How to Change Your Mind

by Michael Pollan

  On occasion, the LSD produced genuine insight, as it did for Brand himself one chilly afternoon in the spring of 1966. Bored, he went up onto the roof of his building in North Beach and took a hundred micrograms of acid—Fadiman’s creativity dose. As he looked toward downtown while wrapped in a blanket, it appeared that the streets lined with buildings were not quite parallel. This must be due to the curvature of Earth, Brand decided. It occurred to him that when we think of Earth as flat, as we usually do, we assume it is infinite, and we treat its resources that way. “The relationship to infinity is to use it up,” he thought, “but a round earth was a finite spaceship you had to manage carefully.” At least that’s how it appeared to him that afternoon, “from three stories and one hundred mikes up.”

  It would change everything if he could convey this to people! But how? He flashed on the space program and wondered, “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the earth from space? I become fixed on this, on how to get this photo that would revolutionize our understanding of our place in the universe. I know, I’ll make a button! But what should it say? ‘Let’s have a photo of the earth from space.’ No, it needs to be a question, and maybe a little paranoid—draw on that American resource. ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?’”

  Brand came down from his roof and launched a campaign that eventually reached the halls of Congress and NASA. Who knows if it was the direct result of Brand’s campaign, but two years later, in 1968, the Apollo astronauts turned their cameras around and gave us the first photograph of Earth from the moon, and Stewart Brand gave us the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Did everything change? The case could be made that it had.

  Part II: The Crack-Up

  Timothy Leary came late to psychedelics. By the time he launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project in 1960, there had already been a full decade of psychedelic research in North America, with hundreds of academic papers and several international conferences to show for it. Leary himself seldom made reference to this body of work, preferring to give the impression that his own psychedelic research represented a radical new chapter in the annals of psychology. In 1960, the future of psychedelic research looked bright. Yet within the brief span of five years, the political and cultural weather completely shifted, a moral panic about LSD engulfed America, and virtually all psychedelic research and therapy were either halted or driven underground. What happened?

  “Timothy Leary” is the too-obvious answer to that question. Just about everyone I’ve interviewed on the subject—dozens of people—has prefaced his or her answer by saying, “It’s far too easy to blame Leary,” before proceeding to do precisely that. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the flamboyant psychology professor with a tropism bending him toward the sun of publicity, good or bad, did grave damage to the cause of psychedelic research. He did. And yet the social forces unleashed by the drugs themselves once they moved from the laboratory out into the culture were bigger and stronger than any individual could withstand—or take credit for. With or without the heedless, joyful, and amply publicized antics of Timothy Leary, the sheer Dionysian power of LSD was itself bound to shake things up and incite a reaction.

  By the time Leary was hired by Harvard in 1959, he had a national reputation as a gifted personality researcher, and yet even then—before his first shattering experience with psilocybin in Cuernavaca during the summer of 1960—Leary was feeling somewhat disenchanted with his field. A few years before, while working as director of psychiatric research at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland, Leary and a colleague had conducted a clever experiment to assess the effectiveness of psychotherapy. A group of patients seeking psychiatric care were divided into two groups; one received the standard treatment of the time, the other (consisting of people on a waiting list) no treatment at all. After a year, one-third of all the subjects had improved, one-third had gotten worse, and one-third remained unchanged—regardless of which group they were in. Whether or not a subject received treatment made no difference whatsoever in the outcome. So what good was conventional psychotherapy? Psychology? Leary had begun to wonder.

  Leary quickly established himself at Harvard’s Department of Social Relations as a dynamic and charismatic, if somewhat cynical, teacher. The handsome professor was a great talker, in the expansive Irish mode, and could charm the pants off anyone, especially women, for whom he was apparently catnip. Leary had always had a roguish, rebellious streak—he was court-martialed during his time at West Point for violating the honor code and expelled from the University of Alabama for spending the night in a women’s dorm—and Harvard-the-institution brought out rebellion in him. Leary would speak cynically of psychological research as a “game.” Herbert Kelman, a colleague in the department who later became Leary’s chief adversary, recalls the new professor as “personable” (Kelman helped him find his first house) but says, “I had misgivings about him from the beginning. He would often talk out of the top of his head about things he knew nothing about, like existentialism, and he was telling our students psychology was all a game. It seemed to me a bit cavalier and irresponsible.”

  I met Kelman, now in his nineties, in the small, overstuffed apartment where he lives with his wife in an assisted-living facility in West Cambridge. Kelman displayed no rancor toward Leary yet evinced little respect for him either as a teacher or as a scientist; indeed, he believes Leary had become disenchanted with science well before psychedelics came into his life. In Kelman’s opinion, even before the psilocybin, “He was already halfway off the deep end.”

  Leary’s introduction to psilocybin, poolside in Mexico during the summer of 1960, came three years after R. Gordon Wasson published his notorious Life magazine article about the “mushrooms that cause strange visions.” For Leary, the mushrooms were transformative. In an afternoon, his passion to understand the human mind had been reignited—indeed, had exploded.

