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

Michael Pollan

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CHAPTER TWO: NATURAL HISTORY

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I can remember the first time I heard Stamets talk about “mycoremediation”—his term for the use of mushrooms to clean up pollution and industrial waste.

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One of the jobs of fungi in nature is to break down complex organic molecules; without them, the earth would long ago have become a vast, uninhabitable waste heap of dead but undecomposed plants and animals.

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So after the Exxon Valdez ran aground off the coast of Alaska in 1989, spilling millions of gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound, Stamets revived a long-standing idea of putting fungi to work breaking down petrochemical waste. He showed a slide of a steaming heap of oily black sludge before inoculating it with the spores of oyster mushrooms, and then a second photograph of the same pile taken four weeks later, when it was reduced by a third and covered in a thick mantle of snowy white oyster mushrooms.

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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.)

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After watching honeybees visiting a woodpile to nibble on mycelium, Stamets identified several species of fungus that bolster the bees’ resistance to infection and CCD.

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He writes in his book that mycelia—the vast, cobwebby whitish net of single-celled filaments, called hyphae, with which fungi weave their way through the soil—are intelligent, forming “a sentient membrane” and “the neurological network of nature.”

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Stamets has been talking about the vast web of mycelia in the soil as “Earth’s natural Internet”—a redundant, complexly branched, self-repairing, and scalable communications network linking many species over tremendous distances.

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(The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom—a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.)

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Stamets contends that these mycelial networks are in some sense “conscious”: aware of their environment and able to respond to challenges accordingly.

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Experiments with slime molds have demonstrated these organisms can navigate mazes in search of food—sensing its location and then growing in that direction.

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The mycelia in a forest do link the trees in it, root to root, not only supplying them with nutrients, but serving as a medium that conveys information about environmental threats and allows trees to selectively send nutrients to other trees in the forest.*

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“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.”

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The blue pigment is in fact evidence of oxidized psilocin, one of the two main psychoactive compounds in a Psilocybe. (The other is psilocybin, which breaks down into psilocin in the body.)

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To determine if the mushroom in question had purplish-brown or black spores, I began making spore prints. This involves cutting the cap off a mushroom and placing it, gill side down, on a piece of white paper.

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Within hours, the mushroom cap releases its microscopic spores, which will form a pretty, shadowy pattern on the paper (reminiscent of a lipstick kiss) that you can then try to decide is purplish brown or black—or rust colored, in which case you might have a deadly Galerina on your hands.

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“I want to discuss the high likelihood that the Stoned Ape Theory, first presented by Roland Fischer and then popularized/restated by Terence McKenna, is probably true—[ingestion of psilocybin] causing a rapid development of the hominid brain for analytical thinking and societal bonding.

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Stamets got his mycological education not at Kenyon, which he left after one year, but at the Evergreen State College, which in the mid-1970s was a new experimental college in Olympia, Washington, where students could design their own course of independent study.

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So apparently you can’t design your own curriculum. Interesting.

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WHEN THE NEXT MORNING I came downstairs, Paul Stamets was in the living room, arranging his collection of mushroom stones on the coffee table. I had read about these artifacts but had never seen or held one, and they were impressive objects: roughly carved chunks of basalt in a variety of sizes and shapes.

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Thousands of these stones were smashed by the Spanish, but two hundred are known to survive, and Stamets owns sixteen of them.

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Most of the surviving stones have been found in the Guatemalan highlands, often when farmers are plowing their fields; some have been dated to at least 1000 B.C.

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Stamets’s laptop is crammed with images of Psilocybes taken not only from nature (he’s a superb photographer) but also from cave paintings, North African petroglyphs, medieval church architecture, and Islamic designs, some of which recall the forms of mushrooms or, with their fractal geometric patternings, mushroom experiences.

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This brings us to Terence McKenna’s stoned ape theory,

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Though reading is no substitute for hearing McKenna expound his thesis (you can find him on YouTube), he summarizes it in Food of the Gods (1992): Psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors “access to realms of supernatural power,” “catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection,” and “brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination.”

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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.

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Language, he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts. Hence, the stoned ape:

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by giving us the gifts of language and self-reflection psilocybin mushrooms made us who we are, transforming our primate ancestors into Homo sapiens.

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what might have started as a biochemical accident has turned into an ingenious strategy for enlarging the species’ range and number, by winning the fervent devotion of an animal as ingenious and well traveled (and well spoken!) as Homo sapiens.

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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.

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Some mycelium will actually insinuate itself into the grain of trees, taking up residence and forming a symbiotic relationship with the tree.

