferns.

Because we were alone in the country, this was all doable. I don’t recall much about a follow-up trip on a Saturday in Riverside Park in Manhattan except that it was considerably less enjoyable and unselfconscious,

Compared with other drugs, 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.

Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.

the very last thing I would want to do is take a psychedelic drug—that is, surrender control of my mind and then in that psychologically vulnerable state stare straight into the abyss.

“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,”

They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”

Never mind the word “psilocybin”; it was the words “mystical” and “spiritual” and “meaning” that leaped out from the pages of a pharmacology journal.

Thirty volunteers who had never before used psychedelics had been given a pill containing either a synthetic version of psilocybin or an “active placebo”—methylphenidate,

or Ritalin—to fool them into thinking they had received the psychedelic.

I’m also sensitive to the limitations of the scientific-materialist perspective and believe that nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.

psychedelics are far more frightening to people than they are dangerous.

It is virtually impossible to die from an overdose of LSD or psilocybin, for example, and neither drug is addictive. After trying them once, animals will not seek a second dose, and repeated use by people robs the drugs of their effect.

some people have on psychedelics can risk flipping those at risk into psychosis, so no one with a family history or predisposition to mental illness should ever take them.

It is also the case that people on psychedelics are liable to do stupid and dangerous things: walk out into traffic, fall from high places, and, on rare occasions, kill themselves. “Bad trips” are very real and can be one of “the most challenging experiences of [a] lifetime,”

If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt.

If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday

If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch.

The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing.

immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!)

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD.

new drugs, Hofmann had been tasked with synthesizing, one by one, the molecules in the alkaloids produced by ergot. Ergot is

new drugs, Hofmann had been tasked with synthesizing, one by one, the molecules in the alkaloids produced by ergot. Ergot is a fungus that can infect grain, often rye, occasionally causing those who consume bread made from it to appear mad or possessed. (One theory of the Salem witch trials blames ergot poisoning for the behavior of the women accused.) But midwives had long used ergot to induce labor and stanch bleeding postpartum, so Sandoz was hoping to isolate a marketable drug from the fungus’s alkaloids. In the fall of 1938, Hofmann made the twenty-fifth molecule in this series, naming it lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 for short. Preliminary testing of the compound on animals did not show much promise (they became restless, but that was about it), so the formula for LSD-25 was put on the shelf. And there it remained for five years, until one

thought all houses had laboratories, so whenever I went over to a friend’s house, I would ask where the laboratory was. I didn’t understand why they would always point me to the bathroom instead—the lavatory.” Winning John’s approval became a motive force in Paul’s life, which perhaps explains the value Stamets places on mainstream scientific

R&D facility. Beginning in 1976, Stamets

chemist gave María Sabina psilocybin in pill form. She took two of the pills and declared they did indeed contain the spirit of the mushroom.* It didn’t take long for thousands of other people—including, eventually, celebrities such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger—to find their way to Huautla and to María Sabina’s door.* For María Sabina and her village, the attention was ruinous.

chemist gave María Sabina psilocybin in pill form. She took two of the pills and declared they did indeed contain the spirit of the mushroom.* It didn’t take long for thousands of other people—including, eventually, celebrities such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger—to find their way to Huautla and to María Sabina’s

mushroom-poisoning reports for the North American Mycological Association

they give voice to a cosmic vision of the triumph of love that one associates derisively with the platitudes of Hallmark cards. All the same, the basic insights afforded to me during the session still seem for the most part compelling. What was the philosophy professor’s compelling insight? “Love conquers all.” James

psilocybin] causing a rapid development of the hominid brain for analytical thinking and societal bonding. Did you know that 23 primates (including humans) consume mushrooms and know how to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’?” I did not. But the brief, elliptical e-mail nicely prefigured the tenor of my weekend with Stamets as I struggled to absorb a torrent of mycological fact and speculation that, like a rushing river, is impossible to ford without being knocked sideways. The sheer brilliance of Stamets’s mushroom’s-eye view of the world can be dazzling, but after a while it can also make you feel claustrophobic, as only the true monomaniac or autodidact—and Stamets is both—can do. Everything is connected is ever the subtext with such people; in this case what

think that animals tripping on psychedelic mushrooms would be at a distinct disadvantage

with vivid archetypes from the attic of the collective unconscious,

researcher, obtained some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience. He witnessed the beginning of life on earth as well as his own conception. “It was the deepest mystical thing I’ve ever seen,” he told friends later. “I saw myself as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of intelligence. I saw my mother and father having intercourse.” Clearly this was what the angel had foretold—“something tremendously important to the future of mankind.” Hubbard realized it was up to him to bring the new gospel of LSD, and the chemical itself, to as many people as he possibly could. He had been given what he called a “special chosen role.” Thus began Al Hubbard’s career as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. Through his extensive connections in both government and business, he persuaded Sandoz Laboratories to give him a mind-boggling quantity of LSD—a liter bottle of it, in one account, forty-three cases in another, six thousand vials in a third.

