How to change your mind книга

How to change your mind книга

Душа должна жить нараспашку.

В середине ХХ века западный мир был потрясен открытием двух необычных молекул, двух органических соединений одного семейства, поразительно схожих между собой. Со временем это открытие радикально изменило всю социальную, политическую и культурную историю человечества, равно как и личную жизнь миллионов людей, перед которыми вдруг приоткрылась вся многофункциональная сложность их мозга. По воле, а может быть, и по иронии судьбы открытие этих разрушительных химических соединений совпало с еще одним разрушительным для мировой истории событием – изобретением ядерной бомбы. Сразу же нашлись и те, кто, сравнивая эти два события, извлек немало полезного из этого космического совпадения. Короче говоря, в мир были выпущены новые, невероятно мощные энергии, после чего мир стал другим.

Вторую молекулу изобретать не пришлось: она существовала многие тысячелетия, хотя до сей поры ни один человек в цивилизованном мире об этом не подозревал. Производимая не химиками, а безобидным маленьким коричневым грибком, эта молекула, впоследствии получившая название псилоцибин, сотни лет использовалась коренными жителями Мексики и Центральной Америки в религиозных и обрядовых таинствах. Теонанакатль («плоть богов»), как называли этот гриб ацтеки, после захвата испанцами Америки был объявлен Римско-католической церковью «вне закона» и загнан «в подполье».

Появление этих двух соединений связано также и с подъемом молодежной контркультуры в середине 1960-х годов, в частности с ее тональностью и нравами. Впервые в истории молодежь обзавелась собственным «ритуалом посвящения», так называемым «кислотным трипом» (acid trip), представлявшим собой не что иное, как галлюцинаторные видения. Но если все прочие обряды посвящения предназначены вводить молодых людей в мир взрослых, то этот, напротив, вводил их во внутренний мир сознания, о существовании которого знала лишь небольшая кучка исследователей. И воздействие этого обряда на общество, мягко говоря, было разрушительным.

Сегодня, по прошествии нескольких десятилетий сокрытия и подавления, психоделики переживают своего рода ренессанс. Новое поколение ученых, многие из которых на себе испробовали действие этих соединений (и ныне вдохновляются этим опытом), старательно изучает их потенциал, применяя их для лечения психических расстройств и заболеваний, таких как депрессия, тревога, душевные травмы и различные виды зависимости. Другие же ученые используют психоделики (в сочетании с новыми инструментами нейровизуализации и мозгового картирования) для исследования взаимосвязей мозга и разума, надеясь с их помощью раскрыть тайны сознания.

How to Change Your Mind (UK Edition)

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, And Transcedence

A trip well worth taking, eye-opening and even mind-blowing. —Kirkus Reviews

Dear Friends and Readers,

I am thrilled to tell you about my upcoming book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

The book grew out of the reporting I did for a 2015 article about psychedelic psychotherapy in the New Yorker, called “The Trip Treatment.” I interviewed a number of cancer patients who, in the course of a single guided session on psilocybin, had such a powerful mystical experience that their fear of death either faded or vanished altogether.

So began what grew into a two-year journey into the world of psychedelics—LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT. The book explores the renaissance of scientific research into these compounds and their potential to relieve several kinds of mental suffering, including depression, anxiety, and addiction. It also delves into the rich history of psychedelics in America, tracing the promise of the early research in the fifties and how a moral panic about LSD in the mid-sixties led to decades of suppression, just now ending. I spend time with neuroscientists who are using psychedelics in conjunction with modern brain imaging technologies to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the self. Several of the scientists I profile are convinced psychedelics could revolutionize mental healthcare and our understanding of the mind.

But what I didn’t expect when I embarked on this journey was for it to result in what is surely the most personal book I’ve ever written. I like to immerse myself in whatever subject I’m reporting—whether that means buying a steer to understand the meat industry or apprenticing myself to a baker to understand bread. What began as a third-person journalistic inquiry ended up a first-person quest to learn what these medicines had to teach me about not only the mind but also my mind, and specifically about the nature of spiritual experience. This book has taken me places I’ve never been—indeed, places I didn’t know existed.

I’m both excited and nervous to publish How to Change Your Mind this spring. I do hope you’ll check it out and share your thoughts about it—you can find me on Instagram (Michael.Pollan), Twitter (@MichaelPollan) and Facebook, as well as through @penguinpress.

