How to Change Your Mind (Kindle highlights)

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, many in the psychiatric establishment regarded LSD and psilocybin as miracle drugs. (p. 3)
I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked. I also had my own personal reason for steering clear of psychedelics: a painfully anxious adolescence that left me (and at least one psychiatrist) doubting my grip on sanity. (p. 5)
I’m less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked. (p. 5)
Set is the mind-set or expectation one brings to the experience, and setting is the environment in which it takes place. 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. (p. 6)
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. (p. 7)
“Individuals transcend their primary identification with their bodies and experience ego-free states,” one of the researchers was quoted as saying. They “return with a new perspective and profound acceptance.” (p. 8)
LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time. (p. 9)
The study demonstrated that a high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably “occasion” a mystical experience—typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe. (p. 10)
What was most remarkable about the results reported in the article is that participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable “to the birth of a first child or death of a parent.” (p. 10)
Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five “most spiritually significant experiences” of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives. (p. 11)
What is striking about this whole line of clinical research is the premise that it is not the pharmacological effect of the drug itself but the kind of mental experience it occasions—involving the temporary dissolution of one’s ego—that may be the key to changing one’s mind. (p. 11)
I was surprised to learn that psychedelics are far more frightening to people than they are dangerous. (p. 13)
It is virtually impossible to die from an overdose of LSD or psilocybin, for example, and neither drug is addictive. (p. 14)
Over time, we tend to optimize and conventionalize our responses to whatever life brings. Each of us develops our shorthand ways of slotting and processing everyday experiences and solving problems, and while this is no doubt adaptive—it helps us get the job done with a minimum of fuss—eventually it becomes rote. It dulls us. The muscles of attention atrophy. (p. 15)
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. (p. 15)
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. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future. (p. 15)
The good thing is I’m seldom surprised. The bad thing is I’m seldom surprised. (p. 16)
EVERYDAY WAKING CONSCIOUSNESS is but one of several possible ways to construct a world, then perhaps there is value in cultivating a greater amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity. With that in mind, How to Change Your (p. 17)
IF EVERYDAY WAKING CONSCIOUSNESS is but one of several possible ways to construct a world, then perhaps there is value in cultivating a greater amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity. (p. 17)
IF THE START of the modern renaissance of psychedelic research can be dated with any precision, one good place to do it would be the year 2006. (p. 21)
With its 2006 decision, the Supreme Court seems to have opened up a religious path—narrow, perhaps, but based on the Bill of Rights—to the federal recognition of psychedelic drugs, at least when they’re being used as a sacrament by a group deemed a religion by the government. (p. 28)
The symposium’s opening ceremony was on January 13, two days after Hofmann’s 100th birthday (he would live to be 102). Two thousand people packed the hall at the Basel Congress Center, rising to applaud as a stooped stick of a man in a dark suit and a necktie, barely five feet tall, slowly crossed the stage and took his seat. (p. 22)
During the weekend symposium following the observation of Hofmann’s birthday, researchers from a variety of disciplines—including neuroscience, psychiatry, pharmacology, and consciousness studies, as well as the arts—explored the impact of Hofmann’s invention on society and culture and its potential for expanding our understanding of consciousness and treating several intractable mental disorders. (p. 26)
“Mysticism,” he likes to say, “is the antidote to fundamentalism.” (p. 37)
Beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the early 1970s, psychedelic compounds had been used to treat a variety of conditions—including alcoholism, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and anxiety at the end of life—frequently with impressive results. But few of the studies were well controlled by modern standards, and some of them were compromised by the enthusiasm of the researchers involved. (p. 44)
“You have to imagine a caveman transported into the middle of Manhattan. He sees buses, cell phones, skyscrapers, airplanes. Then zap him back to his cave. What does he say about the experience? ‘It was big, it was impressive, it was loud.’ He doesn’t have the vocabulary for ‘skyscraper,’ ‘elevator,’ ‘cell phone.’ Maybe he has an intuitive sense there was some sort of significance or order to the scene. But there are words we need that don’t yet exist. (p. 54)