Vancouver Yacht Club. Like so many others,

Huxley immediately recognized the value of an ally as skilled in the ways of the world as the man he liked to call “the good Captain.”

Explorers have not always been the most scientific, excellent or wholly detached people.”)

Called teonanácatl by the Aztecs, or “flesh of the gods,” the mushroom was brutally suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church after the Spanish conquest and driven underground.

Albert Hofmann’s discovery of LSD, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson sampled the magic mushroom in the town of Huautla de Jiménez in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca.

(In 1957, knowledge of LSD was mostly confined to the community of researchers and mental health professionals.)

The advent of LSD can be linked to the revolution in brain science that begins in the 1950s, when scientists discovered the role of neurotransmitters in the brain.

psychedelics found their way into psychotherapy, where they were used to treat a variety of disorders, including alcoholism, anxiety, and depression.

By the end of the decade, psychedelic drugs—which had been legal in most places—were outlawed and forced underground.

psychotherapists, and so-called psychonauts, believing that something precious had been lost from both science and culture, resolved to recover it.

A new generation of scientists, many of them inspired by their own personal experience of the compounds, are testing their potential to heal mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, trauma, and addiction.

By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the “neural correlates” of the sense of self and spiritual experience.

I must have been in junior high school when a scientist reported (mistakenly, as it turned out) that LSD scrambled your chromosomes; the entire media, as well as my health-ed teacher, made sure we heard all about it.

worked on me: I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked.

Years later, in my late twenties and feeling more settled, I did try magic mushrooms two or three times. A friend had given me a Mason jar full of dried, gnarly Psilocybes, and on

perhaps these remarkable molecules might be wasted on the young, that they may have more to offer us later in life, after the cement of our mental habits and everyday behaviors has set. Carl Jung once wrote that it is not the young but people in middle age who need to have an “experience of the numinous” to help them negotiate the second half of their lives.

I had failed to recognize the potential of these molecules as a tool for both understanding the mind and, potentially, changing it.

spring of 2010, a front-page story appeared in the New York Times headlined “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again.” It reported that researchers had been giving large doses of psilocybin—the active compound in magic mushrooms—to terminal cancer patients as a way to help them deal with their “existential distress” at the approach of death.

many of the volunteers reported that over the course of a single guided psychedelic “journey” they reconceived how they viewed their cancer and the prospect of dying. Several of them said they had lost their fear of death completely.

One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms,

One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical experience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain’s activity and patterns of connection.

yielding surprising insights into the “neural correlates”

was learning about the third-person history of psychedelic research made me want to explore this novel landscape of the mind

Coming from a baby boomer, that might sound improbable, a dereliction of generational duty.

particularly remember was the preternatural vividness of the greens in the woods, and in particular the velvety chartreuse softness of the ferns.

Because we were alone in the country, this was all doable. I don’t recall much about a follow-up trip on a Saturday in Riverside Park in Manhattan except that it was considerably less enjoyable and unselfconscious,

Compared with other drugs, 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.

Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place.

the very last thing I would want to do is take a psychedelic drug—that is, surrender control of my mind and then in that psychologically vulnerable state stare straight into the abyss.

“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,”

They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.”

Never mind the word “psilocybin”; it was the words “mystical” and “spiritual” and “meaning” that leaped out from the pages of a pharmacology journal.

Thirty volunteers who had never before used psychedelics had been given a pill containing either a synthetic version of psilocybin or an “active placebo”—methylphenidate,

or Ritalin—to fool them into thinking they had received the psychedelic.

I’m also sensitive to the limitations of the scientific-materialist perspective and believe that nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.

psychedelics are far more frightening to people than they are dangerous.

It is virtually impossible to die from an overdose of LSD or psilocybin, for example, and neither drug is addictive. After trying them once, animals will not seek a second dose, and repeated use by people robs the drugs of their effect.

some people have on psychedelics can risk flipping those at risk into psychosis, so no one with a family history or predisposition to mental illness should ever take them.

