How to Change Your Mind

by Michael Pollan

  In the wake of his first LSD experience, Huxley wrote to Osmond suggesting that “who, having once come to the realization of the primordial fact of unity in love, would ever want to return to experimentation on the psychic level? . . . My point is that the opening of the door by mescalin[e] or LSD is too precious an opportunity, too high a privilege to be neglected for the sake of experimentation.” Or to be limited to sick people. Osmond was actually sympathetic to this viewpoint—after all, he had administered mescaline to Huxley, hardly a controlled experiment—and he participated in many of Hubbard’s sessions turning on the Best and Brightest. But Osmond wasn’t prepared to abandon science or medicine for whatever Huxley and Hubbard imagined might lay beyond it.

  In 1955, Al Hubbard sought to escape the scientific straitjacket and formalize his network of psychedelic researchers by establishing something he called the Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination. The name reflected his own desire to take his work with psychedelics beyond the limits of medicine and its focus on the ill. To serve on the commission’s board, Hubbard recruited Osmond, Hoffer, Huxley, and Cohen, as well as half a dozen other psychedelic researchers, a philosopher (Gerald Heard), and a UN official; he named himself “scientific director.”

  (What did these people think of Hubbard and his grandiose title, not to mention his phony academic credentials? They were at once indulgent and full of admiration. After Betty Eisner wrote a letter to Osmond expressing discomfort with some of Hubbard’s representations, he suggested she think of him as a kind of Christopher Columbus: “Explorers have not always been the most scientific, excellent or wholly detached people.”)

  It isn’t clear how much more there was to the Commission for the Study of Creative Imagination than a fancy letterhead, but its very existence signaled a deepening fissure between the medical and the spiritual approach to psychedelics. (Sidney Cohen, ever ambivalent on questions of science versus mysticism, abruptly resigned in 1957, only a year after joining the board.) His title as “scientific director” notwithstanding, Hubbard himself said during this period, “My regard for science, as an end within itself, is diminishing as time goes on . . . when the thing I want with all of my being, is something that lives far outside and out of reach of empirical manipulation.” Long before Leary, the shift in the objective of psychedelic research from psychotherapy to cultural revolution was well under way.

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  ONE LAST NODE worth visiting in Al Hubbard’s far-flung psychedelic network is Silicon Valley, where the potential for LSD to foster “creative imagination” and thereby change the culture received its most thorough test to date. Indeed, the seeds that Hubbard planted in Silicon Valley continue to yield interesting fruit, in the form of the valley’s ongoing interest in psychedelics as a tool for creativity and innovation. (As I write, the practice of microdosing—taking a tiny, “subperceptual” regular dose of LSD as a kind of mental tonic—is all the rage in the tech community.) Steve Jobs often told people that his experiments with LSD had been one of his two or three most important life experiences. He liked to taunt Bill Gates by suggesting, “He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.” (Gates has said he did in fact try LSD.) It might not be a straight one, but it is possible to draw a line connecting Al Hubbard’s arrival in Silicon Valley with his satchelful of LSD to the tech boom that Steve Jobs helped set off a quarter century later.

  The key figure in the marriage of Al Hubbard and Silicon Valley was Myron Stolaroff. Stolaroff was a gifted electrical engineer who, by the mid-1950s, had become assistant to the president for strategic planning at Ampex, one of the first technology companies to set up shop in what at the time was a sleepy valley of farms and orchards. (It wouldn’t be called Silicon Valley until 1971.) Ampex, which at its peak had thirteen thousand employees, was a pioneer in the development of reel-to-reel magnetic tape for both audio and data recording. Born in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1920, Stolaroff studied engineering at Stanford and was one of Ampex’s very first employees, a fact that would make him a wealthy man. Nominally Jewish, he was by his thirties a spiritual seeker whose path eventually led him to Gerald Heard, the English philosopher and friend of Aldous Huxley’s. Stolaroff was so moved by Heard’s description of his LSD experience with Al Hubbard that in March 1956 he traveled to Vancouver for a session with the Captain in his apartment.