  “In four hours by the swimming pool in Cuernavaca I learned more about the mind, the brain, and its structures than I did in the preceding fifteen as a diligent psychologist,” he wrote later in Flashbacks, his 1983 memoir. “I learned that the brain is an underutilized biocomputer . . . I learned that normal consciousness is one drop in an ocean of intelligence. That consciousness and intelligence can be systematically expanded. That the brain can be reprogrammed.”

  Leary returned from his journey with an irresistible urge to “rush back and tell everyone,” as he recalled in High Priest, his 1968 memoir. And then in a handful of sentences he slid into a prophetic voice, one in which the whole future trajectory of Timothy Leary could be foretold:

  Listen! Wake up! You are God! You have the Divine plan engraved in cellular script within you. Listen! Take this sacrament! You’ll see! You’ll get the revelation! It will change your life!

  But at least for the first year or two at Harvard, Leary went through the motions of doing science. Back in Cambridge that fall, he recruited Richard Alpert, a promising assistant professor who was heir to a railroad fortune, and, having secured the tacit approval of their department chair, David McClelland, the two launched the Harvard Psilocybin Project, operating out of a tiny broom closet of an office in the Department of Social Relations in a house at 5 Divinity Avenue. (I went looking for the house, but it has long since been razed and replaced by a sprawling, block-long brick science building.) Leary, ever the salesman, had convinced Harvard that the research he proposed to undertake was squarely in the tradition of William James, who in the early years of the century had also studied altered states of consciousness and mystical experience at Harvard. The university placed one condition on the research: Leary and Alpert could give the new drugs to graduate students, but not to undergraduates. Before long, an intriguingly titled new seminar showed up in the Harvard course listings:

  Experimental Expansion of Consciousness

  The literature describing internally and externally induced changes in awareness will be reviewed. The basic elements
of mystical experiences will be studied cross-culturally. The members of the seminar will participate in experiences with consciousness expanding methods and a systematic analysis of attention will be paid to the problems of methodology in this area. This seminar will be limited to advanced graduate students. Admission by consent of the instructor.

  “Experimental Expansion of Consciousness” proved to be extremely popular.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN ITS THREE YEARS of existence, the Harvard Psilocybin Project accomplished surprisingly little, at least in terms of science. In their first experiments, Leary and Alpert administered psilocybin to hundreds of people of all sorts, including housewives, musicians, artists, academics, writers, fellow psychologists, and graduate students, who then completed questionnaires about their experiences. According to “Americans and Mushrooms in a Naturalistic Environment: A Preliminary Report,” most subjects had generally very positive and occasionally life-changing experiences.

  “Naturalistic” was apt: these sessions took place not in university buildings but in comfortable living rooms, accompanied by music and candlelight, and to a casual observer they would have looked more like parties than experiments, especially because the researchers themselves usually joined in. (Leary and Alpert took a heroic amount of psilocybin and, later, LSD.) At least in the beginning, Leary, Alpert, and their graduate students endeavored to write up accounts of their own and their subjects’ psilocybin journeys, as if they were pioneers exploring an unmapped frontier of consciousness and the previous decade of work surveying the psychedelic landscape had never happened. “We were on our own,” Leary wrote, somewhat disingenuously. “Western literature had almost no guides, no maps, no texts that even recognized the existence of altered states.”

  Drawing on their extensive fieldwork, however, Leary did do some original work theorizing the idea of “set” and “setting,” deploying the words in this context for the first time in the literature. These useful terms, if not the concepts they denote—for which Al Hubbard deserves most of the credit—may well represent Leary’s most enduring contribution to psychedelic science. Leary and Alpert published a handful of papers in the early years at Harvard that are still worth reading, both as well-written and closely observed ethnographies of the experience and as texts in which the early stirrings of a new sensibility can be glimpsed.

  Building on the idea that the life-changing experiences of volunteers in the Psilocybin Project might have some broader social application, in 1961 Leary and a graduate student, Ralph Metzner, dreamed up a more ambitious research project. The Concord Prison Experiment sought to discover if the potential of psilocybin to change personality could be used to reduce recidivism in a population of hardened criminals. That this audacious experiment ever got off the ground is a testimony to Leary’s salesmanship and charm, for not only the prison psychiatrist but the warden had to sign off on it.

  The idea was to compare the recidivism rates of two groups of prisoners in a maximum security prison in Concord, Massachusetts. A group of thirty-two inmates received psilocybin in sessions that took place in the prison, with one member of Leary’s team taking the drug with them—so as not to condescend to the prisoners, Leary explained, or treat them like guinea pigs.* The other remained straight in order to observe and take notes. A second group of inmates received no drugs or special treatment of any kind. The two groups were then followed for a period of months after their release.

  Leary reported eye-popping results: ten months after their release, only 25 percent of the psilocybin recipients had ended up back in jail, while the control group returned at a more typical rate of 80 percent. But when Rick Doblin at MAPS meticulously reconstructed the Concord experiment decades later, reviewing the outcomes subject by subject, he concluded that Leary had exaggerated the data; in fact, there was no statistically significant difference in the rates of recidivism between the two groups. (Even at the time, the methodological shortcomings of the study had prompted David McClelland, the department chair, to write a scathing memo to Metzner.) Of Leary’s scientific work, Sidney Cohen, himself a psychedelic researcher, concluded that “it was the sort of research that made scientists wince.”

