Michael Pollan: How to change your mind

• The true method of knowledge is experiment.“
• Stamets’s extract of turkey tail mushrooms (Trametes versicolor) has been shown to help cancer patients by stimulating their immune systems. (Stamets claims to have used it to help cure his mother’s stage 4 breast cancer.)
• I am part of the stream of molecules that are flowing through nature. I am given a voice, given consciousness for a time, but I feel that I am part of this continuum of stardust into which I am born and to which I will return at the end of this life.“
• One patient he treated in Vancouver, an alcoholic paralyzed by social anxiety, recalled Hubbard handing him a bouquet of roses during an LSD session: “He said, ‘Now hate them.’ They withered and the petals fell off, and I started to cry. Then he said, ‘Love them,’ and they came back brighter and even more spectacular than before. That meant a lot to me. I realized that you can make your relationships anything you want. The trouble I was having with people was coming from me.”
• But the ego, that inner neurotic who insists on running the mental show, is wily and doesn’t relinquish its power without a struggle. Deeming itself indispensable, it will battle against its diminishment, whether in advance or in the middle of the journey. I suspect that’s exactly what mine was up to all through the sleepless nights that preceded each of my trips, striving to convince me that I was risking everything, when really all I was putting at risk was its sovereignty.
• the loss of a clear distinction between subject and object might help explain another feature of the mystical experience: the fact that the insights it sponsors are felt to be objectively true—revealed truths rather than plain old insights. It could be that in order to judge an insight as merely subjective, one person’s opinion, you must first have a sense of subjectivity
• that feeling of transparency we associate with ordinary consciousness may owe more to familiarity and habit than it does to verisimilitude. As a psychonaut acquaintance put it to me, “If it were possible to temporarily experience another person’s mental state, my guess is that it would feel more like a psychedelic state than a ‘normal’ state, because of its massive disparity with whatever mental state is habitual with you.”
• Psychedelics alter consciousness by disorganizing brain activity,“ Carhart-Harris writes. They increase the amount of entropy in the brain, with the result that the system reverts to a less constrained mode of cognition.
• “It’s not just that one system drops away,” he says, “but that an older system reemerges.” That older system is primary consciousness, a mode of thinking in which the ego temporarily loses its dominion and the unconscious, now unregulated, “is brought into an observable space.”
• IN BOTH PHYSICS and information theory, entropy is often associated with expansion—as in the expansion of a gas when it is heated or freed from the constraints of a container. As the gas’s molecules diffuse in space, it becomes harder to predict the location of any given one; the uncertainty of the system thus increases. In a throwaway line at the end of his entropy paper, Carhart-Harris reminds us that in the 1960s the psychedelic experience was usually described as “consciousness-expansion”; knowingly or not, Timothy Leary and his colleagues had hit on exactly the right metaphor for the entropic brain. This expansion metaphor also chimes with Huxley’s reducing valve, implying as it does that consciousness exists in a state of opening or contraction.
• over-produced. We put too many notes in a song . . . too many ingredients in our recipes . . . too many flourishes in the clothes we wear, the houses we live in . . . it all seemed so pointless when really all we needed to do was focus on the love.“
• This is simply the wheel of life,“ she recalls him saying. “‘You feel like you’re being ground down by it now, but the wheel is going to turn and you’ll be on top again.’”
• “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.
• “Do you see the world as a prison or a playground?” is the key question Matt Johnson takes away from the rat park experiment. If addiction represents a radical narrowing of one’s perspective and behavior and emotional repertoire, the psychedelic journey has the potential to reverse that constriction, open people up to the possibility of change by disrupting and enriching their interior environment.
• “People come out of these experiences seeing the world a little more like a playground.”
• Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow, and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow. And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.“ Those main trails represent the most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a different direction.
• “Think of psychedelics as temporarily flattening the snow. The deeply worn trails disappear, and suddenly the sled can go in other directions, exploring new landscapes and, literally, creating new pathways.”
• The default mode network appears to be the seat not only of the ego, or self, but of the mental faculty of time travel as well. The two are of course closely related: without the ability to remember our past and imagine a future, the notion of a coherent self could hardly be said to exist; we define ourselves with reference to our personal history and future objectives. (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.) Mental time travel is constantly taking us off the frontier of the present moment. This can be highly adaptive; it allows us to learn from the past and plan for the future. But when time travel turns obsessive, it fosters the backward-looking gaze of depression and the forward pitch of anxiety. Addiction, too, seems to involve uncontrollable time travel. The addict uses his habit to organize time: When was the last hit, and when can I get the next?