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Stamets believes the mycelium functions as a kind of immune system for its arboreal host, secreting antibacterial, antiviral, and insecticidal compounds that protect the trees from diseases and pests, in exchange for nourishment and habitat.

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Once we register on our retinas the visual pattern of the object we’re searching for, it’s much more likely to pop out of the visual field.

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technical name for this phenomenon is “the pop-out effect.”)

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and anyone who picks a mushroom trails an invisible cloud of its spore behind him; this, he believes, is the origin of the idea of fairy dust.

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Stamets dilated on the idea of psilocybin as a chemical messenger sent from Earth, and how we had been elected, by virtue of the gift of consciousness and language, to hear its call and act before it’s too late. “Plants and mushrooms have intelligence, and they want us to take care of the environment, and so they communicate that to us in a way we can understand.”

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Why us? “We humans are the most populous bipedal organisms walking around, so some plants and fungi are especially interested in enlisting our support. I think they have a consciousness and are constantly trying to direct our evolution by speaking out to us biochemically. We just need to be better listeners.”

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and it is his imagination—wild as it often is—that allows him to see systems where others have not,

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These more specialized scientists (a word that wasn’t coined until 1834) gradually moved science indoors and increasingly gazed at nature through devices that allowed them to observe it at scales invisible to the human eye. These moves subtly changed the object of study—indeed, made it more of an object.

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Instead of seeing nature as a collection of discrete objects, the Romantic scientists—and I include Stamets in their number—saw a densely tangled web of subjects, each acting on the other in the great dance that would come to be called coevolution.

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I suspect that imaginative leap has become harder for us moderns to make. Our science and technology encourage us in precisely the opposite direction, toward the objectification of nature and of all species other than our own.

About the Author

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• Scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) injected fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes, then followed the spread of the isotopes through the forest community using a variety of sensing methods, including a Geiger counter. Within a few days, stores of the radioactive carbon had been routed from tree to tree. Every tree in a plot thirty meters square was connected to the network; the oldest trees functioned as hubs, some with as many as forty-seven connections. The diagram of the forest network resembled a map of the Internet. In what is surely a tip of the hat to Stamets, a paper by one of the UBC scientists dubbed it the “wood-wide web.”

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• The key structures making up the default mode network are the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior parietal lobule, the lateral temporal cortex, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampus formation. See Randy L. Buckner, Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, and Daniel L. Schacter, “The Brain’s Default Network,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124, no. 1 (2008).

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While neuroimaging indicates strong links between these structures, the concept of the default mode network remains new and is still not universally accepted.

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• I’m using the terms more or less interchangeably here. However, the ego, being closely associated with Freud’s model of the mind, implies a construct that stands in a dynamic relationship to other parts of the mind, such as the unconscious, or id, acting on behalf of the self.

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• It’s worth noting that these findings seem to be at odds with Amanda Feilding’s initial hypothesis that psychedelics work by increasing blood flow to the brain.

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• David Nutt and Amanda Feilding are coauthors.

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• Exactly how psychedelics accomplish this, neurochemically, is still uncertain, but some of Carhart-Harris’s research points to a plausible mechanism. Because of their affinity with the serotonin 2A receptors, psychedelic compounds cause a set of neurons in the cortex (“layer five pyramidal neurons,” to be exact) that are rich in these receptors to fire in such a way as to desynchronize the usual oscillations of the brain. Carhart-Harris likens these oscillations, which help to organize brain activity, to the synchronized clapping of an audience. When a few wayward individuals clap out of order, the applause becomes less rhythmic and more chaotic. Similarly, the excitation of these cortical neurons appears to disrupt oscillations in a particular frequency—the alpha waves—that have been correlated with activity in the default mode network and, specifically, in self-reflection.

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• This research was published in 2017: Matthew M. Nour et al., “Psychedelics, Personality, and Political Perspectives,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. “Ego dissolution experienced during a participant’s ‘most intense’ psychedelic experience positively predicted liberal political views, openness and nature relatedness, and negatively predicted authoritarian political views.”

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• “A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘Universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.” (Walter Sullivan, “The Einstein Papers: A Man of Many Parts,” The New York Times, March 29, 1972.)

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CHAPTER SIX

THE TRIP TREATMENT

Psychedelics in Psychotherapy

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I thought about this so-called overview effect during my conversations with volunteers in the psilocybin trials, and especially with those who had overcome their addictions after a psychedelic journey—to inner space, if you will. Several volunteers described achieving a new distance on their own lives, a vantage from which matters that had once seemed daunting now seemed smaller and more manageable, including their addictions. It sounded as though the psychedelic experience had given many of them an overview effect on the scenes of their own lives, making possible a shift in worldview and priorities that allowed them to let go of old habits, sometimes with remarkable ease. As one lifetime smoker put it to me in terms so simple I found it hard to believe, “Smoking became irrelevant, so I stopped.”