The experience of the sacred reported both by the great mystics and by people on high-dose psychedelic journeys is the same experience and is “real”—that is, not just a figment of the imagination. (p. 55)
“There is so much authority that comes out of the primary mystical experience that it can be threatening to existing hierarchical structures.” (p. 59)
The sheer suggestibility of psychedelics is one of their defining characteristics, so in one sense it is no wonder that so many of the first cohort of volunteers at Hopkins had powerful mystical experiences: the experiment was designed by three men intensely interested in mystical states of consciousness. (And it is likewise no wonder that the European researchers I interviewed all failed to see as many instances of mystical experience in their subjects as the Americans did in theirs.) (p. 64)
The first and, to his mind, “handiest” is ineffability: “The subject of it immediately says that it defies expression, that no adequate report of its contents can be given in words.” (p. 69)
The noetic quality is James’s second mark: “Mystical states seem to those who experience them to be also states of knowledge . . . They are illuminations, revelations full of significance and importance . . . and as a rule they carry with them a curious sense of authority.” (p. 69)
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; what was merely known is now felt, takes on the authority of a deeply rooted conviction. And, more often than not, that conviction concerns the supreme importance of love. (p. 71)
This last point James alludes to in his discussion of the third mark of mystical consciousness, which is “transiency.” For although the mystical state cannot be sustained for long, its traces persist and recur, “and from one recurrence to another it is susceptible of continuous development in what is felt as inner richness and importance.” (p. 71)
The fourth and last mark in James’s typology is the essential “passivity” of the mystical experience. “The mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were grasped and held by a superior power.” This sense of having temporarily surrendered to a superior force often leaves the person feeling as if he or she has been permanently transformed. (p. 72)
Our task in life consists precisely in a form of letting go of fear and expectations, an attempt to purely give oneself to the impact of the present. (p. 72)
Hayes particularly recommends the experience to people in middle age for whom, as Carl Jung suggested, experience of the numinous can help them negotiate the second half of their lives. (p. 73)
On the first interpretation, the mind-altering power of psilocybin argues for a firmly materialist understanding of consciousness and spirituality, because the changes observed in the mind can be traced directly to the presence of a chemical—psilocybin. What is more material than a chemical? One could reasonably conclude from the action of psychedelics that the gods are nothing more than chemically induced figments of the hominid imagination. (p. 85)
So here was a curious paradox. The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality—the very basis of religious belief. (p. 85)
A forest is a far more complex, sociable, and intelligent entity than we knew, and it is fungi that organize the arboreal society. (p. 91)
“If a gilled mushroom has purplish brown to black spores, and the flesh bruises bluish, the mushroom in question is very likely a psilocybin-producing species.” (p. 95)
It was believed that psychedelic mushrooms were native to southern Mexico, where R. Gordon Wasson had “discovered” them in 1955. (p. 101)
The Spanish sought to crush the mushroom cults, viewing them, rightly, as a mortal threat to the authority of the church. (p. 108)
The Inquisition would bring dozens of charges against Native Americans for crimes involving both peyote and psilocybin, in what amounted to an early battle in the war on drugs—or, to be more precise, the war on certain plants and fungi. (p. 109)
It took an act of faith to believe that eating the bread and wine of the Eucharist gave the worshipper access to the divine, an access that had to be mediated by a priest and the church liturgy. Compare that with the Aztec sacrament, a psychoactive mushroom that granted anyone who ate it direct, unmediated access to the divine—to visions of another world, a realm of the gods. So who had the more powerful sacrament? (p. 109)
This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the senses that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts. Hence, the stoned ape: by giving us the gifts of language and self-reflection psilocybin mushrooms made us who we are, transforming our primate ancestors into Homo sapiens. (p. 115)
The stoned ape theory is not really susceptible to proof or disproof. (p. 116)
In McKenna’s vision, it is the mushroom itself that helped form precisely the kind of mind—endowed with the tools of language and fired by imagination—that could best advance its interests. How diabolically brilliant! (p. 117)
