English
Magyar
How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan
Free download · 500+ book summaries
What is How to Change Your Mind about?
The book How to Change Your Mind reveals new evidence about psychedelic substances that confirm their ability to heal mental illnesses, alleviate depression and addiction, thus helping people die in peace.
Key ideas of How to Change Your Mind
Psychedelics as Mental Health Tools
Clinical trials at Johns Hopkins show psilocybin reliably reduces fear of death in cancer patients and achieves far higher smoking cessation rates than approved treatments.
The Ego and the Default Mind
Psychedelics quiet the brain's default mode network, temporarily dissolving the ego and opening entrenched mental patterns to change, as confirmed by modern neuroscience.
Set, Setting, and Cultural Containers
How a psychedelic session is prepared, guided, and integrated determines the outcome, a lesson the first wave of researchers learned and Timothy Leary's movement forgot.
Read an excerpt from the summary
How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
A Door He Had Spent His Life Avoiding
Michael Pollan was sixty when he started writing this book, which makes the project either ridiculous or perfect, depending on your view. He was the food guy. The man who taught a generation to eat plants, mostly, not too much. He had spent decades writing careful, measured books about agriculture and apples and the cook. Then he picked up the most stigmatized class of drugs of the twentieth century and decided to try them on himself.
He was an unlikely candidate. As a kid in the late 1960s he had absorbed every warning the culture could throw at him about LSD. One scientist had claimed acid scrambled chromosomes, which turned out to be wrong but never quite shook loose from the public mind. Art Linkletter blamed LSD for his daughter jumping from an apartment window. The Manson murders got linked to it. By college, Pollan was terrified of acid. He also had what he calls a painfully anxious adolescence, the kind where you and your psychiatrist both quietly wonder about your grip on sanity. So even when his wife Judith and a friend handed him a Mason jar of dried psilocybin mushrooms in his late twenties, the experience stayed small. He took the mushrooms two or three times. He noticed the chartreuse softness of ferns and a sudden compulsion to be outdoors, undressed, away from metal and plastic. The jar sat in the pantry until they cleaned out the kitchen years later and threw it out. Cocaine had come along by then, and a snowy-white powder made the wrinkled brown mushrooms seem dowdy and demanding.
Like it?
Continue in the appWho is it for?
- Anyone who wants to understand the science behind the current psychedelic therapy revival.
- Anyone who has struggled with depression, addiction, or end-of-life anxiety and wants to know what new treatments are emerging.
- Anyone curious about how consciousness works and what altered states can reveal about the ordinary mind.
- Anyone interested in the cultural and political history of how psychedelics were suppressed and why research is returning.
About the author: Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan is an American author and journalist best known for his writing on food, agriculture, and the human relationship with the natural world. His earlier books, including The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, made him one of the most widely read nonfiction writers of his generation.
How to Change Your Mind marked a significant departure: Pollan turned his careful, reported approach toward psychedelic science and his own direct experience with psilocybin and LSD. He has taught at Harvard and UC Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism.
Read it in 60 minutes
The summary of How to Change Your Mind and 500+ more books await in the BookBase app.