How to change your mind What the new science of psychedelics teaches us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence

Review by New York Times Review

HOW TO CHANGE YOUR MIND: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, by Michael Pollan. (Penguin, $18.) Yes, this is the book in which Pollan drops acid. Here, the author, known for his searching examinations of the ethics of eating, investigates how psychedelics can provide relief. His book was one of the Book Review's 10 best of 2018. SEVERANCE, by Ling Ma. (Picador, $17.) Candace, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, is the anchor of this dystopian novel as she falls into an unsatisfying and trance-like routine in New York City. As our reviewer, Antonia Hitchens, put it, the book "offers blatant commentary on 'dizzying abundance' and unrelenting consumption, evolving into a semi-surreal sendup of a workplace and its utopia of rules." THE ROAD TO UNFREEDOM: Russia, Europe, America, by Timothy Snyder. (Tim Duggan, $17.) Snyder considers what causes democracy to fracture, with a focus on recent political instability in the West. In his view, Russia and Vladimir Putin are to blame. Our reviewer, Margaret MacMillan, wrote that Snyder "argues forcefully and eloquently" that we are living in dangerous times, calling his book a "good wake-up call." THE GLITCH, by Elisabeth Cohen. (Anchor, $16.) Shelley is the chief executive of a tech company, and she's ruthlessly efficient: She schedules sex with her husband, carves out "me time" at 3:30 a.m. and even takes a men's multivitamin. When she encounters a woman who claims to be a younger Shelley, her life begins to unravel, raising broader questions about work and selfhood. "What is the 'glitch,' really, for the rest of us?" our reviewer, Stephanie Danler, asked. "It's a question of work, and what it costs women to do it." STEALING THE SHOW: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television, by Joy Press. (Atria, $18.) Press, a former critic for The Village Voice, traces the ways in which women like Shonda Rhimes, Lena Dunham and Mindy Kaling have transformed television. While the book focuses mainly on contemporary shows, including "Gilmore Girls" and "Broad City," it gives a nod to their forebears, like "I Love Lucy" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show." TRANSCRIPTION, by Kate Atkinson. (Back Bay/Little, Brown, $16.99.) In her new novel, the author of "Life After Life" explores a teenage girl's unlikely involvement with MI5 in 1940. Juliet was a secretary before her recruitment, and was assigned to monitor British Fascist sympathizers. Ten years later, while she was working for the BBC, her past comes back to her in unsettling ways.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [May 12, 2019]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Pollan (Cooked, 2013) has long enlightened and entertained readers with his superbly inquisitive and influential books about food. He now investigates a very different sort of comestible, psychedelics (from the Greek: mind manifesting), and what they reveal about consciousness and the brain. Cued to the quiet renaissance underway in psychedelic therapy including microdosing, the subject of Ayelet Waldman's A Really Good Day (2017) to treat addiction and depression and tohelp patients cope with terminal illness, Pollan set out to understand the neurological effects of key psychoactive chemicals. Zealous mycologist Paul Stamets shares his deep knowledge of psilocybin fungi, held sacred for centuries in Mexico and Central America. Revealing how much more there is to the story of LSD than the infamous counterculture experimentation of Timothy Leary, Pollan recounts how the molecule was synthesized in 1938 in a Swiss pharmaceutical company lab by Albert Hofmann, catalyzing two decades of research, including the successful treatment of alcoholism, and inspiring crew-cut-sporting, revolver-toting Al Hubbard, aka Captain Trips, a bootlegger, gunrunner, government agent, and millionaire, to introduce nearly 6,000 people to LSD between 1951 and 1966. Then there's the impact LSD had on Silicon Valley.Never having tripped in his youth, and increasingly aware that our habits of mind harden as we age, Pollan decides to undergo some psychedelic therapy of his own, finding underground guides to oversee his experiences. Drawing on both spirituality and science, he shares the mysterious details of his inner journeys, and explains the neurological impact of psychoactive drugs and how they change lives. Pollan's complexly elucidating and enthralling inquiry combines fascinating and significant history with daring and resonant reportage and memoir, and looks forward to a new open-mindedness toward psychedelics and the benefits of diverse forms of consciousness.