The smoking cessation pilot study in which this man took part—his name is Charles Bessant, and he has been abstinent now for six years—was directed by Matthew Johnson, a protégé of Roland Griffiths’s at Johns Hopkins, where the study took place.

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Johnson worked on the lab’s early psilocybin studies, serving as a guide for several dozen sessions and helping to crunch the data, before launching a study of his own in 2009. The smoking study gave fifteen volunteer smokers who were trying to quit several sessions of cognitive behavioral therapy followed by two or three doses of psilocybin. A so-called open-label study, there was no placebo, so they all knew they were getting the drug. Volunteers had to stop smoking before their psilocybin session; they had their carbon-monoxide levels measured at several intervals to ensure compliance and confirm they remained abstinent.

The study was tiny and not randomized, but the results were nevertheless striking, especially when you consider that smoking is one of the most difficult addictions to break—harder, some say, than heroin. Six months after their psychedelic sessions, 80 percent of the volunteers were confirmed as abstinent; at the one-year mark, that figure had fallen to 67 percent, which is still a better rate of success than the best treatment now available. (A much larger randomized study, comparing the effectiveness of psilocybin therapy with the nicotine patch, is currently under way.) As in the cancer-anxiety studies, the volunteers who had the most complete mystical experiences had the best outcomes; they were, like Charles Bessant, able to quit smoking.

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In the middle of her session, Savannah suddenly sat up and announced she had discovered something important, an “epiphany” that her guides needed to write down so it wouldn’t be lost to posterity: “Eat right. Exercise. Stretch.”

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.

Johnson believes the value of psilocybin for the addict is in the new perspective—at once obvious and profound—that it opens onto one’s life and its habits. “Addiction is a story we get stuck in, a story that gets reinforced every time we try and fail to quit: ‘I’m a smoker and I’m powerless to stop.’ The journey allows them to get some distance and see the bigger picture and to see the short-term pleasures of smoking in the larger, longer-term context of their lives.”

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Of course, this re-contextualization of an old habit doesn’t just happen; countless people have taken psilocybin and continued to smoke. If it does happen, it’s because breaking the habit is the avowed intention of the session, strongly reinforced by the therapist in the preparatory meetings and the integration afterward. The “set” of the psychedelic journey is carefully orchestrated by the therapist in much the same way a shaman would use his authority and stagecraft to maximize the medicine’s deep powers of suggestion. 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.

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Yet what accounts for the unusual authority of the rather ordinary insights volunteers brought back from their journeys? “You don’t get that on any other drug,” Roland Griffiths points out. Indeed, after most drug experiences, we’re fully aware of, and often embarrassed by, the inauthenticity of what we thought and felt while under the influence. Though neither Griffiths nor Johnson mentioned it, the connection between seeing and believing might explain this sense of authenticity. Very often on psychedelics our thoughts become visible. These are not hallucinations, exactly, because the subject is often fully aware that what she is seeing is not really before her, yet these thoughts made visible are nevertheless remarkably concrete, vivid, and therefore memorable.

This is a curious phenomenon, as yet unexplained by neuroscience, though some interesting hypotheses have recently been proposed. When neuroscientists who study vision use fMRIs to image brain activity, they find that the same regions in the visual cortex light up whether one is seeing an object live—“online”—or merely recalling or imagining it, off-line. This suggests that the ability to visualize our thoughts should be the rule rather than the exception. Some neuroscientists suspect that during normal waking hours something in the brain inhibits the visual cortex from presenting to consciousness a visual image of whatever it is we’re thinking about. It’s not hard to see why such an inhibition might be adaptive: cluttering the mind with vivid images would complicate reasoning and abstract thought, not to mention everyday activities like walking or driving a car. But when we are able to visualize our thoughts—such as the thought of ourselves as a smoker looking like a coughing gargoyle—those thoughts take on added weight, feel more real to us. Seeing is believing.

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. The overview effect reported by the astronauts didn’t add anything to our intellectual understanding of this “pale blue dot” in the vast sea of space, but seeing it made it real in a way it had never been before. Perhaps the equally vivid overview effect on the scenes of their lives that psychedelics afford some people is what makes it possible for them to change their behavior.

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Matt Johnson believes that psychedelics can be used to change all sorts of behaviors, not just addiction. The key, in his view, is their power to occasion a sufficiently dramatic experience to “dope-slap people out of their story. It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-delete. Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people can let go of the mental models we use to organize reality.”

