How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan · 2018 · 9 ideas · 9 min
Psychedelics, dismissed for fifty years as dangerous countercultural relics, are in fact powerful tools for dissolving the rigid mental habits behind depression, addiction, and the fear of death — if used deliberately and with care.
Why this book
Pollan approaches psychedelics as a skeptical, middle-aged journalist with no interest in 1960s nostalgia, and ends up persuaded that LSD and psilocybin (the compound in "magic mushrooms") do something neurologically specific and clinically valuable: they temporarily loosen the brain's most entrenched patterns, the neural habits that keep depressed people depressed, addicts addicted, and the dying terrified. He interlaces the science with his own guided psychedelic experiences, undertaken as research and personal experiment alike.
The book matters because it arrives at a genuine inflection point — after decades in which psychedelics were criminalized and research all but shut down following their association with 1960s counterculture, a new wave of clinical trials at institutions like Johns Hopkins and NYU has been quietly re-legitimizing their therapeutic use for treatment-resistant depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety. Pollan's contribution is to make both the neuroscience and the felt experience legible to readers who'd otherwise dismiss the whole subject as drug-culture mysticism.
Who should read it
Readers curious about the resurgence of psychedelic therapy, or skeptical of it, will find Pollan an unusually credible guide precisely because he starts as a skeptic himself. It's also valuable for anyone interested in consciousness, the neuroscience of the self, or how rigid thought patterns underlie mental illness.
About the author
Michael Pollan is an American journalist and professor at Harvard and UC Berkeley, best known for his books on food and agriculture, including The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food.