“I’ve never regretted my adolescent use of LSD, but reading this fascinating, lucid, wise and hopeful book did make me wonder if those drug experiences weren’t another example of youth wasted on the young. Michael Pollan, who waited until he was a grownup to experiment, is the perfect guide to today’s dawning psychedelic renaissance.”
-Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland

“Michael Pollan masterfully guides us through the highs, lows, and highs again of psychedelic drugs. How to Change Your mind chronicles how it’s been a longer and stranger trip than most any of us knew.”
-Daniel Goleman, co-author Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body

“Very few writers, if any, have the gravitas and journalistic cred to tackle this explosive subject-from both the outside and the inside-extract it from its nationally traumatic and irrationally over reactive past, and bring both reason and revelatory insight to it. Michael Pollan has done just that. This is investigative journalism at its rigorous and compelling best- and radically mind opening in so many ways just to read it.”
-Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, and author of Full Catastrophe Living and Coming to Our Senses

“Michael Pollan assembles a great deal of information here on the history, science, and effects of psychedelics. I found his frank recounting of his recent experiences with LSD, psilocybin, and toad venom most revealing. They appear to have softened his materialistic views and opened him to the possibilities of higher consciousness. He did, indeed, change his mind.”
-Andrew Weil, author of The Natural Mind and 8 Weeks to Optimum Health

“Do psychedelics open a door to a different reality, or is it just the same-old, same-old reality seen through a different set of lenses? I quickly became engrossed in Pollan’s narrative– the intersection of science, consciousness-enhancing, and government prohibition. But at the center of Pollan’s story is the greatest conundrum of all– why should substances that have been so beneficial to so many people, be the focus of crazy criminal penalties? Why, indeed.”
-Errol Morris

“Michael Pollan has applied his brilliant mind and fastidious prose to the Mind itself, specifically the modes by which psychedelic substances temporarily obliterate the ego and engender deep spiritual connectedness to the universe. Michael walks the tight-rope between an objective ‘reporter’ and a spiritual pilgrim seeking insight and sustenance from psychedelics, and his innocence and integrity serve as a balance bar between cynicism and partisan affirmation. His success here places these drugs and what they do at the center of a potential revolution in medicine. It’s an extraordinary achievement, and no matter what you may think you know about psychedelics, if you even know the word, you should read this book.”
-Peter Coyote, author and Zen Buddhist Priest

“After 50 years underground, psychedelics are back. We are incredibly fortunate to have Michael Pollan be our travel guide for their renaissance. With humility, humor, and deep humanity, he takes us through the history, the characters, and the science of these “mind manifesting” compounds. Along the way, he navigates the mysteries of consciousness, spirituality, and the mind. What he has done previously for gardeners and omnivores, Pollan does brilliantly here for all of us who wonder what it means to be fully human, or even what it means to be.”
-Thomas R. Insel, MD, former director of National Institute of Mental Health and co-founder and president of Mindstrong Health

“A rare and utterly engrossing exposition that will most certainly delineate a fundamental change in the understanding of the human mind and the mystery of consciousness. Pollan previously reshaped our knowledge of earthly landscapes in his writings. With this book, he transforms our understanding of the innerscape, the unbounded world we occupy every conscious second of our life experienced by thoughts, suffering, awareness, joy, and reasoning. This is more than a book-it is a treasure.”
-Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest

Press

Reviews

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

Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2018

Food writer Pollan (Cooked) shifts his focus to other uses of plants in this brilliant history of psychedelics across cultures and generations, the neuroscience of its effects, the revival of research on its potential to heal mental illness—and his own mind-changing trips. For an entire generation, psychedelics were synonymous with Harvard professor-turned-hippie Timothy Leary and his siren call to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Kirkus Review, April 24, 2018

Noted culinary writer Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, 2013, etc.) makes the transition from feeding your body to feeding your head.

The lengthy disclaimer on the copyright page speaks volumes. The author, well-known for books on food and life such as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has been opening some of the doors of perception with the aid of lysergic acid, its molecular cousin psilocybin, ayahuasca, and assorted other chemical tools.

Interviews

Michael Pollan speaks with Michael Lerner

May 11, 2015

Michael Pollan speaks with Michael Lerner about new research into the healing properties of psychedelics.

How to Change Your Mind

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

“Astounding.” —New York Magazine

Dear Friends and Readers,

I am thrilled to tell you about my new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

The book grew out of the reporting I did for a 2015 article about psychedelic psychotherapy in the New Yorker, called “The Trip Treatment.” I interviewed a number of cancer patients who, in the course of a single guided session on psilocybin, had such a powerful mystical experience that their fear of death either faded or vanished altogether.