In his view, the most important such model is the self, or ego, which a high-dose psychedelic experience temporarily dissolves. He speaks of “our addiction to a pattern of thinking with the self at the center of it.” This underlying addiction to a pattern of thinking, or cognitive style, links the addict to the depressive and to the cancer patient obsessed with death or recurrence.

“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.” Albert Einstein called the modern human’s sense of separateness “a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.”*

“Psychedelics knock the legs out from under that model. That can be dangerous in the wrong circumstances, leading to bad trips and worse.”

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“But in the right setting, where your safety is assured, it may be a good intervention for dealing with some of the problems of the self”—of which addiction is only one. Dying, depression, obsession, eating disorders—all are exacerbated by the tyranny of an ego and the fixed narratives it constructs about our relationship to the world. By temporarily overturning that tyranny and throwing our minds into an unusually plastic state (Robin Carhart-Harris would call it a state of heightened entropy), psychedelics, with the help of a good therapist, give us an opportunity to propose some new, more constructive stories about the self and its relationship to the world, stories that just might stick.

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This is a very different kind of therapy than we are accustomed to in the West, because it is neither purely chemical nor purely psychodynamic—neither mindless nor brainless. Whether Western medicine is ready to accommodate such a radically novel—and ancient—model for mental transformation is an open question. In taking people safely through the liminal state psychedelics occasion, with its radical suggestibility, Johnson acknowledges that the doctors and researchers “play the same role as shamans or elders.

“Whatever we’re delving into here, it’s in the same realm as the placebo. But a placebo on rocket boosters.”

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In a 2015 pilot study conducted at the University of New Mexico ten alcoholics received psilocybin, combined with “motivational enhancement therapy,” a type of cognitive behavioral therapy designed expressly to treat addiction. By itself, the psychotherapy had little effect on drinking behavior, but after the psilocybin session drinking decreased significantly, and these changes were sustained during the thirty-six weeks of follow-up. Michael Bogenschutz, the lead investigator, reported a strong correlation between the “strength of the experience and the effect” on drinking behavior. The New Mexico results were encouraging enough to warrant a much larger phase 2 trial, involving 180 volunteers, which Bogenschutz is now conducting at NYU in collaboration with Stephen Ross and Jeffrey Guss.

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ONE GOOD WORD to describe the experiences of both the Apollo astronauts and the volunteers on their psilocybin journeys is “awe,” a human emotion that can perhaps help weave together the disparate strands of psychological interpretation proposed by the psychedelic researchers with whom I spoke. 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.

“People who are addicted know they’re harming themselves—their health, their careers, their social well-being—but they often fail to see the damage their behavior is doing to others.” Addiction is, among other things, a radical form of selfishness. One of the challenges of treating the addict is getting him to broaden his perspective beyond a consuming self-interest in his addiction, the behavior that has come to define his identity and organize his days. Awe, Hendricks believes, has the power to do this.

Hendricks mentioned the research of Dacher Keltner, a psychologist at Berkeley who happens to be a close friend. “Keltner believes that awe is a fundamental human emotion, one that evolved in us because it promotes altruistic behavior. 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.” This larger entity could be the social collective, nature as a whole, or a spirit world, but it is something sufficiently overpowering to dwarf us and our narrow self-interest. “Awe promotes a sense of the ‘small self’ that directs our attention away from the individual to the group and the greater good.”

Keltner’s lab at Berkeley has done a clever series of experiments demonstrating that after people have had even a relatively modest experience of awe, such as looking at soaring trees, they’re more likely to come to the assistance of others. (In this experiment, conducted in a eucalyptus grove on the Berkeley campus, volunteers spent a minute looking either at the trees or at the façade of a nearby building. Then a confederate walked toward the participants and stumbled, scattering pens on the ground. Bystanders who had looked at the trees proved more likely to come to her aid than those who had looked at the building.) In another experiment, Keltner’s lab found that if you ask people to draw themselves before and after viewing awe-inspiring images of nature, the after-awe self-portraits will take up considerably less space on the page. An experience of awe appears to be an excellent antidote for egotism.

“We now have a pharmacological intervention that can occasion truly profound experiences of awe,” Hendricks pointed out. Awe in a pill. For the self-obsessed addict, “it can be blissful to feel a part of something larger and greater than themselves, to feel reconnected to other people”—to the weave of social and family relations that addiction reliably frays. “Very often they come to recognize the harm they’re doing not only to themselves but to loved ones. That’s where the motivation to change often comes from—a renewed sense of connection and responsibility, as well as the positive feeling of being a small self in the presence of something greater.”