In the mid-twentieth century, scientists and psychodynamic therapists conducted hundreds of research studies to investigate the promise of psychedelics for treating alcoholism, neuroses, and schizophrenia.[1] Despite positive results, this research ceased at the end of the 1960s when the Nixon administration banned LSD, magic mushrooms, and other psychoactive substances associated with the counterculture. But in recent years, laboratory and clinical research has resumed, and some proponents have exuberantly declared that we are in the midst of a psychedelic “renaissance.”[2] As the opioid crisis persists and scores of veterans continue to return home from the War on Terror in need of psychiatric treatment, psychedelics are being enthusiastically resuscitated as promising breakthrough treatments for cases of depression, anxiety, addiction, and PTSD that pharmaceuticals and psychodynamic therapy have been unable to relieve.

Michael Pollan’s latest book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, explores this rebirth of scientific and medical interest in psychedelics. The cover image, of a portal to the sky set against a black backdrop, beckons the reader on a journey through the title’s many themes. Along the way, Pollan narrates a fascinating social history of LSD and psilocybin (the psychoactive compound found in “magic” mushrooms), resurrects a near-forgotten body of scientific and clinical research on psychedelics that pre-dates Timothy Leary and the counterculture, and recounts his own tentative explorations in an underground world of therapists and healers. Collectively, the research efforts and lives and struggles of the men and women Pollan introduces us to — chemists, neuroscientists, mycologists, drug reform activists, therapists, psychologists, and patients participating in clinical trials for addiction, depression, and end-of-life anxiety — weave a larger story of psychedelic science as a promising field for treating mental illness and exploring the mysteries of human consciousness. Fifty years after LSD was classified as a schedule one prohibited drug, Pollan discovers science and psychiatry are now taking psychedelics seriously as a tool “for both understanding the mind and, potentially, changing it.”

At the same time, there are also many important perspectives missing from Pollan’s book. It is almost entirely a white history and a male one. Its primary protagonists are the principal investigators leading the research studies and clinical trials. There are very different histories — less white and male and science-centered — of psychedelic use in the modern West and the current “psychedelic renaissance” that Pollan could have sought out and used his power as a best-selling author to tell.

In general — barring a brief discussion of how non-indigenous people exploitatively appropriated magic mushrooms from native Oaxacans —Pollan has very little to say about the fraught politics of non-indigenous people using rituals and sacred medicines extracted and appropriated from the cultures of indigenous peoples. Such politics have a renewed relevancy as medical legalization grows increasingly likely, and a host of ethical questions confronts the psychedelic research community on issues related to patents, insurance, and FDA licensing. Who stands to profit from the current renaissance of research is an urgent question in 2018 and, unfortunately, not one that Pollan devotes much time to considering.

Absent, too, is a thoughtful reflection on how the particulars of Pollan’s privilege and taste occlude other important issues at stake in embracing psychedelic therapy. For instance, he is too inclined to dismiss tastes that are not his own; he disparages the New Age music that plays throughout psychedelic culture and states his preference for Bach. But his myopia has consequences deeper than the soundtrack. For instance, Pollan fails to address the questions Mike Jay raises in his review, “Who Gets to Trip?” where he pairs How to Change Your Mind with Lauren Slater’s Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds. Slater, who has a history of psychosis, was excluded from both clinical trials and the underground world that accepted Pollan. Jay’s criticism gets at the important politics of access Pollan misses.

So what then is the value of Pollan’s book, and why review it for The Revealer, a publication about religion? Researched and written in the style of immersive journalism that Pollan is known for, the book does thoughtfully and beautifully capture the story these scientists and psychonauts tell themselves about what they are doing and why it matters. As it turns out, this story is not just about the excitement generated by cutting-edge research or promising clinical trial results. One of the inspirations for Pollan’s initial interest in psychedelics is, in fact, a 2006 study by a team of researchers led by Roland Griffiths and William Richards at Johns Hopkins titled, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” Published in the journal Psychopharmacology, Pollan is intrigued by the presence of the words “mystical” and “spiritual” at the center of a peer-reviewed scientific journal article. “The title hinted at an intriguing frontier of research,” he writes, “one that seemed to straddle two worlds we’ve grown accustomed to think are irreconcilable: science and spirituality.” Much of his book is an exploration of the relationship between these two domains. As the book progresses, there is a gradual unsettling of Pollan’s own self-identification as a philosophical materialist, “who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws it obeys should be able to explain everything that happens.” How is it, Pollan asks, that psychedelics might undo such a worldview?