  Leary played a more tangential role in one other, much more credible study done in the spring of 1962: the Good Friday Experiment, described in chapter one. Unlike the Concord Prison Experiment, the “Miracle at Marsh Chapel,” as it became known, made a good faith effort to honor the conventions of the controlled, double-blind psychology experiment. Neither the investigators nor the subjects—twenty divinity students—were told who had gotten the drug and who had gotten the placebo, which was active. The Good Friday study was far from perfect; Pahnke suppressed the fact that one subject freaked out and had to be sedated. Yet Pahnke’s main conclusion—that psilocybin can reliably occasion a mystical experience that is “indistinguishable from, if not identical with,” the experiences described in the literature—still stands and helped to inspire the current wave of research, particularly at Johns Hopkins, where it was replicated (roughly speaking) in 2006.

  But most of the credit for the Good Friday Experiment rightfully belongs to Walter Pahnke, not Timothy Leary, who was critical of its design from the start; he had told Pahnke it was a waste of time to use a control group or a placebo. “If we learned one thing from that experience,” Leary later wrote, “it was how foolish it was to use a double-blind experiment with psychedelics. After five minutes, no one’s fooling anyone.”

  * * *

  • • •

  BY NOW, Leary had pretty much lost interest in doing science; he was getting ready to trade the “psychology game” for what he would call the “guru game.” (Perhaps Leary’s most endearing character trait was never to take himself too seriously—even as a guru.) It had become clear to him that the spiritual and cultural import of psilocybin and LSD far outweighed any therapeutic benefit to individuals. As with Hubbard and Huxley and Osmond before him, psychedelics had convinced Leary that they had the power not just to heal people but to change society and save humankind, and it was his mission to serve as their prophet. It was as though the chemicals themselves had hit upon a brilliant scheme for their own proliferation, by colonizing the brains of a certain type of charismatic and messianic human.

  “We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard,” Leary later wrote about this period, “believing that it was a time (after the shallow, nostalgic fifties) for far-out visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new, empirical, tangible meta-physics was desperately needed.” The bomb and the cold war formed the crucial background to these ideas, investing the project with urgency.

  Leary was also encouraged in his shift from scientist to evangelist by some of the artists he turned on. In one notable session at his Newton home in December 1960, Leary gave psilocybin to the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, a man who needed no chemical inducement to play the role of visionary prophet. Toward the end of an ecstatic trip, Ginsberg stumbled downstairs, took off all his clothes, and announced his intention to march naked through the streets of Newton preaching the new gospel.

  “We’re going to teach people to stop hating,” Ginsberg said, “start a peace and love movement.” You can almost hear in his words the 1960s being born, the still-damp, Day-Glo chick cracking out of its shell. When Leary managed to persuade Ginsberg not to leave the house (among other issues, it was December), the poet got on the phone and started dialing world leaders, trying to get Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Mao Zedong on the line to work out their differences. In the end, Ginsberg was only able to reach his friend Jack Kerouac, identifying himself as God (“that’s G-O-D”) and telling him he must take these magic mushrooms.

  Along with everyone else.

  Ginsberg was convinced that Leary, the Harvard professor, was the perfect man to lead the new psychedelic crusade. To Ginsberg, the fact that the new prophet “should emerge from Harvard Univer
sity,” the alma mater of the newly elected president, was a case of “historic comedy,” for here was “the one and only Dr. Leary, a respectable human being, a worldly man faced with the task of a Messiah.” Coming from the great poet, the words landed like seeds on the fertile, well-watered soil of Timothy Leary’s ego. (It is one of the many paradoxes of psychedelics that these drugs can sponsor an ego-dissolving experience that in some people quickly leads to massive ego inflation. Having been let in on a great secret of the universe, the recipient of this knowledge is bound to feel special, chosen for great things.)

  Huxley and Hubbard and Osmond shared Leary’s sense of historical mission, but they had a very different idea of how best to fulfill it. The three were inclined to a more supply-side kind of spiritualism—first you must turn on the elite, and then let the new consciousness filter down to the masses, who might not be ready to absorb such a shattering experience all at once. Their unspoken model was the Eleusinian mysteries, in which the Greek elite gathered in secret to ingest the sacred kykeon and share a night of revelation. But Leary and Ginsberg, both firmly in the American grain, were determined to democratize the visionary experience, make transcendence available to everyone now. Surely that was the great blessing of psychedelics: for the first time, there was a technology that made this possible. Years later Lester Grinspoon, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, captured the ethos nicely in a book he wrote with James Bakalar, Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered: “Psychedelic drugs opened to mass tourism mental territories previously explored only by small parties of particularly intrepid adventurers, mainly religious mystics.” As well as visionary artists like William Blake, Walt Whitman, and Allen Ginsberg. Now, with a pill or square of blotter paper, anyone could experience firsthand exactly what in the world Blake and Whitman were talking about.