Even if psilocybin in mushrooms began as “an accident of a metabolic pathway,” the fact that it wasn’t discarded during the course of the species’ evolution suggests it must have offered some benefit. “My best guess,” Beug says, “is that the mushrooms that produced the most psilocybin got selectively eaten and so their spores got more widely disseminated.” Eaten by whom, or what? And why? Beug says that many animals are known to eat psilocybin mushrooms, including horses, cattle, and dogs. Some, like cows, appear unaffected, but many animals appear to enjoy an occasional change in consciousness too. (p. 122)
Eaten in small doses, psychedelic mushrooms might well increase fitness in animals, by increasing sensory acuity and possibly focus as well. (p. 123)
There are times in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adaptation. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population. (p. 124)
I’m thinking, for example, of the “earth’s Internet,” “the neurological network of nature,” and the “forest’s immune system”—three Romantic-sounding metaphors that it would be foolish to bet against. (p. 127)
I discovered that all I needed to do to restore a sense of semi-normalcy was to open my eyes. To open or close my eyes was like changing the channel. (p. 130)
Not quite a hallucination, “projection” is probably the psychological term for this phenomenon: when we mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so that they appear to glisten with meaning. (p. 135)
Before this afternoon, I had always assumed access to a spiritual dimension hinged on one’s acceptance of the supernatural—of God, of a Beyond—but now I’m not so sure. The Beyond, whatever it consists of, might not be nearly as far away or inaccessible as we think. (p. 136)
“Some of the best minds in psychiatry had seriously studied these compounds in therapeutic models, with government funding.” But after the culture and the psychiatric establishment turned against psychedelics in the mid-1960s, an entire body of knowledge was effectively erased from the field, as if all that research and clinical experience had never happened. (p. 142)
Psychologists call these self-fulfilling prophecies “expectancy effects,” and they turn out to be especially powerful in the case of psychedelics. (p. 143)
Another challenge was the irrational exuberance that seemed to infect any researchers who got involved with LSD, an enthusiasm that might have improved the results of their experiments at the same time it fueled the skepticism of colleagues who remained psychedelic virgins. (p. 144)
How do you do a controlled experiment with a psychedelic? How do you effectively blind your patients and clinicians or control for the powerful expectancy effect? (p. 144)
Here was an arresting application of the psychotomimetic paradigm: use a single high-dose LSD session to induce an episode of madness in an alcoholic that would simulate delirium tremens, shocking the patient into sobriety. (p. 149)
The work with psychedelics would eventually spark a revival of interest in the subjective dimensions of the mind—in consciousness. (p. 149)
Critics of treating alcoholics with LSD concluded that the treatment didn’t work as well under rigorously controlled conditions, which was true enough, while supporters of the practice concluded that attention to set and setting was essential to the success of LSD therapy, which was also true. • • • IN THE MID-1950S, Bill Wilson, the cofounder of Alcoholics Anonymous, learned about Osmond and Hoffer’s work with alcoholics. The idea that a drug could occasion a life-changing spiritual experience was not exactly news to Bill W., as he was known in the fellowship. He credited his own sobriety to a mystical experience he had on belladonna, a plant-derived alkaloid with hallucinogenic properties that was administered to him at Towns Hospital in Manhattan in 1934. Few members of AA realize that the whole idea of a spiritual awakening leading one to surrender to a “higher power”—a cornerstone of Alcoholics Anonymous—can be traced to a psychedelic drug trip. (p. 152)
Critics of treating alcoholics with LSD concluded that the treatment didn’t work as well under rigorously controlled conditions, which was true enough, while supporters of the practice concluded that attention to set and setting was essential to the success of LSD therapy, which was also true. (p. 152)
Bill W. thought there might be a place for LSD therapy in AA, but his colleagues on the board of the fellowship strongly disagreed, believing that to condone the use of any mind-altering substance risked muddying the organization’s brand and message. (p. 153)
If the period we call “the 1960s” actually began sometime in the 1950s, the fad for LSD therapy that Cary Grant unleashed in 1959 is one good place to mark a shift in the cultural breeze. (p. 157)
He came to believe that “under LSD the fondest theories of the therapist are confirmed by his patient.” (p. 158)
It suggests an interesting way to think about psychedelics: as a kind of “active placebo,” to borrow a term proposed by Andrew Weil in his 1972 book, The Natural Mind. They do something, surely, but most of what that is may be self-generated. Or as Stanislav Grof put it, psychedelics are “nonspecific amplifiers” of mental processes.) (p. 159)
Why were engineers in particular so taken with psychedelics? Schwartz, himself trained as an aerospace engineer, thinks it has to do with the fact that unlike the work of scientists, who can simplify the problems they work on, “problem solving in engineering always involves irreducible complexity. You’re always balancing complex variables you can never get perfect, so you’re desperately searching to find patterns. LSD shows you patterns. (p. 182)