It is also the case that people on psychedelics are liable to do stupid and dangerous things: walk out into traffic, fall from high places, and, on rare occasions, kill themselves. “Bad trips” are very real and can be one of “the most challenging experiences of [a] lifetime,”

If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch. This is why the various travel metaphors for the psychedelic experience are so apt.

If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday

If you need to be reminded how completely mental habit blinds us to experience, just take a trip to an unfamiliar country. Suddenly you wake up! And the algorithms of everyday life all but start over, as if from scratch.

The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We’re constantly jumping ahead to the next thing.

immersing us in the flow of a present that is literally wonderful—wonder being the by-product of precisely the kind of unencumbered first sight, or virginal noticing, to which the adult brain has closed itself. (It’s so inefficient!)

Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who, in 1943, accidentally found that he had discovered (five years earlier) the psychoactive molecule that came to be known as LSD.

new drugs, Hofmann had been tasked with synthesizing, one by one, the molecules in the alkaloids produced by ergot. Ergot is

new drugs, Hofmann had been tasked with synthesizing, one by one, the molecules in the alkaloids produced by ergot. Ergot is a fungus that can infect grain, often rye, occasionally causing those who consume bread made from it to appear mad or possessed. (One theory of the Salem witch trials blames ergot poisoning for the behavior of the women accused.) But midwives had long used ergot to induce labor and stanch bleeding postpartum, so Sandoz was hoping to isolate a marketable drug from the fungus’s alkaloids. In the fall of 1938, Hofmann made the twenty-fifth molecule in this series, naming it lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 for short. Preliminary testing of the compound on animals did not show much promise (they became restless, but that was about it), so the formula for LSD-25 was put on the shelf. And there it remained for five years, until one

thought all houses had laboratories, so whenever I went over to a friend’s house, I would ask where the laboratory was. I didn’t understand why they would always point me to the bathroom instead—the lavatory.” Winning John’s approval became a motive force in Paul’s life, which perhaps explains the value Stamets places on mainstream scientific

R&D facility. Beginning in 1976, Stamets

chemist gave María Sabina psilocybin in pill form. She took two of the pills and declared they did indeed contain the spirit of the mushroom.* It didn’t take long for thousands of other people—including, eventually, celebrities such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger—to find their way to Huautla and to María Sabina’s door.* For María Sabina and her village, the attention was ruinous.

chemist gave María Sabina psilocybin in pill form. She took two of the pills and declared they did indeed contain the spirit of the mushroom.* It didn’t take long for thousands of other people—including, eventually, celebrities such as Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Mick Jagger—to find their way to Huautla and to María Sabina’s

mushroom-poisoning reports for the North American Mycological Association

they give voice to a cosmic vision of the triumph of love that one associates derisively with the platitudes of Hallmark cards. All the same, the basic insights afforded to me during the session still seem for the most part compelling. What was the philosophy professor’s compelling insight? “Love conquers all.” James

psilocybin] causing a rapid development of the hominid brain for analytical thinking and societal bonding. Did you know that 23 primates (including humans) consume mushrooms and know how to distinguish ‘good’ from ‘bad’?” I did not. But the brief, elliptical e-mail nicely prefigured the tenor of my weekend with Stamets as I struggled to absorb a torrent of mycological fact and speculation that, like a rushing river, is impossible to ford without being knocked sideways. The sheer brilliance of Stamets’s mushroom’s-eye view of the world can be dazzling, but after a while it can also make you feel claustrophobic, as only the true monomaniac or autodidact—and Stamets is both—can do. Everything is connected is ever the subtext with such people; in this case what

think that animals tripping on psychedelic mushrooms would be at a distinct disadvantage

with vivid archetypes from the attic of the collective unconscious,

researcher, obtained some LSD, and had a literally life-changing experience. He witnessed the beginning of life on earth as well as his own conception. “It was the deepest mystical thing I’ve ever seen,” he told friends later. “I saw myself as a tiny mite in a big swamp with a spark of intelligence. I saw my mother and father having intercourse.” Clearly this was what the angel had foretold—“something tremendously important to the future of mankind.” Hubbard realized it was up to him to bring the new gospel of LSD, and the chemical itself, to as many people as he possibly could. He had been given what he called a “special chosen role.” Thus began Al Hubbard’s career as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD. Through his extensive connections in both government and business, he persuaded Sandoz Laboratories to give him a mind-boggling quantity of LSD—a liter bottle of it, in one account, forty-three cases in another, six thousand vials in a third.

Vancouver Yacht Club. Like so many others,

Huxley immediately recognized the value of an ally as skilled in the ways of the world as the man he liked to call “the good Captain.”

Explorers have not always been the most scientific, excellent or wholly detached people.”)