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How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan: A man who believes you’re never too old to take a trip
Food writer Michael Pollan has turned his attention to mind-altering mushrooms
Can we all benefit from psychedelics?
Undoubtedly one of the finest writers of our time, best selling author Michael Pollan is most widely associated for his writings on the food industrial complex.
It’s an industry that has unconsciously found its way into our stomachs and minds. Behind this quest to get us thinking more about our health, Pollan is a truth seeker. Like any great journalist, he will unravel an entire field, before he puts pen to paper and his approach has earnt him millions of fans across the world.
For his next endeavour, he’s used himself as a guinea pig to better understand the profound area of psychedelics and its effect on the brain. A subject that has revived itself through the orthodoxies of science to much public interest.
Exploring The World Of Psychedelics With Michael Pollan
Tune in, turn on, and… maybe change your mind. Author Michael Pollan revisits psychedelic drugs, a mainstay of the counterculture in the 60’s, long since fallen out of fashion. Turns out Timothy Leary may have been right about the therapeutic potential of these mind-bending drugs. Could magic mushrooms finally help people quit smoking? Could LSD be an effective treatment for depression, anxiety, or addiction?
This Will Change Your Mind About Psychedelic Drugs
“The biggest misconception people have about psychedelics is that these are drugs that make you crazy,” says Michael Pollan, author of the new book How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. “We now have evidence that that does happen sometimes — but in many more cases, these are drugs that can make you sane.”
‘Reluctant Psychonaut’ Michael Pollan Embraces The ‘New Science’ Of Psychedelics
Author Michael Pollan had always been curious about psychoactive plants, but his interest skyrocketed when he heard about a research study in which people with terminal cancer were given a psychedelic called psilocybin — the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms” — to help them deal with their distress.
Michael Pollan: Can Psychedelics Save the World?
Most people know Michael Pollan as a food writer. His 2006 book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, is widely credited with helping spark the modern food movement, in which everyday Americans began asking questions about where their food comes from. But in his new book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, Pollan shifts his lens away from food and onto the world of hallucinogenic medicines, in which people are tripping – both legally and illegally – on LSD, psilocybin mushrooms and other psychedelics in order to heal mental and emotional afflictions.
The Science of Altering Consciousness
Among scientists, there are tentative signs of a psychedelics renaissance. After decades of stigma, impressive research is showing the power of these substances to help sufferers of depression and addiction, or to comfort patients with a terminal cancer diagnosis, struggling to face their own end. This is the fascinating territory that the journalist Michael Pollan explores with his new book, “How to Change Your Mind.” Pollan dives into brain science, the history of psychedelics (and our tortured attitudes towards them) but his larger subject is the nature of human consciousness.
Michael Pollan Tried a Series of Psychedelic Drugs…For Research!
As an immersive author, Michael Pollan experienced the effects of the best-known psychedelic drugs while researching for his book ‘How to Change Your Mind.’
My Adventures With the Trip Doctors
My first psilocybin journey began around an altar in the middle of a second-story loft in a suburb of a small city on the Eastern Seaboard. On this adventure I would have a guide, a therapist who, like an unknown number of other therapists administering psychedelics in America today, must work underground because these drugs are illegal. Seated across the altar from me, Mary (who asked that I use a nickname because of the work she does) began by reciting, with her eyes closed, a long and elaborate prayer derived from various Native American traditions. My eyes were closed, too, but now and again I couldn’t resist peeking out for a glance at my guide: a woman in her 60s with long blond hair parted in the middle and high cheekbones that I mention only because they would, in a few hours, figure in her miraculous transformation into a Mexican Indian.
A Strait-Laced Writer Explores Psychedelics, and Leaves the Door of Perception Ajar
“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.