  Sixty-six micrograms of Sandoz LSD launched Stolaroff on a journey by turns terrifying and ecstatic. Over the course of several hours, he witnessed the entire history of the planet from its formation through the development of life on earth and the appearance of humankind, culminating in the trauma of his own birth. (This seems to have been a common trajectory of Hubbard-guided trips.) “That was a remarkable opening for me,” he told an interviewer years later, “a tremendous opening. I relived a very painful birth experience that had determined almost all my personality features. But I also experienced the oneness of mankind, and the reality of God. I knew that from then on . . . I would be totally committed to this work.

  “After that first LSD experience, I said, ‘this is the greatest discovery man has ever made.’”

  Stolaroff shared the news with a small number of his friends and colleagues at Ampex. They began meeting every month or so to discuss spiritual questions and the potential of LSD to help individuals—healthy individuals—realize their full potential. Don Allen, a young Ampex engineer, and Willis Harman, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford, joined the group, and Al Hubbard began coming down to Menlo Park to guide the members on psychedelic journeys and then train them to guide others. “As a therapist,” Stolaroff recalled, “he was one of the best.”

  Convinced of the power of LSD to help people transcend their limitations, Stolaroff tried for a time, with Hubbard’s help, to reshape Ampex as the world’s first “psychedelic corporation.” Hubbard conducted a series of weekly workshops at headquarters and administered LSD to company executives at a site in the Sierra. But the project foundered when the company’s general manager, who was Jewish, objected to the images of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the Last Supper that Hubbard insisted on bringing into his office. Around the same time, Willis Harman shifted the focus of his teaching at Stanford, offering a new class on “the human potential” that ended with a unit on psychedelics. The engineers were getting religion. (And have it still: I know of one Bay Area tech company today that uses psychedelics in its management training. A handful of others have instituted “microdosing Fridays.”)

  In 1961, Stolaroff left Ampex to dedicate himself full-time to psychedelic research. With Willis Harman, he established the orotundly titled International Foundation for Advanced Study (IFAS) to explore the potential of LSD to enhance human personality and creativity. Stolaroff hired a psychiatrist named Charles Savage as medical director and, as staff psychologist, a first-year graduate student by the name of James Fadiman. (Fadiman, who graduated from Harvard in 1960, was introduced to psilocybin by Richard Alpert, though not until after his graduation. “The greatest thing in the world has happened to me,” Alpert told his former student, “and I want to share it with you.”) Don Allen also left his engineering post at Ampex to join IFAS as a screener and guide. The foundation secured a drug research permit from the FDA and a supply of LSD and mescaline from Al Hubbard and began—to use an Al Hubbard term—“processing clients.” Over the next six years, the foundation would process some 350 people.

  As James Fadiman and Don Allen recall those years at the foundation (both sat for extensive interviews), it was a thrilling and heady time to be working on what they were convinced was the frontier of human possibility. For the most part, their experimental subjects were “healthy normals” or what Fadiman described as “a healthy neurotic outpatient population.” Each client paid five hundred dollars for a package that included before-and-after personality testing, a guided LSD session, and some follow-up. Al Hu
bbard “would float in and out,” Don Allen recalls. He “was both our inspiration and our resident expert.” James Fadiman says, “He was the hidden force behind the Menlo Park research.” From time to time, Hubbard would take members of the staff to Death Valley for training sessions, in the belief that the primordial landscape there was particularly conducive to revelatory experience.

