Author Archive
London Real: Psychedelics — How to Change Your Mind
Pollan’s new book How to Change Your Mind, dives deep into the world of psychedelics, through meetings with shamans, magic mushroom hunts, and using yourself as a guinea-pig, he takes the readers on a journey to the frontiers of the human mind.
The Guardian Books podcast: Michael Pollan on the history, science and experience of taking psychedelic drugs
On this week’s show, we’re talking to Michael Pollan. You may know him from his food writing – books like The Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, or Cooked, which is also now a Netflix show. His latest focus, however, is something quite different – still something consumable – it’s psychedelic drugs.
Real Time with Bill Maher—Michael Pollan: Psychedelic Science
Professor and author Michael Pollan joins Bill to discuss his latest book: “How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
The Spectator Books Podcast: a psychedelic trip with Michael Pollan
This week’s Spectator Books Podcast asks: is LSD good for you? I’m joined by the author Michael Pollan, who talks about the fascinating lost history of psychedelic drugs, speculates on what they may tell us about the human mind and the universe, recalls his own mind-blowing encounter with toad venom, and reveals that serious scientific research is even now being done into whether the “machine elves” that DMT users meet are hallucinations or visitors from another dimension. Plus, we learn why “enough LSD to kill an elephant” isn’t just a figure of speech…
Equipment for Living: Losing and recovering oneself in drugs and sobriety
In December of 1934, an unemployed stockbroker named Bill Wilson checked himself into Towns Hospital in Manhattan. He had a habit of consuming more than two quarts of whiskey per day, and his wife had implored him to get help. The doctor gave Wilson an extract of belladonna, a plant with hallucinogenic properties, which at the time was an experimental treatment for alcoholism. That afternoon, the “room blazed with an indescribably white light,” Wilson later wrote. A vision of a mountain came to him. “I stood upon its summit where a great wind blew…. Then came the blazing thought, ‘you are a free man.’”
Michael Pollan on What We Can Learn From Psychedelics
In his new book, “How to Change Your Mind,” Michael Pollan turns his attention from food systems to the history, and current renaissance, of psychedelics. A growing body of research suggests that psychedelics may in fact have health benefits and help people cope with depression, anxiety and addiction. Pollan joins Forum to discuss his journey into the world of psychedelics and what studying them has taught him about the power of the human mind.
Michael Pollan Drops Acid — and Comes Back From His Trip Convinced
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?
Freedom From the Known
In this episode the Waking Up podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Michael Pollan about his new book How to Change Your Mind. They cover the the resurgence of interest in psychedelics in clinical practice and end-of-life care, the “betterment of well people,” the relationship between thinking and mental suffering, the differences between psychedelics and meditation, the non-duality of consciousness, the brain’s “default mode network,” their experiences with various psychedelics, and other topics.
The Joe Rogan Experience — Michael Pollan
Listen to the whole interview with Joe Rogan here.
Two books to help get your head around the psychedelic
What was countercultural is being embraced by a maturing scientific mainstream. In what may prove to be a book of great importance, Michael Pollan, one of Time magazine’s hundred most influential people in the world, and the author of foodie bestsellers including The Omnivore’s Dilemma, investigates this reawakening to the marvels of psychedelics.