Pollan discovers he doesn’t have to look far. At every turn in his investigation of the science of psychedelics, he encounters this entanglement of science with mysticism, and the material with the spiritual. For example, in his history of twentieth-century psychedelic use in the West, Pollan tells the story of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938 and was deeply sympathetic to the adoption of his “problem-child” by the counterculture youth. He regarded this as an “understandable response to the emptiness of what he described as a materialist, industrialized, and spiritually impoverished society that had lost its connection to nature.” Hoffman emerged from his own experiences with LSD “convinced the molecule offered civilization not only a potential therapeutic but also a spiritual balm.”

Throughout the book, Pollan continually returns to this theme, and what he calls this “curious paradox.” The mind-altering properties of LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelics seem to suggest a solidly materialist explanation for consciousness and spirituality because the changes they occasion can be attributed directly to a chemical. And what, he writes, “is more material than a chemical?” Yet what Pollan hears over and over in his investigation is that even the most secular of patients and participants in the clinical trials, even (especially) the laboratory scientists working with these substances, come away from their experiences convinced that something beyond a material basis of reality exists: “The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality — the very basis of religious belief.”

To help him navigate this paradox, Pollan turns to the work of William James, the pioneering nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosopher, psychologist, and scholar of religion. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, James argued that everyday waking consciousness is “but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”[3] Pollan is especially intrigued by James’ description of the consciousness generated by mystical experience as a state of profound knowing. Those who experience it are filled with the conviction, in Pollan’s words, “that some profound objective truth has been disclosed… regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation.” James called this conviction “the noetic quality,” and it leads Pollan on a search to understand what might account for it.

“Noetics” in ancient Greek and medieval philosophy was the branch of metaphysics concerned with the mind and the divine intellect. One place Pollan seeks answers on the “noetic quality” is in the neuroscience laboratories of David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London and Judson Brewer at Yale. Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), both research teams — the first administering participants high doses of psilocybin and the second working with experienced meditators — discovered that states of ego dissolution in volunteers correlated with the quieting of activity in the network of brain structures known as the “default mode network.” This network has been hypothesized to be the seat of the self; that is, it is the part of the brain responsible for the sense we have of ourselves as an individual “I” or ego separate from others and from a world “out there.” What these studies seem to show is that “when activity in the default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes, and the usual boundaries we experience between self and world, subject and object, all melt away.” But the studies also reveal that consciousness survives the disappearance of this ego-self, and that in fact, “taking this particular network off-line may give us access to extraordinary states of consciousness — moments of oneness or ecstasy that are no less wondrous for having a physical cause.”

By reaching out to patients in clinical trials testing the efficacy of psilocybin for the treatment of depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety, Pollan learns that many trial participants attribute their healing to the mystical experiences occasioned by the chemical. Pollan appreciates the difficulty of fitting this into a standard psychiatric paradigm. He asks, “How is Western medicine to evaluate a psychiatric drug that appears to work not by means of any strictly pharmacological effect but by administering a certain kind of experience in the minds of the people who take it?” Here it is the psychiatrist Jeffrey Guss, one of the researchers on the psilocybin clinical trials, who helps Pollan understand that part of the promise of psychedelic-assisted therapy is that it seems to resolve the conflict between two competing understandings and treatment paradigms of mental illness that have characterized American psychiatry over the past half century: “Is mental illness a disorder of chemistry, or is it a loss of meaning in one’s life? Psychedelic therapy is the wedding of those two approaches.”[4]