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2018 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Food writer Pollan (Cooked) shifts his focus to other uses of plants in this brilliant history of psychedelics across cultures and generations, the neuroscience of its effects, the revival of research on its potential to heal mental illness-and his own mind-changing trips. For an entire generation, psychedelics were synonymous with Harvard professor-turned-hippie Timothy Leary and his siren call to "turn on, tune in, drop out." But, Pollan argues, that freewheeling attitude quickly turned into a "full-on moral panic about LSD" that "doomed the first wave of [psychedelic] research." By the 1990s, the body of knowledge about the successful use of LSD to treat alcoholics in the '50s and '60s was buried, and medical interest only revived in 2010 with studies on treating cancer anxiety with psilocybin. Pollan writes movingly of one man whose "psychedelic journey had shifted his perspective from a narrow lens trained on the prospect of dying to a renewed focus on how best to live the time left to him." Today, renewed interest has sent scientists racing ahead with trials of psychedelics to treat addiction and depression, and curious seekers like Pollan into experiments with these substances. This nuanced and sophisticated exploration, which asks big questions about meaning-making and spiritual experience, is thought-provoking and eminently readable. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

In his latest work, Pollan (Cooked) shifts his focus from food to psychedelic drugs. The shift makes sense because one of the drugs is psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms. Pollan recounts the history of psychedelic drugs from their origins, their rise in popularity and use in the 1960s, and the backlash that led to their classification as illegal substances to the recent resurgence in research as treatment for people with terminal illnesses, depression, and addiction. The story of the 53-year-old television news director who was being treated for terminal cancer serves as a powerful narrative of how effective and helpful psychedelic drugs can be. Pollan goes beyond his third-person research and offers a firsthand account of his own "trips": first with LSD, then psilocybin, and, finally, the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Throughout, Pollan's steady narration is soothing, authoritative, and tempered. VERDICT Pollan's approach to psychedelic drugs-first through the academic lens, then through personal stories-makes the topic interesting. Yet it's his conversational narration that carries the listener from beginning to end. ["A work of participatory journalism that shines new light on psychedelics and the people who study them": LJ 4/15/18 review of the Penguin Pr. hc.]-Gladys Alcedo, Wallingford, CT © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Noted culinary writer Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, 2013, etc.) makes the transition from feeding your body to feeding your head.The lengthy disclaimer on the copyright page speaks volumes. The author, well-known for books on food and life such as The Botany of Desire and The Omnivore's Dilemma, has been opening some of the doors of perception with the aid of lysergic acid, its molecular cousin psilocybin, ayahuasca, and assorted other chemical tools. His journeys are timely, since, "after several decades of suppression and neglect, psychedelics are having a renaissance." For one thing, LSD and its kin have proven potent tools in treating depression, anxiety, addictions, post-traumatic stress, and other ailments. Through the use of neuroimaging technologies that were not available to the pioneers of psychiatric psychedelia, we can see that in interrupting ordinary patterns of thought and helping regroove the brain, these drugs are in fact mind-expanding, as the "hoary 1960s platitude" would have it. Pollan traveled deep into the woods to undertake acid-laced spirit journeys with people who are off the grid, and perhaps a touch off their rockers as well; at the Esalen Institute, he learned the latest from a place that served a historic role in spreading the psychedelic gospel. As Pollan notes, there are risks in unguided forays into the dustier corners of the mind, but the old scare tactics of chromosomal damage and going blind after staring at the sun are just that--though, as he also writes, "once introduced into the culture, these urban legends survive and, on occasion, go on to become 'true.' " The author's evenhanded but generally positive approach shoos away scaremongering while fully recognizing that we're out in the tall grass--and, as he notes, though credited with psychological evenness, he's found himself "tossed in a psychic storm of existential dread so dark and violent that the keel comes off the boat," reason enough to seek chemical aid.A trip well worth taking, eye-opening and even mind-blowing.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Prologue Midway through the twentieth century, two unusual new molecules, organic compounds with a striking family resemblance, exploded upon the West. In time, they would change the course of social, political, and cultural history, as well as the personal histories of the millions of people who would eventually introduce them to their brains. As it happened, the arrival of these disruptive chemistries coincided with another world historical explosion--that of the atomic bomb. There were people who compared the two events and made much of the cosmic synchronicity. Extraordinary new energies had been loosed upon the world; things would never be quite the same. The first of these molecules was an accidental invention of science. Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, shortly before physi- cists split an atom of uranium for the first time. Hofmann, who worked for the Swiss pharmaceutical firm Sandoz, had been looking for a drug to stimulate circulation, not a psychoactive compound. It wasn't until five years later when he accidentally ingested a minus- cule quantity of the new chemical that he realized he had created something powerful, at once terrifying and wondrous. The second molecule had been around for thousands of years, though no one in the developed world was aware of it. Produced not by a chemist but by an inconspicuous little brown mushroom, this molecule, which would come to be known as psilocybin, had been used by the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America for hundreds of years as a sacrament. Called teonanácatl by the Aztecs, or "flesh of the gods," the mushroom was brutally suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church after the Spanish conquest and driven un- derground. In 1955, twelve years after Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD, a Manhattan banker and amateur mycologist named R. Gordon Wasson sampled the magic mushroom in the town of Huautla de Jiménez in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. Two years later, he published a fifteen-page account of the "mushrooms that cause strange visions" in Life magazine, marking the moment when news of a new form of consciousness first reached the general public. (In 1957, knowledge of LSD was mostly confined to the com- munity of researchers and mental health professionals.) People would not realize the magnitude of what had happened for several more years, but history in the West had shifted. The impact of these two molecules is hard to overestimate. The advent of LSD can be linked to the revolution in brain science that begins in the 1950s, when scientists discovered the role of neu- rotransmitters in the brain. That quantities of LSD measured in mi- crograms could produce symptoms resembling psychosis inspired brain scientists to search for the neurochemical basis of mental dis- orders previously believed to be psychological in origin. At the same time, psychedelics found their way into psychotherapy, where they were used to treat a variety of disorders, including alcoholism, anxi- ety, and depression. For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, many in the psychiatric establishment regarded LSD and psilocybin as miracle drugs. The arrival of these two compounds is also linked to the rise of the counterculture during the 1960s and, perhaps especially, to its particular tone and style. For the first time in history, the young had a rite of passage all their own: the "acid trip." Instead of folding the young into the adult world, as rites of passage have always done, this one landed them in a country of the mind few adults had any idea even existed. The effect on society was, to put it mildly, disruptive. Yet by the end of the 1960s, the social and political shock waves unleashed by these molecules seemed to dissipate. The dark side of psychedelics began to receive tremendous amounts of publicity-- bad trips, psychotic breaks, flashbacks, suicides--and beginning in 1965 the exuberance surrounding these new drugs gave way to moral panic. As quickly as the culture and the scientific establishment had embraced psychedelics, they now turned sharply against them. By the end of the decade, psychedelic drugs--which had been legal in most places--were outlawed and forced underground. At least one of the twentieth century's two bombs appeared to have been defused. Then something unexpected and telling happened. Beginning in the 1990s, well out of view of most of us, a small group of scientists, psychotherapists, and so-called psychonauts, believing that some- thing precious had been lost from both science and culture, resolved to recover it. Today, after several decades of suppression and neglect, psyche- delics are having a renaissance. A new generation of scientists, many of them inspired by their own personal experience of the compounds, are testing their potential to heal mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety, trauma, and addiction. Other scientists are using psychedelics in conjunction with new brain-imaging tools to explore the links between brain and mind, hoping to unravel some of the mysteries of consciousness. One good way to understand a complex system is to disturb it and then see what happens. By smashing atoms, a particle accelerator forces them to yield their secrets. By administering psychedelics in carefully calibrated doses, neuroscientists can profoundly disturb the normal waking consciousness of volunteers, dissolving the structures of the self and occasioning what can be described as a mystical expe- rience. While this is happening, imaging tools can observe the changes in the brain's activity and patterns of connection. Already this work is yielding surprising insights into the "neural correlates" of the sense of self and spiritual experience. The hoary 1960s platitude that psychedelics offered a key to understanding--and "expanding"-- consciousness no longer looks quite so preposterous. How to Change Your Mind is the story of this renaissance. Although it didn't start out that way, it is a very personal as well as public his- tory. Perhaps this was inevitable. Everything I was learning about the third-person history of psychedelic research made me want to explore this novel landscape of the mind in the first person too--to see how the changes in consciousness these molecules wrought actu- ally feel and what, if anything, they had to teach me about my mind and might contribute to my life. Excerpted from How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us about Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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