So began what grew into a two-year journey into the world of psychedelics—LSD, psilocybin, Ayahuasca and 5-MeO-DMT. The book explores the renaissance of scientific research into these compounds and their potential to relieve several kinds of mental suffering, including depression, anxiety, and addiction. It also delves into the rich history of psychedelics in America, tracing the promise of the early research in the fifties and how a moral panic about LSD in the mid-sixties led to decades of suppression, just now ending. I spend time with neuroscientists who are using psychedelics in conjunction with modern brain imaging technologies to probe the mysteries of consciousness and the self. Several of the scientists I profile are convinced psychedelics could revolutionize mental healthcare and our understanding of the mind.

But what I didn’t expect when I embarked on this journey was for it to result in what is surely the most personal book I’ve ever written. I like to immerse myself in whatever subject I’m reporting—whether that means buying a steer to understand the meat industry or apprenticing myself to a baker to understand bread. What began as a third-person journalistic inquiry ended up a first-person quest to learn what these medicines had to teach me about not only the mind but also my mind, and specifically about the nature of spiritual experience. This book has taken me places I’ve never been—indeed, places I didn’t know existed.

I do hope you’ll check out How to Change Your Mind and share your thoughts about it—you can find me on Instagram (Michael.Pollan), Twitter (@MichaelPollan) and Facebook, as well as through @penguinpress.

“I’ve never regretted my adolescent use of LSD, but reading this fascinating, lucid, wise and hopeful book did make me wonder if those drug experiences weren’t another example of youth wasted on the young. Michael Pollan, who waited until he was a grownup to experiment, is the perfect guide to today’s dawning psychedelic renaissance.”
-Kurt Andersen, author of Fantasyland

“Michael Pollan masterfully guides us through the highs, lows, and highs again of psychedelic drugs. How to Change Your mind chronicles how it’s been a longer and stranger trip than most any of us knew.”
-Daniel Goleman, co-author Altered Traits: Science Reveals How Meditation Changes Your Mind, Brain and Body

“Very few writers, if any, have the gravitas and journalistic cred to tackle this explosive subject-from both the outside and the inside-extract it from its nationally traumatic and irrationally over reactive past, and bring both reason and revelatory insight to it. Michael Pollan has done just that. This is investigative journalism at its rigorous and compelling best- and radically mind opening in so many ways just to read it.”
-Jon Kabat-Zinn, founder of mindfulness-based stress reduction, and author of Full Catastrophe Living and Coming to Our Senses

“Michael Pollan assembles a great deal of information here on the history, science, and effects of psychedelics. I found his frank recounting of his recent experiences with LSD, psilocybin, and toad venom most revealing. They appear to have softened his materialistic views and opened him to the possibilities of higher consciousness. He did, indeed, change his mind.”
-Andrew Weil, author of The Natural Mind and 8 Weeks to Optimum Health

“Do psychedelics open a door to a different reality, or is it just the same-old, same-old reality seen through a different set of lenses? I quickly became engrossed in Pollan’s narrative– the intersection of science, consciousness-enhancing, and government prohibition. But at the center of Pollan’s story is the greatest conundrum of all– why should substances that have been so beneficial to so many people, be the focus of crazy criminal penalties? Why, indeed.”
-Errol Morris

“Michael Pollan has applied his brilliant mind and fastidious prose to the Mind itself, specifically the modes by which psychedelic substances temporarily obliterate the ego and engender deep spiritual connectedness to the universe. Michael walks the tight-rope between an objective ‘reporter’ and a spiritual pilgrim seeking insight and sustenance from psychedelics, and his innocence and integrity serve as a balance bar between cynicism and partisan affirmation. His success here places these drugs and what they do at the center of a potential revolution in medicine. It’s an extraordinary achievement, and no matter what you may think you know about psychedelics, if you even know the word, you should read this book.”
-Peter Coyote, author and Zen Buddhist Priest

“After 50 years underground, psychedelics are back. We are incredibly fortunate to have Michael Pollan be our travel guide for their renaissance. With humility, humor, and deep humanity, he takes us through the history, the characters, and the science of these “mind manifesting” compounds. Along the way, he navigates the mysteries of consciousness, spirituality, and the mind. What he has done previously for gardeners and omnivores, Pollan does brilliantly here for all of us who wonder what it means to be fully human, or even what it means to be.”
-Thomas R. Insel, MD, former director of National Institute of Mental Health and co-founder and president of Mindstrong Health

