Reviews
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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…
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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.
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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…
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The book shines new light on the revitalized field of psychedelic medicine.
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Food writer Michael Pollan has turned his attention to mind-altering mushrooms
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“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…
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If How to Change Your Mind furthers the popular acceptance of psychedelics as much as I suspect it will, it will be by capsizing the long association, dating from Leary’s time, between the drugs and young people. Pollan observes that the young have had less time to establish the cognitive patterns that psychedelics temporarily overturn.…
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Many psychedelic drugs are non-addictive, and can be helpful in treating all sorts of psychological conditions, argues Michael Pollan.
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In the past decade, as Pollan shows, there has been a psychedelic renaissance led by scientists. Working in places such as Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and Imperial College London, they have been studying the brains of those given psychedelic drugs in controlled situations, and their hypotheses are fascinating — although they are still hypotheses. Professor…
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In “How to Change Your Mind,” (Penguin Press) food journalist Michael Pollan makes psychedelics his subject du jour by offering up his own mind as a test subject. It may not be the obvious subject for the author of the modern classic “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” but stick with Pollan — this departure makes for great…
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In “How to Change Your Mind,” Michael Pollan makes it clear that he could not agree more. If “everyday waking consciousness” is “but one of several possible ways to construct a world,” he writes, “then perhaps there is value in cultivating a greater amount of what I’ve come to think of as neural diversity.” By…
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Known for his writing on plants and food, Michael Pollan, in his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, brings all the curiosity and skepticism for which he is well known to a decidedly different topic: the psychedelic drugs d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin. In addition to being a balanced piece of journalistic science…