In 1960, the future of psychedelic research looked bright. Yet within the brief span of five years, the political and cultural weather completely shifted, a moral panic about LSD engulfed America, and virtually all psychedelic research and therapy were either halted or driven underground. What happened? “Timothy Leary” is the too-obvious answer to that question. (p. 185)
Of Leary’s scientific work, Sidney Cohen, himself a psychedelic researcher, concluded that “it was the sort of research that made scientists wince.” (p. 191)
But this upheaval would almost certainly have happened without Timothy Leary. He was by no means the only route by which psychedelics were seeping into American culture; he was just the most notorious. (p. 206)
1998 article on the history of psychedelics that “by blurring the boundaries between religion and science, between sickness and health, and between healer and sufferer, the psychedelic model entered the realm of applied mysticism”—a realm where psychiatry, increasingly committed to a biochemical understanding of the mind, was reluctant to venture. (p. 207)
“by blurring the boundaries between religion and science, between sickness and health, and between healer and sufferer, the psychedelic model entered the realm of applied mysticism”—a realm where psychiatry, increasingly committed to a biochemical understanding of the mind, was reluctant to venture. (p. 207)
Another factor was the rise of the placebo-controlled double-blind trial as the “gold standard” for testing drugs in the wake of the thalidomide scandal, a standard difficult for psychedelic research to meet. (p. 208)
After quantities of “bootleg LSD” showed up on the street in 1962–1963 and people in the throes of “bad trips” began appearing in emergency rooms and psych wards, mainstream psychiatry felt compelled to abandon psychedelic research. LSD was now regarded as a cause of mental illness rather than a cure. (p. 209)
To confine these drugs to the laboratory, or to use them only for the benefit of the sick, became hard to justify, when they could do so much for everyone, including the researchers themselves! (p. 213)
So perhaps Leary’s real sin was to have the courage of his convictions—his and everyone else’s in the psychedelic research community. It’s often said that a political scandal is what happens when someone in power inadvertently speaks the truth. (p. 213)
So perhaps Leary’s real sin was to have the courage of his convictions—his and everyone else’s in the psychedelic research community. It’s often said that a political scandal is what happens when someone in power inadvertently speaks the truth. Leary was all too often willing to say out loud to anyone in earshot what everyone else believed but knew better than to speak or write about candidly. (p. 213)
LSD truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind (the superego, ego, and unconscious) and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority and then to lines of every imaginable kind: between patient and therapist, research and recreation, sickness and health, self and other, subject and object, the spiritual and the material. (p. 214)
Normally, rites of passage help knit societies together as the young cross over hurdles and through gates erected and maintained by their elders, coming out on the other side to take their place in the community of adults. Not so with the psychedelic journey in the 1960s, which at its conclusion dropped its young travelers onto a psychic landscape unrecognizable to their parents. (p. 216)
In his introduction to The Secret Chief Revealed, Myron Stolaroff sketched the influence of underground guides like Leo Zeff on the field as a whole, suggesting that the legitimate psychedelic research that resumed in the late 1990s, when he was writing, had “evolved as a result of anecdotal evidence from underground therapists” like Zeff, as well as from the first wave of psychedelic research done in the 1950s and 1960s. (p. 227)
Members of this community tend to be more spiritual than religious in any formal sense, focused on the common core of mysticism or “cosmic consciousness” that they believe lies behind all the different religious traditions. So what appeared to me as a bunch of conflicting symbols of divinity are in fact different means of expressing or interpreting the same underlying spiritual reality, “the perennial philosophy” that Aldous Huxley held to undergird all religions and to which psychedelics supposedly can offer direct access. (p. 231)
ONE NOTABLE DIFFERENCE about doing psychedelics at sixty, as opposed to when you’re eighteen or twenty, is that at sixty you’re more likely to have a cardiologist you might want to consult in advance of your trip. (p. 235)
I was disappointed my cardiologist had taken MDMA off the table but pleased that he had more or less given me a green light on the rest of my travel plans. (p. 237)
Fritz’s instructions were straightforward: Breathe deeply and rapidly while exhaling as strongly as you can. “At first it will feel unnatural and you’ll have to concentrate to maintain the rhythm, but after a few minutes your body will take over and do it automatically.” (p. 242)
Here I was, in range of my sixtieth birthday, taking LSD for the first time. It did feel something like a rite of passage, but a passage to where, exactly? (p. 246)