  In half a dozen or so papers published in the early 1960s, the foundation’s researchers reported some provocative “results.” Seventy-eight percent of clients said the experience had increased their ability to love, 71 percent registered an increase in self-esteem, and 83 percent said that during their sessions they had glimpsed “a higher power, or ultimate reality.” Those who had such an experience were the ones who reported the most lasting benefits from their session. Don Allen told me that most clients emerged with “notable and fairly sustainable changes in beliefs, attitudes, and behavior, way above statistical probability.” Specifically, they became “much less judgmental, much less rigid, more open, and less defended.” But it wasn’t all sweetness and light: several clients abruptly broke off marriages after their sessions, now believing they were mismatched or trapped in destructive patterns of behavior.

  The foundation also conducted studies to determine if LSD could in fact enhance creativity and problem solving. “This wasn’t at all obvious,” James Fadiman points out, “since the experience is so powerful, you might just wander off and lose track of what you were trying to accomplish.” So to test their hypothesis, Fadiman and his colleagues started with themselves, seeing if they could design a credible creativity experiment while on a relatively light dose of LSD—a hundred micrograms. Perhaps not surprisingly, they determined that they could.

  Working in groups of four, James Fadiman and Willis Harman administered the same dose of LSD to artists, engineers, architects, and scientists, all of whom were somehow “stuck” in their work on a particular project. “We used every manipulation of set and setting in the book,” Fadiman recalled, telling subjects “they would be fascinated by their intellectual capacities and would solve problems as never before.” Subjects reported much greater fluidity in their thinking, as well as an enhanced ability to both visualize a problem and recontextualize it. “We were amazed, as were our participants, at how many novel and effective solutions came out of our sessions,” Fadiman wrote. Among their subjects were some of the visionaries who in the next few years would revolutionize computers, including William English and Doug Engelbart.* There are all sorts of problems with this study—it was not controlled, it relied on the subjects’ own assessments of their success, and it was halted before it could be completed—but it does at least point to a promising avenue for research.

  The foundation had closed up shop by 1966, but Hubbard’s work in Silicon Valley was not quite over. In one of the more mysterious episodes of his career, Hubbard was called out of semiretirement by Willis Harman in 1968. After IFAS disbanded, Harman had gone to work at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI), a prestigious think tank affiliated with Stanford University and a recipient of contracts from several branches of the federal government, including the military. Harman was put in charge of SRI’s Educational Policy Research Center, with a mandate to envision education’s future. LSD by now was illegal but still very much in use in the community of engineers and academics in and around Stanford.

  Hubbard, who by now was broke, was hired as a part-time “special investigative agent,” ostensibly to keep tabs on the use of drugs in the student movement. Harman’s letter of employment to Hubbard is both obscure and suggestive: “Our investigations of some of the current social movements affecting education indicate that the drug use prevalent among student members of the New Left is not entirely undesigned. Some of it appears to be present as a deliberate weapon aimed at political change. We are concerned with assessing the significance of this as it impacts on matters of long-range educational policy. In this connection it would be advantageous to have you considered in the capacity of a special investigative agent who might have access to relevant data which is not ordinarily available.” Though not mentioned in the letter, Hubbard’s services to SRI also included using his extensive government contacts to keep contracts flowing. So Al Hubbard once again donned his khaki security-guard uniform, complete with gold badge, sidearm, and a belt studded with bullets, and got back to work.

  But the uniform and the “special agent” title were all a cover, and an audacious one at that.

  As a vocal enemy of the rising counterculture, it’s entirely possible Hubbard did investigate illegal drug use on campus for SRI (or others*), but if he did, he was once again working both sides of the street. For though the legal status of LSD had changed by 1968, Hubbard and Harman’s mission—“to provide the [LSD] experience to political and intellectual leaders around the world”—apparently had not. The work might well have continued, just more quietly and beneath a cover story. For as Willis Harman told Todd Brendan Fahey in a 1990 interview and as a former SRI employee confirmed, “Al never did anything resembling security work.

  “Al’s job was to run the special sessions for us.”

