How to Change Your Mind
What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
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.
Psychedelics Resources
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Reviews
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’Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky
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Michael Pollan Drops Acid — and Comes Back From His Trip Convinced
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The Trip of a Lifetime: Michael Pollan explores what LSD and other psychedelics can do for the no longer young.
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Brimming with X
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A Strait-Laced Writer Explores Psychedelics, and Leaves the Door of Perception Ajar
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A revival in the scientific study of psychedelics prompts a journalist to take a trip
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Take a hit of acid and call me in the morning
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Andrew Sullivan: Why we should say yes to drugs
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Might LSD be good for you?
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A Guide for Psychedelic Virgins and Skeptics?
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This book on psychedelics might convince you to drop acid
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Review: How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics by Michael Pollan — turn on, tune in and lick a toad
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How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
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What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
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A Neuroscientist Reviews Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind
Interviews
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‘Reluctant Psychonaut’ Michael Pollan Embraces The ‘New Science’ Of Psychedelics
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Real Time with Bill Maher—Michael Pollan: Psychedelic Science
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Michael Pollan Tried a Series of Psychedelic Drugs…For Research!
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Reluctant Psychonaut: How Psychedelics Changed Michael Pollan’s Mind
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This Will Change Your Mind About Psychedelic Drugs
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Michael Pollan: ‘I was a very reluctant psychonaut’
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Michael Pollan on testing psychedelics as a treatment for depression
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Exploring the New Science of Psychedelics
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Exploring The World Of Psychedelics With Michael Pollan
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Michael Pollan on psychedelia: ‘Everything I once was had been liquefied’
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Consciousness, Chemically Altered
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The Science of Altering Consciousness
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Freedom From the Known
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The Joe Rogan Experience — Michael Pollan
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Michael Pollan takes a trip in his latest book, “How to Change Your Mind”
Praise for
How to Change Your Mind
Gripping and surprising . . . Makes losing your mind sound like the sanest thing a person could do.
The New York Times Book Review
Pollan’s deeply researched chronicle will enlighten those who think of psychedelics chiefly as a kind of punchline to a joke about the Woodstock generation and hearten the growing number who view them as a potential antidote to our often stubbornly narrow minds. . . . Engaging and informative.
The Boston Globe
Sweeping and often thrilling . . . It is to Pollan’s credit that, while he ranks among the best of science writers, he’s willing, when necessary, to abandon the 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.
The Guardian
Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics changed my mind, or at least some of the ideas held in my mind. . . . Whatever one may think of psychedelics, the book reminds us that the mind is the greatest mystery in the universe, that this mystery is always right here, and that we usually dedicate far too little time and energy to exploring it.
Yuval Noah Harari, author of Sapiens and 21 Lessons for the 21st Century
Astounding.
New York Magazine