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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.
Andrew Sullivan: Why we should say yes to drugs
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.”
Author Michael Pollan on Recode Decode
Michael speaks with Kara Swisher about his new book.
Michael Pollan on psychedelia: ‘Everything I once was had been liquefied’
The writer Michael Pollan is best known for his advice, “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” His bestselling books (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Cooked) have served up large helpings of food for thought — about the health claims of packaged meals, the iniquities of industrial farming, and the joy a home-cooked family dinner can bring. In his seventh decade, however, Pollan has become fascinated by a new subject — psychedelic drugs.
The Ezra Klein Show: A mind-expanding conversation with Michael Pollan
This is a discussion about how to expand your mind — how to expand the connections it makes, the experiences it’s open to, the sensory information it absorbs. And, more than that, this is a conversation about recognizing that our minds are narrower than we think, that there is a lot we’re filtering out and pruning away and outright ignoring.
Michael Pollan takes a trip in his latest book, “How to Change Your Mind”
Over the past 30 years, in numerous food- and farm-related articles, and in his five best-selling books, including “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” and “Food Rules,” Michael Pollan has always retained a degree of journalistic detachment as he’s teased out the complexities of modern food production and consumption — namely why we eat what we eat, and the environmental and health consequences of our choices.
But when Pollan reported on a subject far more controversial than GMOs (genetically modified organisms) and Big Ag — the current renaissance in psychedelics research — for a 2015 New Yorker article “The Trip Treatment,” he realized he had “just scratched the surface” of a subject that only amped up his fascination the more he learned.
A Neuroscientist Reviews Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind
The book shines new light on the revitalized field of psychedelic medicine.
Consciousness, Chemically Altered
In his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan writes of his own consciousness-expanding experiments with psychedelic drugs like LSD and psilocybin, and he makes the case for why shaking up the brain’s old habits could be therapeutic for people facing addiction, depression, or death.
In this segment, Ira talks with Pollan and psychedelics researcher Robin Carhart-Harris about the neuroscience of consciousness, and how psychedelic drugs may alter the algorithms and habits our brains use to make sense of the world.