It made me realize what a powerful little technology a pair of eyeshades could be, at least in this context: it was like donning a pair of virtual reality goggles, allowing me immediately to take leave of this place and time. (p. 247)
A lot of the music was New Age drivel—the sort of stuff you might hear while getting a massage in a high-end spa—yet never had it sounded so evocative, so beautiful! (p. 247)
This was unfamiliar territory for me and not at all where I expected to find myself on LSD. (p. 249)
Psychedelic experiences are notoriously hard to render in words; to try is necessarily to do violence to what has been seen and felt, which is in some fundamental way pre- or post-linguistic or, as students of mysticism say, ineffable. (p. 251)
Platitudes that wouldn’t seem out of place on a Hallmark card glow with the force of revealed truth. Love is everything. Okay, but what else did you learn? No—you must not have heard me: it’s everything (p. 251)
Is a platitude so deeply felt still just a platitude? No, I decided. A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. (p. 251)
A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. (p. 252)
A psychedelic is liable to take all the boxes off the shelf, open and remove even the most familiar items, turning them over and imaginatively scrubbing them until they shine once again with the light of first sight. Is this reclassification of the familiar a waste of time? If it is, then so is a lot of art. It seems to me there is great value in such renovation, the more so as we grow older and come to think we’ve seen and felt it all before. (p. 252)
The notion of a few years of psychotherapy condensed into several hours seemed about right. (p. 254)
Our brains are prediction machines optimized by experience, and when it comes to faces, they have boatloads of experience: faces are always convex, so this hollow mask must be a prediction error to be corrected. (p. 262)
What had always been a thinking, feeling, perceiving subject based in here was now an object out there. I was paint! (p. 264)
Nothing in my experience led me to believe this novel form of consciousness originated outside me; it seems just as plausible, and surely more parsimonious, to assume it was a product of my brain, just like the ego it supplanted. (p. 265)
I had just come from a place where being was no more and now vowed never to forget what a gift (and mystery) it is, that there is something rather than nothing. (p. 280)
Last is the conviction that the experience is ineffable, even as thousands of words are expended in the attempt to communicate its power. (Guilty.) (p. 285)
What had changed for me was that now I understood exactly what these writers were talking about: their own mystical experiences, however achieved, however interpreted. Formerly inert, their words now emitted a new ray of relation, or at least I was now in a position to receive it. (p. 287)
My own interpretation of what I experienced—my now officially verified mystical experience—remains a work in progress, still in search of the right words. But 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. For me, “spiritual” is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. (p. 288)
While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and world, that no-man’s-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, “part and particle” of some larger entity. (p. 290)
The group of tryptamines we call “the classic psychedelics” have a strong affinity with one particular type of serotonin receptor, called the 5-HT2A. These receptors are found in large numbers in the human cortex, the outermost, and evolutionarily most recent, layer of the brain. Basically, the psychedelics resemble serotonin closely enough that they can attach themselves to this receptor site in such a way as to activate it to do various things. (p. 292)
This has led some scientists to speculate that the human body must produce some other, more bespoke chemical for the express purpose of activating the 5-HT2A receptor—perhaps an endogenous psychedelic that is released under certain circumstances, perhaps when dreaming. One candidate for that chemical is the psychedelic molecule DMT, which has been found in trace amounts in the pineal gland of rats. (p. 292)
Yet it is difficult to be quite so certain that anyone else possesses consciousness, much less other creatures, because there is no outward physical evidence that consciousness as we experience it exists. The thing of which we are most certain is beyond the reach of our science, supposedly our surest way of knowing anything. (p. 294)
True, anesthetics disrupt consciousness too, yet because such drugs shut it down, this kind of disturbance yields relatively little data. In contrast, someone on a psychedelic remains awake and able to report on what he or she is experiencing in real time. Nowadays, these subjective reports can be correlated with various measures of brain activity, using several different modes of imaging—tools unavailable to researchers during the first wave of psychedelic research in the 1950s and 1960s. (p. 295)
He likes to quote Grof’s grand claim that what the telescope was for astronomy, or the microscope for biology, psychedelics will be for understanding the mind. (p. 297)
