How to Change Your Mind

What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Michael Pollan · 2018 · Science

11 min · 11 chaptersNarrated in your voice

Original summary · AI-drafted, human-published · added by Library

What it's about

Michael Pollan traces psychedelic compounds from their discovery through 1960s utopianism, prohibition, and their recent return to legitimate neuroscience labs. He argues that LSD and psilocybin are not merely recreational curiosities but tools that reveal how the brain constructs the self, and that under careful clinical conditions they show real promise against depression, addiction, and the existential dread of terminal illness. The book mattered because it moved psychedelics from countercultural memory into mainstream medical and scientific conversation.

Reading plan

Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.

Read together

Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.

Who it's for

- A reader curious about consciousness who wants the science behind claims of ego dissolution and mystical experience. - A patient, caregiver, or clinician weighing psychedelic-assisted therapy for depression, addiction, or end-of-life anxiety. - A general nonfiction reader who enjoys Pollan's blend of history, memoir, and science journalism.

What’s inside

1
A Second Look at a Forbidden Subject
The current psychedelic renaissance in neuroscience was possible only after researchers stripped the drugs of the countercultural politics that got them banned in 1970.
1 min
2
Mushrooms, Mexico, and Mr. Wasson
The modern Western psychedelic story begins not in a laboratory but in a Mexican village, where a banker's 1955 expedition set off consequences neither he nor his hosts could control.
1 min
3
Leary, Harvard, and the Fall
Timothy Leary's turn from careful researcher to public evangelist did more to destroy psychedelic science's credibility than any pharmacological danger of the drugs themselves.
1 min
4
The Entropic Brain
Psychedelics produce their signature effects by suppressing the brain's default mode network, and this loosening of the self-narrating system, not any single chemical action, is the real mechanism worth studying.
1 min
5
The Trip Treatment
A single guided psychedelic session can durably reduce a dying patient's fear of death, suggesting the mystical quality of the experience, not the drug's pharmacology alone, is doing the therapeutic work.
1 min
6
Rewiring the Addicted and Depressed Mind
Psychedelics may treat addiction and depression by breaking rigid, habitual patterns of thought in a way daily medication cannot, offering psychiatry a fundamentally different treatment model.
1 min
7
Journeys Underground: The Author as Subject
Pollan's own guided sessions with LSD, psilocybin, and 5-MeO-DMT are offered as a way to make the clinical findings vivid, but a single articulate journalist's trip reports cannot substitute for controlled evidence.
1 min
8
What the Adult Brain Can Relearn from the Child's
The lasting value of psychedelics may lie in temporarily returning the adult mind to the more plastic, less defended mode of cognition characteristic of early childhood.
1 min
9
Where the Renaissance Outpaces the Evidence
1 min
10
Final summary
1 min
11
Actionable advice
1 min

About Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan is an American journalist and professor at Harvard and UC Berkeley, best known for The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. His work on food systems established his method of combining deep reporting, personal experiment, and cultural history, which he applied here to psychedelic science after decades of writing about the natural world and human consciousness.