“A rare and utterly engrossing exposition that will most certainly delineate a fundamental change in the understanding of the human mind and the mystery of consciousness. Pollan previously reshaped our knowledge of earthly landscapes in his writings. With this book, he transforms our understanding of the innerscape, the unbounded world we occupy every conscious second of our life experienced by thoughts, suffering, awareness, joy, and reasoning. This is more than a book-it is a treasure.”
-Paul Hawken, author of Blessed Unrest

Press

Reviews

’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky

The New York Review of Books, July 30, 2018

In 1938 Albert Hofmann, a chemist at the Sandoz Laboratories in Basel, created a series of new compounds from lysergic acid. One of them, later marketed as Hydergine, showed great potential for the treatment of cerebral arteriosclerosis. Another salt, the diethylamide (LSD), he put to one side, but he had “a peculiar presentiment,” as he put it in his memoir LSD: My Problem Child (1980), “that this substance could possess properties other than those established in the first investigations.”

Michael Pollan Drops Acid — and Comes Back From His Trip Convinced

The New York Times Book Review, June 4, 2018

With “How to Change Your Mind,” Pollan remains concerned with what we put into our bodies, but we’re not talking about arugula. At various points, our author ingests LSD, psilocybin and the crystallized venom of a Sonoran Desert toad. He writes, often remarkably, about what he experienced under the influence of these drugs. (The book comes fronted with a publisher’s disclaimer that nothing contained within is “intended to encourage you to break the law.” Whatever, Dad.) Before starting the book, Pollan, now in his early 60s, had never tried psychedelics, referring to himself as “less a child of the psychedelic 1960s than of the moral panic that psychedelics provoked.” But when he discovered that clinical interest had been revived in what some boosters are now calling entheogens (from the Greek for “the divine within”), he had to know: How did this happen, and what do these remarkable substances actually do to us?

The Trip of a Lifetime: Michael Pollan explores what LSD and other psychedelics can do for the no longer young.

Slate, May 14, 2018

If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn. But “by middle age,” he writes, “the sway of habitual thinking over the operations of the mind is nearly absolute.” What he sought in his own trips was not communion with a higher consciousness so much as the opportunity to “renovate my everyday mental life.”

Brimming with X

The Times Literary Supplement (UK), August 11, 2018

In his new book How To Change Your Mind: The new science of psychedelics, Michael Pollan sets out the twentieth-century history of the use of “psychedelic” substances with clarity, insight and humour. He does his fieldwork – with appropriate trepidation. He goes mushroom hunting. He consumes four different psychedelic tryptamines under suitably controlled conditions – LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca (active ingredient N, N-dimethyltryptamine, sc DMT), and, with shattering results, 5-MeO-DMT, the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad Incilius alvarius – and tells us, as well as he can, what happens. He ends with two chapters laying out the latest neuro­scientific speculations and describing the extraordinarily fruitful renaissance of the use of psychedelics in psychotherapy in the 1990s.

A Strait-Laced Writer Explores Psychedelics, and Leaves the Door of Perception Ajar

The New York Times, May 14, 2018

“How to Change Your Mind” is a calm survey of the past, present and future. A book about a blurry subject, it is cleareyed and assured. Pollan is not the most obvious guide for such a journey. He is, to judge from his self-reporting, a giant square. In the prologue, he describes himself as someone “not at all sure he has ever had a single ‘spiritually significant’ experience,” a pretty straitened admission even for an avowed atheist. “I have never been one for deep or sustained introspection,” he writes later. You often find yourself thinking: This guy could really use a trip.

A revival in the scientific study of psychedelics prompts a journalist to take a trip

Science, May 7, 2018

Known for his writing on plants and food, Michael Pollan, in his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, brings all the curiosity and skepticism for which he is well known to a decidedly different topic: the psychedelic drugs d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin. In addition to being a balanced piece of journalistic science writing, this work is also part memoir, as Pollan searches for meaning in life as he enters his early 60s.

Take a hit of acid and call me in the morning

The Boston Globe, May 11, 2018

In “How to Change Your Mind,” Michael Pollan makes it clear that he could not agree more. If “everyday waking consciousness” is “but one of several possible ways to construct a world,” he writes, “then perhaps there is value in cultivating a greater amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity.” By “neural diversity” Pollan seems to mean a broad, embracing experience of the human mind and its links to the universe at large, an experience largely unconstrained by “heuristics,” the cognitive shortcuts that allow us to solve problems and make quick judgments but that also sometimes lead us astray.