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. (p. 299)
“Psychedelics overall are among the safest drugs we know of . . . It’s virtually impossible to die from an overdose of them; they cause no physical harm; and if anything they’re anti-addictive” (254). (p. 465)
In his 2012 book, Drugs Without the Hot Air, Nutt writes that “psychedelics overall are among the safest drugs we know of . . . It’s virtually impossible to die from an overdose of them; they cause no physical harm; and if anything they’re anti-addictive”. (p. 465)
Carhart-Harris and his colleagues had discovered that psilocybin reduces brain activity, with the falloff concentrated in one particular brain network that at the time he knew little about: the default mode network. (p. 301)
If a researcher gives you a list of adjectives and asks you to consider how they apply to you, it is your default mode network that leaps into action. (It also lights up when we receive “likes” on our social media feeds.) (p. 304)
The mystical experience may just be what it feels like when you deactivate the brain’s default mode network. This can be achieved any number of ways: through psychedelics and meditation, as Robin Carhart-Harris and Judson Brewer have demonstrated, but perhaps also by means of certain breathing exercises (like Holotropic Breathwork), sensory deprivation, fasting, prayer, overwhelming experiences of awe, extreme sports, near-death experiences, and so on. (p. 306)
People who are color-blind report being able to see certain colors for the first time when on psychedelics, and there is research to suggest that people hear music differently under the influence of these drugs. (p. 310)
People who are color-blind report being able to see certain colors for the first time when on psychedelics, and there is research to suggest that people hear music differently under the influence of these drugs. They process the timbre, or coloration, of music more acutely—a dimension of music that conveys emotion. (p. 310)
While suppressing entropy (in this context, a synonym for uncertainty) in the brain “serves to promote realism, foresight, careful reflection and an ability to recognize and overcome wishful and paranoid fantasies,” at the same time this achievement tends to “constrain cognition” and exert “a limiting or narrowing influence on consciousness.” (p. 311)
The entropy paper asks us to conceive of the mind as an uncertainty-reducing machine with a few serious bugs in it. (p. 312)
Magical thinking is one way for human minds to reduce their uncertainty about the world, but it is less than optimal for the success of the species. (p. 312)
A better way to suppress uncertainty and entropy in the human brain emerged with the evolution of the default mode network, Carhart-Harris contends, a brain-regulating system that is absent or undeveloped in lower animals and young children. Along with the default mode network, “a coherent sense of self or ‘ego’ emerges” and, with that, the human capacity for self-reflection and reason. (p. 312)
Carhart-Harris suggests that the psychological “disorders” at the low-entropy end of the spectrum are not the result of a lack of order in the brain but rather stem from an excess of order. (p. 313)
This is perhaps most clearly evident in depression, when the ego turns on itself and uncontrollable introspection gradually shades out reality (p. 313)
In his view, the forms of consciousness that psychedelics unleash are regressions to a “more primitive” mode of cognition. (p. 314)
The increase in entropy allows a thousand mental states to bloom, many of them bizarre and senseless, but some number of them revelatory, imaginative, and, at least potentially, transformative. (p. 317)
In this sense, entropy in the brain is a bit like variation in evolution: it supplies the diversity of raw materials on which selection can then operate to solve problems and bring novelty into the world. (p. 318)
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. (p. 320)
Aging is really a process of declining entropy, the fading over time of what we should regard as a positive attribute of mental life. (p. 321)
A flattering term for this regime of good enough predictions is “wisdom.” (p. 321)
Baby consciousness is so different from adult consciousness as to constitute a mental country of its own, one from which we are expelled sometime early in adolescence. Is there a way back in? The closest we can come to visiting that foreign land as adults may be during the psychedelic journey. (p. 323)
In The Philosophical Baby, Gopnik draws a useful distinction between the “spotlight consciousness” of adults and the “lantern consciousness” of young children. The first mode gives adults the ability to narrowly focus attention on a goal. (In his own remarks, Carhart-Harris called this “ego consciousness” or “consciousness with a point.”) In the second mode—lantern consciousness—attention is more widely diffused, allowing the child to take in information from virtually anywhere in her field of awareness, which is quite wide, wider than that of most adults. (By this measure, children are more conscious than adults, rather than less.) (p. 325)
