How to Change Your Mind

In How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan investigates the history, science, and therapeutic potential of psychedelics, a class of drugs he explores through both reporting and firsthand experience. The book, subtitled “What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence,” is divided into six chapters that move from cultural history to personal narrative. Pollan opens with the story of how psychedelics arrived in the West, centered on Albert Hofmann’s accidental synthesis of LSD in 1943 and his famous bicycle ride, then traces the research boom of the 1950s and 1960s involving figures like Timothy Leary and Aldous Huxley. He details how the drugs became culturally entangled with the counterculture, leading to prohibition and a decades-long halt in legitimate research. The middle chapters follow the revival of psychedelic science in the 2000s. Pollan visits researchers such as Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins, who studies psilocybin for existential distress in cancer patients, and observes trials using the drug to treat depression and nicotine addiction. He explains concepts like the “default mode network,” a brain system linked to the sense of self that psychedelics appear to quiet, and the “mystical-type experience” measured in clinical settings. In the final chapters, Pollan describes his own guided psilocybin journeys, including encounters with imagined beings and feelings of dissolving ego boundaries. He also examines the underground practice of psychedelic therapy and the debate over medicalization versus spiritual use. The book concludes by considering whether these substances can offer meaningful relief and insight without recreating the excesses that once derailed their study.