Andrew Sullivan: Why we should say yes to drugs

New York Magazine, May 25, 2018

Pollan, who writes seamlessly about his own experiments in psychedelics as well as the exciting discoveries in mental health now opening up before us, puts this perfectly: “Love is everything … A platitude is precisely what is left of a truth after it has been drained of all emotion. To desaturate that dried husk with feeling is to see it again for what it is: the loveliest and most deeply rooted of truths, hidden in plain sight.”

Might LSD be good for you?

The Spectator, May 12, 2018

Many psychedelic drugs are non-addictive, and can be helpful in treating all sorts of psychological conditions, argues Michael Pollan.

A Guide for Psychedelic Virgins and Skeptics?

Los Angeles Review of Books, July 25, 2018

When Pollan agrees to take psychedelic drugs, he presents himself as a stand-in for the skeptical reader; he is an LSD-virgin turned “psychonaut” for the purposes of journalistic and scientific inquiry.

This book on psychedelics might convince you to drop acid

New York Post, May 12, 2018

In “How to Change Your Mind,” (Penguin Press) food journalist Michael Pollan makes psychedelics his subject du jour by offering up his own mind as a test subject. It may not be the obvious subject for the author of the modern classic “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but stick with Pollan — this departure makes for great reading.

Review: How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan — turn on, tune in and lick a toad

The Times of London, May 12, 2018

In the past decade, as Pollan shows, there has been a psychedelic renaissance led by scientists. Working in places such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Imperial College London, they have been studying the brains of those given psychedelic drugs in controlled situations, and their hypotheses are fascinating — although they are still hypotheses. Professor David Nutt at Imperial, for example, believes that what the trials are revealing is the existence of an inhibiting, efficient shortcut he calls the “brain’s default network”, or DMN, which, when switched off by psychedelics, allows the mind to wander into extraordinary places.

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

Publishers Weekly, April 24, 2018

Food writer Pollan (Cooked) shifts his focus to other uses of plants in this brilliant history of psychedelics across cultures and generations, the neuroscience of its effects, the revival of research on its potential to heal mental illness—and his own mind-changing trips. For an entire generation, psychedelics were synonymous with Harvard professor-turned-hippie Timothy Leary and his siren call to “turn on, tune in, drop out.”

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Kirkus Review, April 24, 2018

Noted culinary writer Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, 2013, etc.) makes the transition from feeding your body to feeding your head.

The lengthy disclaimer on the copyright page speaks volumes. The author, well-known for books on food and life such as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, has been opening some of the doors of perception with the aid of lysergic acid, its molecular cousin psilocybin, ayahuasca, and assorted other chemical tools.

A Neuroscientist Reviews Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind

Massive, May 21, 2018

The book shines new light on the revitalized field of psychedelic medicine.

How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan – review

Timothy Leary in 1992: ‘would have been more help piping down than turning on’. Photograph: AP

Timothy Leary in 1992: ‘would have been more help piping down than turning on’. Photograph: AP

I n 1938, the Swiss chemist Albert Hofmann, seeking a new drug to stimulate blood circulation, accidentally invented lysergic acid deithylamide, or LSD. Later, after inadvertently absorbing a minuscule quantity through his skin, he was obliged to stagger home and lie down on his sofa, where, “in a dreamlike state, with eyes closed… I perceived an uninterrupted stream of fantastic pictures, extraordinary shapes with intense, kaleidoscopic play of colours”. It was more than an impressive display, though: Hoffman felt convinced he’d been inducted into a secret of the universe, “the mystical experience of a deeper, comprehensive reality”. Mere days after the birth of LSD, scientists split the first uranium atom. One of these two world-jolting events went on to reshape civilisation, but by the mid-1960s, the other had been banished to the shadows. Research funding ceased and LSD was outlawed along with psilocybin, the psychedelic ingredient in magic mushrooms, introduced to the west in 1955 by an open-minded Manhattan banker. A trapdoor to another dimension had briefly opened, but now it seemed decisively slammed shut.

Michael Pollan, author of In Defence of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, was born a bit too late (though also, I think he’d admit, a bit too square) to participate in the psychedelic era. “The only way I was going to get to Woodstock,” he writes, “was if my parents drove me.” But then in the 1990s that trapdoor reopened a crack: American scientists quietly began research indicating that psychedelics might enormously benefit the terminally ill, alcoholics and those with “treatment-resistant” depression. How to Change Your Mind is Pollan’s sweeping and often thrilling chronicle of the history of psychedelics, their brief modern ascendancy and suppression, their renaissance and possible future, all interwoven with a self-deprecating travelogue of his own cautious but ultimately transformative adventures as a middle-aged psychedelic novice. In other words, this is a serious work of history and science, but also one in which the author, under the influence of a certain Central American toad venom, becomes convinced he’s giving birth to himself. Improbably, the combination largely works.

