Editors Reads Verdict
The book that brought mainstream attention to the psychedelic renaissance in psychiatry — carefully reported, intellectually honest, and personally courageous in a way that elevates it above most science writing.
What We Loved
- The science reporting on clinical trials is rigorous and accessible
- Pollan's personal experiences ground the abstract science in embodied reality
- The cultural history of psychedelics and their suppression is illuminating and often enraging
Minor Drawbacks
- The book's positive framing may underemphasize risk for vulnerable readers
- Some critics felt Pollan's establishment-outsider perspective was both the book's strength and its limitation
Key Takeaways
- → The default mode network — the brain's self-referential narrative system — may be what psychedelics temporarily suppress, which explains their effects on ego and their potential in treating conditions of rigid self-narrative
- → Set and setting are as important as the substance — context shapes experience profoundly
- → The medicalization of psychedelics may be necessary for mainstream acceptance but may also constrain what they can do
| Author | Michael Pollan |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Penguin Press |
| Pages | 465 |
| Published | May 15, 2018 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-Fiction, Science, Psychology |
How to Change Your Mind Review
How to Change Your Mind arrived at exactly the right moment — when a generation of clinical researchers was producing rigorous results suggesting that psilocybin and other psychedelics could treat depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety with an effectiveness that conventional pharmacology had failed to match, and when the cultural taboo on the subject was strong enough that this research was essentially invisible to the mainstream. Michael Pollan, a writer of impeccable cultural standing with a prior record in food and consciousness, was the ideal person to make the case.
The book is structured as four interleaved investigations: a natural history of the psychedelic plants and fungi themselves; a cultural history of psychedelics’ rise to prominence, their association with the counterculture, and their suppression by the Nixon administration; a survey of the new clinical research and the scientists conducting it; and Pollan’s own cautious, systematic personal exploration of LSD, psilocybin, ayahuasca, and 5-MeO-DMT toad venom.
The science sections are the book’s most valuable contribution. Pollan explains the default mode network — the brain’s self-referential, narrative-generating system — and the research suggesting that psychedelics temporarily suppress it, producing states of ego dissolution that patients in clinical trials consistently describe as among the most meaningful experiences of their lives. For patients with treatment-resistant depression, or with the existential terror of terminal illness, these experiences appear to produce lasting change.
The personal memoir sections are more unusual — a 63-year-old with a skeptical New York intellectual’s prior attitude toward drugs describing his own experiences with some candor. What emerges is not a puff piece but a genuinely honest accounting, including the discomfort and strangeness alongside the beauty.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "How to Change Your Mind" about?
An exploration of the new science of psychedelics — LSD, psilocybin, DMT, 5-MeO-DMT — and their potential to treat depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety. Part science reporting, part cultural history, part personal memoir of Pollan's own experiences with plant medicines.
What are the key takeaways from "How to Change Your Mind"?
The default mode network — the brain's self-referential narrative system — may be what psychedelics temporarily suppress, which explains their effects on ego and their potential in treating conditions of rigid self-narrative Set and setting are as important as the substance — context shapes experience profoundly The medicalization of psychedelics may be necessary for mainstream acceptance but may also constrain what they can do
Is "How to Change Your Mind" worth reading?
The book that brought mainstream attention to the psychedelic renaissance in psychiatry — carefully reported, intellectually honest, and personally courageous in a way that elevates it above most science writing.
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