  That former SRI employee is Peter Schwartz, an engineer who became a leading futurist; he is currently senior vice president for government relations and strategic planning at Salesforce.com. In 1973, Schwartz went to work for Willis Harman at SRI, his first job out of graduate school. By then, Al Hubbard was more or less retired, and Schwartz was given his office. On the wall above the desk hung a large photograph of Richard Nixon, inscribed “to my good friend, Al, for all your years of service, your friend, Dick.” A pile of mail accumulated in the in-box, with letters addressed to A. M. Hubbard from all over the world, including, he recalled, one from George Bush, the future CIA director, who at the time was serving as head of the Republican National Committee.

  “Who was this fellow?” Schwartz wondered. And then one day this round fellow with a gray crew cut, dressed in a security guard’s uniform and carrying a .38, showed up to retrieve his mail.

  “‘I’m a friend of Willis’s,’” Hubbard told Schwartz. “And then he began asking me the strangest questions, completely without context. ‘Where do you think you actually came from? What do you think about the cosmos?’ I learned later this was how he checked people out, to decide whether or not you were a worthy candidate.”

  Intrigued, Schwartz asked Harman about this mystery man and, piece by piece, began to put together much of the tale of Hubbard’s life. The young futurist soon realized that “most of the people I was meeting who had interesting ideas had tripped with Hubbard: professors at Stanford, Berkeley, the staff at SRI, computer engineers, scientists, writers. And all of them had been transformed by the experience.” Schwartz said that several of the early computer engineers relied on LSD in designing circuit chips, especially in the years before they could be designed on computers. “You had to be able to visualize a staggering complexity in three dimensions, hold it all in your head. They found that LSD could help.”

  Schwartz eventually realized that “everyone in that community”—referring to the Bay Area tech crowd in the 1960s and early 1970s, as well as the people in and around Stewart Brand’s Whole Earth Network—“had taken Hubbard LSD.”

  Why were engineers in particular so taken with psychedelics? Schwartz, himself trained as an aerospace engineer, thinks it has to do with the fact that unlike the work of scientists, who can simplify the problems they work on, “problem solving in engineering always involves irreducible complexity. You’re always balancing complex variables you can never get perfect, so you’re desperately searching to find patterns. LSD shows you patterns.

  “I have no doubt that all that Hubbard LSD all of us had taken had a big effect on the birth of Silicon Valley.”

  Stewart Brand received his own baptism in Hubbard LSD at IFAS in 1962, with James Fadiman presiding as his guide. His first experience with LSD “was kind of a bum
trip,” he recalls, but it led to a series of other journeys that reshaped his worldview and, indirectly, all of ours. The Whole Earth Network Brand would subsequently gather together (which included Peter Schwartz, Esther Dyson, Kevin Kelly, Howard Rheingold, and John Perry Barlow) and play a key role in redefining what computers meant and did, helping to transform them from a top-down tool of the military-industrial complex—with the computer punch card a handy symbol of Organization Man—into a tool of personal liberation and virtual community, with a distinctly countercultural vibe. How much does the idea of cyberspace, an immaterial realm where one can construct a new identity and merge with a community of virtual others, owe to an imagination shaped by the experience of psychedelics? Or for that matter virtual reality?* The whole notion of cybernetics, the idea that material reality can be translated into bits of information, may also owe something to the experience of LSD, with its power to collapse matter into spirit.

  Brand thinks LSD’s value to his community was as an instigator of creativity, one that first helped bring the power of networked computers to people (via SRI computer visionaries such as Doug Engelbart and the early hacker community), but then was superseded by the computers themselves. (“At a certain point, the drugs weren’t getting any better,” Brand said, “but the computers were.”) After his experience at IFAS, Brand got involved with Ken Kesey and his notorious Acid Tests, which he describes as “a participatory art form that led directly to Burning Man,” the annual gathering of the arts, technology, and psychedelic communities in the Nevada desert. In his view, LSD was a critical ingredient in nourishing the spirit of collaborative experiment, and tolerance of failure, that distinguish the computer culture of the West Coast. “It gave us permission to try weird shit in cahoots with other people.”