As a “healthy normal,” Pollan is excluded from participating in these clinical trials. But as he deepens his investigations, he starts to seek an understanding of the paradox of the noetic through his own experiences. Pollan is, at first, a wary traveler, and he describes himself at the beginning of the book as — barring a mild experience or two with magic mushrooms in his twenties — psychedelically naïve. This changes after a trip to the Pacific Northwest to meet the mycologist and mushroom entrepreneur Paul Stamets. Why, Pollan wonders, would fungi and plants evolve to produce a chemical compound with such profound effects on the minds of the creatures that consume them? Stamets believes they have a special intelligence and message to share with humans about the interconnectedness of all matter and all life; they communicate this to us neurochemically “by virtue of the gift of consciousness.” Pollan compares Stamets to the nineteenth-century German Romantic scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who argued that it was not through distant, rational objectivity but rather through our subjective understanding (feelings, senses, and imagination) that we ought to study the natural world. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice” that is “familiar to his soul,” Humboldt wrote. Through this understanding, Pollan is able to appreciate Stamets’ theories of the intelligence of little scraps of dried brown fungi and their capacity to fill the human mind with an exquisite experience of unitive consciousness. Stamets guides Pollan on a field expedition to find a special species of magic mushroom called Psilocybe azurescens. And months later, on a summer day in his home in New England, Pollan takes them. These pages, the most beautiful of the book, are filled with the evocative nature writing that Pollan is famous for. Sitting in his garden abuzz with late-summer life, Pollan starts to find a resolution to the noetic paradox that has been troubling him:

I’m struck by the fact that there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight — another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.

Faith, says Pollan, is not needed here, nor is “access to a spiritual dimension” dependent on “one’s acceptance of the supernatural.” Rather, it is an understanding of the spiritual opposed not so much to the material or to nature as it is to a human-centric egotism: “The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical,” Pollan concludes.

In the book’s opening pages, Pollan notes that in the 1960s, the acid trip became a rite of passage for the era’s youth, but that “[i]nstead 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.” For Pollan, the new renaissance of psychedelics in American society beckons us to a different kind of rite of passage, one that would re-enchant the world and re-connect us with our non-human fellow creatures:

One of the gifts of psychedelics is the way they reanimate the world, as if they were distributing the blessings of consciousness more widely and evenly over the landscape, in the process breaking the human monopoly on subjectivity that we moderns take as a given. To us, we are the world’s only conscious subjects, with the rest of creation made up of objects; to the more egotistical among us, even other people count as objects. Psychedelic consciousness overturns that view, by granting us a wider, more generous lens through which we can glimpse the subject-hood — the spirit! — of everything, animal, vegetable, even mineral, all of it now somehow returning our gaze. Spirits, it seems, are everywhere. New rays of relation appear between us and all the world’s Others.

The book’s epigraph is a line from the Emily Dickinson poem “Time and Eternity”: “The soul should always stand ajar.” With that poetic gesture, Pollan invites his readers to dwell in that new opening.

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[1] For more on this history, see: Caldwell, W.V. 1968. LSD Psychotherapy: An Exploration of Psychedelic and Psycholytic Therapy. New York, Grove Press; Dyck, Erika. 2008. Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins; Lattin, Don. 2010. The Harvard Psychedelic Club. New York: HarperOne.

[2] The FDA recently designated psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy using MDMA (the primary substance in the recreational drug Ecstasy) and psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) as “breakthrough therapies.” On-going Stage 3 clinical trials will likely lead to the medical legalization of these substances in the United States by the early 2020s. For an excellent account of the revival of laboratory research, see Langlitz, Nicolas. 2013. Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press. The term “renaissance” was coined by psychiatrist Ben Sessa in his 2012 book, The Psychedelic Renaissance: Reassessing the Role of Psychedelic Drugs in 21st Century Psychiatry and Society.

[3] James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, cited in Pollan, 17.

[4] For more on this conflict, see anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s ethnographic study of American psychiatry, Luhrmann, T.M. 2000. Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry. Vintage Books: New York. For more on the clinical trials with psilocybin and patients’ narratives of their healing, see also Pollan’s excellent piece in the The New Yorker, The Trip Treatment, February 9, 2015.

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Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the current renaissance of interest in psychedelics in American society.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.