It is to Pollan’s credit that, while he ranks among the best of science writers, he’s willing, when necessary, to abandon that genre’s fixation on materialist explanation as the only path to understanding. One of the book’s important messages is that the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics, for the dying or seriously ill, can’t be separated from the mystical experiences to which they give rise. Judging from the testimony here, it’s because the drugs allow a glimpse of “boundless awareness” – a perspective beyond the small and solitary ego – that patients with advanced cancer find themselves at peace with the notion of death, while depressives learn to feel hope. “Oh God, it all makes sense now, so simple and beautiful,” says one dying man and that feeling persists for the remainder of his life.

Why assume that “normal” consciousness is the real one, while the boundless and transcendent variety is somehow fake?

The book makes clear that it’s no mere hippy cliche to say that LSD and psilocybin were banned because of the threat they posed to the established social order. (The real health risks of these non-addictive drugs, Pollan explains, are for most people exceedingly small.) LSD “truly was an acid, dissolving almost everything with which it came into contact, beginning with the hierarchies of the mind… and going on from there to society’s various structures of authority”. Timothy Leary, though he emerges from these pages as a showboater who’d have been more help piping down than turning on or tuning in, probably had it right. “The kids who take LSD aren’t going to fight your wars,” he predicted. “They aren’t going to join your corporations.” It was an outcome that couldn’t be permitted.

The big risk for a writer here, as Pollan is aware, is that first-person reports from the frontiers of consciousness have a way of seeming utterly banal on the page: there’s an inverse relationship between how amazing it is to perceive that “I was God and God was me”, or that “the core of our being is love”, and how tedious it can be to read about it. Still, he gamely makes the attempt to put the ineffable into words. Pausing in the middle of a guided psilocybin trip to visit the lavatory, he watches himself pee: “The arc of water I sent forth was truly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen,” he writes, “a waterfall of diamonds cascading into a pool, breaking its surface into a billion clattering fractals of light.”

It’s interesting to ask what psychedelics do to the brain in order to cause such effects and Pollan devotes a solid section to the neuroscience of tripping. But to wonder how neurons create these illusions, as he notes, is to begin from the assumption that they are illusions. Why assume that “normal” consciousness is the real one, while the boundless and transcendent variety is somehow fake? Almost all reports of psychedelic-induced spiritual experience share what William James called the “noetic” sense: people are convinced they’ve experienced not just some impressive mental theatre, but something more true than everyday reality. How to Change Your Mind is at its most gripping in the moments when Pollan, with a wry nod to the sceptical rationalist he always thought he was, allows himself to wonder if they might actually be right.

How to change your mind книга

New York Times Book Review 10 Best Books of 2018

A New York Times Notable Book

The #1 New York Times bestseller.

A brilliant and brave investigation into the medical and scientific revolution taking place around psychedelic drugs—and the spellbinding story of his own life-changing psychedelic experiences

When Michael Pollan set out to research how LSD and psilocybin (the active ingredient in magic mushrooms) are being used to provide relief to people suffering from difficult-to-treat conditions such as depression, addiction and anxiety, he did not intend to write what is undoubtedly his most personal book. But upon discovering how these remarkable substances are improving the lives not only of the mentally ill but also of healthy people coming to grips with the challenges of everyday life, he decided to explore the landscape of the mind in the first person as well as the third. Thus began a singular adventure into various altered states of consciousness, along with a dive deep into both the latest brain science and the thriving underground community of psychedelic therapists. Pollan sifts the historical record to separate the truth about these mysterious drugs from the myths that have surrounded them since the 1960s, when a handful of psychedelic evangelists inadvertently catalyzed a powerful backlash against what was then a promising field of research.

A unique and elegant blend of science, memoir, travel writing, history, and medicine, How to Change Your Mind is a triumph of participatory journalism. By turns dazzling and edifying, it is the gripping account of a journey to an exciting and unexpected new frontier in our understanding of the mind, the self, and our place in the world. The true subject of Pollan’s «mental travelogue» is not just psychedelic drugs but also the eternal puzzle of human consciousness and how, in a world that offers us both suffering and joy, we can do our best to be fully present and find meaning in our lives.