A low-temperature search (so-called because it requires less energy) involves reaching for the most probable or nearest-to-hand answer, like the one that worked for a similar problem in the past. Low-temperature searches succeed more often than not. A high-temperature search requires more energy because it involves reaching for less likely but possibly more ingenious and creative answers—those found outside the box of preconception. Drawing on its wealth of experience, the adult mind performs low-temperature searches most of the time. (p. 325)
Gopnik believes that both the young child (five and under) and the adult on a psychedelic have a stronger predilection for the high-temperature search; in their quest to make sense of things, their minds explore not just the nearby and most likely but “the entire space of possibilities.” These high-temperature searches might be inefficient, incurring a higher rate of error and requiring more time and mental energy to perform. High-temperature searches can yield answers that are more magical than realistic. Yet there are times when hot searches are the only way to solve a problem, and occasionally they return answers of surpassing beauty and originality. (p. 326)
“The short summary is, babies and children are basically tripping all the time.” (p. 328)
For the well, psychedelics, by introducing more noise or entropy into the brain, might shake people out of their usual patterns of thought—“lubricate cognition,” in Carhart-Harris’s words—in ways that might enhance well-being, make us more open and boost creativity. (p. 328)
As for the unwell, the patients who stand to gain the most are probably those suffering from the kinds of mental disorders characterized by mental rigidity: addiction, depression, obsession. (p. 329)
The experience could work as a kind of reset—as when you “introduce a burst of noise into a system” that has gotten locked into a rigid pattern. (p. 329)
To cite one obvious example, 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. (p. 333)
But it isn’t clear that the effects of a psychedelic drug can ever be isolated, whether from the context in which it is administered, the presence of the therapists involved, or the volunteer’s expectations. (p. 333)
Western science and modern drug testing depend on the ability to isolate a single variable, but it isn’t clear that the effects of a psychedelic drug can ever be isolated, whether from the context in which it is administered, the presence of the therapists involved, or the volunteer’s expectations. (p. 333)
Is mental illness a disorder of chemistry, or is it a loss of meaning in one’s life? Psychedelic therapy is the wedding of those two approaches.” (p. 335)
Existential distress is what psychologists call the complex of depression, anxiety, and fear common in people confronting a terminal diagnosis. “Xanax isn’t the answer.” If there is an answer, Bossis believes, it is going to be more spiritual in nature than pharmacological. (p. 336)
The uncanny authority of the psychedelic experience might help explain why so many cancer patients in the trials reported that their fear of death had lifted or at least abated: they had stared directly at death and come to know something about it, in a kind of dress rehearsal. (p. 346)
Here we bump into one of the richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials: while it succeeds in no small part because it has the sanction and authority of science, its effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can explain. Science is being used to validate an experience that would appear to undermine the scientific perspective in what might be called White-Coat Shamanism. (p. 347)
But exactly why should that experience translate into relief from anxiety and depression? Is it the intimation of some kind of immortality that accounts for the effect? This seems too simple and fails to account for the variety of experiences people had, many of which did not dwell on an afterlife. (p. 350)
Existential distress at the end of life bears many of the hallmarks of a hyperactive default network, including obsessive self-reflection and an inability to jump the deepening grooves of negative thinking. The ego, faced with the prospect of its own extinction, turns inward and becomes hypervigilant, withdrawing its investment in the world and other people. (p. 353)
Even for atheists like Dinah Bazer—like me!—psychedelics can charge a world from which the gods long ago departed with the pulse of meaning, the immanence with which they once infused it. The sense of a cold and arbitrary universe governed purely by chance is banished. Especially in the absence of faith, these medicines, in the right hands, may offer powerful antidotes for the existential terrors that afflict not only the dying. (p. 355)
Bertrand Russell wrote that the best way to overcome one’s fear of death “is to make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life.” (p. 355)
Matt Johnson refers to these realizations as “duh moments” and says they are common among his volunteers and not at all insignificant. Smokers know perfectly well that their habit is unhealthy, disgusting, expensive, and unnecessary, but under the influence of psilocybin that knowing acquires a new weight, becomes “something they feel in the gut and the heart. Insights like this become more compelling, stickier, and harder to avoid thinking about. These sessions deprive people of the luxury of mindlessness”—our default state, and one in which addictions like smoking can flourish. (p. 364)
This is why it is important to understand that “psychedelic therapy” is not simply treatment with a psychedelic drug but rather a form of “psychedelic-assisted therapy,” as many of the researchers take pains to emphasize. (p. 364)
Perhaps this is one of the things psychedelics do: relax the brain’s inhibition on visualizing our thoughts, thereby rendering them more authoritative, memorable, and sticky. (p. 365)
“So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to be psychologically defended at all costs. We’re trapped in a story that sees ourselves as independent, isolated agents acting in the world. But that self is an illusion. It can be a useful illusion, when you’re swinging through the trees or escaping from a cheetah or trying to do your taxes. But at the systems level, there is no truth to it. You can take any number of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes, vehicles for passing on DNA; that we’re social creatures through and through, unable to survive alone; that we’re organisms in an ecosystem, linked together on this planet floating in the middle of nowhere. Wherever you look, you see that the level of interconnectedness is truly amazing, and yet we insist on thinking of ourselves as individual agents.” (p. 366)
It was Peter Hendricks, a young psychologist at the University of Alabama conducting a trial using psilocybin to treat cocaine addicts, who first suggested to me that the experience of awe might offer the psychological key to explain the power of psychedelics to alter deeply rooted patterns of behavior. (p. 373)
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.” (p. 373)
An experience of awe appears to be an excellent antidote for egotism. (p. 374)
The volunteers depicted their depression foremost as a state of “disconnection,” whether from other people, their earlier selves, their senses and feelings, their core beliefs and spiritual values, or nature. (p. 377)
I was reminded of Carhart-Harris’s hypothesis that depression might be the result of an overactive default mode network—the site in the brain where rumination appears to take place. (p. 378)
We shouldn’t forget that irrational exuberance has afflicted psychedelic research since the beginning, and the belief that these molecules are a panacea for whatever ails us is at least as old as Timothy Leary. (p. 382)
Because their number is so small, these volunteers benefit from the care and attention of exceptionally well-trained and dedicated therapists, who are also biased in favor of success. Also, the placebo effect is usually strongest in a new medicine and tends to fade over time, as observed in the case of antidepressants; they don’t work nearly as well today as they did upon their introduction in the 1980s. (p. 382)
“Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.” Both reflect a mind mired in rumination, one dwelling on the past, the other worrying about the future. What mainly distinguishes the two disorders is their tense. (p. 383)
A happy brain is a supple and flexible brain, he believes; depression, anxiety, obsession, and the cravings of addiction are how it feels to have a brain that has become excessively rigid or fixed in its pathways and linkages—a brain with more order than is good for it. On the spectrum he lays out (in his entropic brain article) ranging from excessive order to excessive entropy, depression, addiction, and disorders of obsession all fall on the too-much-order end. (p. 385)
Carhart-Harris uses the metaphor of annealing from metallurgy: psychedelics introduce energy into the system, giving it the flexibility necessary for it to bend and so change. The Hopkins researchers use a similar metaphor to make the same point: psychedelic therapy creates an interval of maximum plasticity in which, with proper guidance, new patterns of thought and behavior can be learned. (p. 385)
(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.) (p. 387)
When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently. (p. 390)
I, FOR ONE, sincerely hope that the kinds of experiences I’ve had on psychedelics will not be limited to sick people and will someday become more widely available. (p. 405)
After each of my psychedelic sessions came a period of several weeks in which I felt noticeably different—more present to the moment, much less inclined to dwell on what’s next. I was also notably more emotional and surprised myself on several occasions by how little it took to make me tear up or smile. I found myself thinking about things like death and time and infinity, but less in angst than in wonder. (p. 407)
This was a way of being I treasured, but, alas, every time it eventually faded. (p. 408)
After a month or so, it was pretty much back to baseline. (p. 408)
For me, the psychedelic experience opened a door to a specific mode of consciousness that I can now occasionally recapture in meditation. (p. 408)
I don’t know if this is exactly where I’m supposed to be when I’m meditating, but I’m always happy to find myself floating in this particular mental stream. I would never have found it if not for psychedelics. This strikes me as one of the great gifts of the experience they afford: the expansion of one’s repertoire of conscious states. (p. 409)
But this I can say with certainty: the mind is vaster, and the world ever so much more alive, than I knew when I began. (p. 414)