wisdom, 321
Wit, Harriet de, 30–31
wonder, 16, 135, 136
Wordsworth, William, 285
Wright, Curtis, 48
Yensen, Richard, 218
Yoder, Norman, 209n
youth culture, 25
Zeff, Leo, 225–27, 230, 236, 252
Zen, 73
About the Author
MICHAEL POLLAN is the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Journalism. In 2010, Time magazine named him in its list of the one hundred most influential people in the world.
* The Inuit appear to be the exception that proves the rule, but only because nothing psychoactive grows where they live. (At least not yet.)
* David J. Nutt, Drugs Without the Hot Air: Minimising the Harms of Legal and Illegal Drugs (Cambridge, U.K.: UIT, 2012). This is why people “microdosing” on psychedelics never take them on consecutive days.
* Theresa M. Carbonaro et al., “Survey Study of Challenging Experiences After Ingesting Psilocybin Mushrooms: Acute and Enduring Positive and Negative Consequences,” Journal of Psychopharmacology (2016): 1268–78. The survey found that 7.6 percent of respondents sought treatment for “one or more psychological symptoms they attributed to their challenging psilocybin experience.”
* Technically, a mushroom is the “fruiting body” of a fungus—its reproductive organ. Think of mushrooms as the apples on a tree that grows entirely underground. Most of the fungal organism exists belowground, in the form of mycelia—the typically white cobwebby single-cell-wide filaments that extend through the soil. But because it is hard to observe and study these delicate subterranean structures—they can’t be unearthed without breaking—we tend to focus on the mushrooms we can see, even though they are just the tip of a kind of fungal iceberg.
* Pronounced sill-OSS-a-bee.
* Complicating matters, Stamets first named his son for the bluish color that Psilocybes turn, then named the bluest of Psilocybes after his son.
* Since 1984, Stamets has run a very successful company called Fungi Perfecti, which sells medicinal mushroom supplements, spores, and growing kits for edible mushrooms, as well as various other mushroom-related paraphernalia.
* Scientists at the University of British Columbia (UBC) injected fir trees with radioactive carbon isotopes, then followed the spread of the isotopes through the forest community using a variety of sensing methods, including a Geiger counter. Within a few days, stores of the radioactive carbon had been routed from tree to tree. Every tree in a plot thirty meters square was connected to the network; the oldest trees functioned as hubs, some with as many as forty-seven connections. The diagram of the forest network resembled a map of the Internet. In what is surely a tip of the hat to Stamets, a paper by one of the UBC scientists dubbed it the “wood-wide web.”
* The Wassons either dismissed or overlooked a somewhat simpler explanation: that powerful feelings and a cult of mystery could be expected to gather around a “plant” that, depending on knowledge and context, could either nourish and delight or lead to an agonizing death.
* On another return trip, Wasson was joined by James Moore, who had introduced himself as a chemist for a pharmaceutical company. But Moore was really a CIA agent eager to obtain psilocybin for the agency’s own psychedelic research program, MK-Ultra.
* Wasson was halfhearted in his desire to protect María Sabina’s identity. The same week that the Life article appeared, he self-published a book, Mushrooms, Russia, and History, in which he retold her story but neglected to disguise her name.
* The authors concluded that “hallucinogenic plants alter perception in hunting dogs by diminishing extraneous signals and by enhancing sensory perception (most likely olfaction) that is directly involved in the detection and capture of game.” Bradley C. Bennett and Rocío Alarcón, “Hunting and Hallucinogens: The Use Psychoactive and Other Plants to Improve the Hunting Ability of Dogs,” Journal of Ethnopharmacology 171 (2015): 171–83.
* Because possession of LSD wouldn’t be a federal crime until 1968, the government often had to rely on marijuana prosecutions when moving against people in the counterculture.
* Osmond’s story, and the rich Canadian history of psychedelic research, is well told in Erika Dyck, Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008).
* Duncan C. Blewett and Nick Chwelos, Handbook for the Therapeutic Use of Lysergic Acid Diethlylamide-25: Individual and Group Procedures (1959), http://www.maps.org/research-archive/ritesofpassage/lsdhandbook.pdf. Blewett and Chwelos drew heavily on Osmond and Hoffer’s case reports for their manual.
* See especially Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (New York: Grove Press, 1992), and Jay Stevens, Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream (New York: Grove Press, 1987).
* Hubbard treasured a 1957 letter he received from a Monsignor Brownmajor in Vancouver endorsing his work: “We therefore approach the study of these psychedelics and their influence on the mind of man anxious to discover whatever attributes they possess, respectfully evaluating their proper place in the Divine Economy.”
* Hubbard’s name appears on a single scientific paper, written with his colleagues at Hollywood Hospital: “The Use of LSD-25 in the Treatment of Alcoholism and Other Psychiatric Problems,” Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 22 (March 1961): 34–45.
* Sidney Gottlieb, the CIA officer in charge of MK-Ultra, would testify to Congress that its goal was “to investigate whether and how it was possible to modify an individual’s behavior by covert means.” We would know more about MK-Ultra had Gottlieb not destroyed most of the program’s records on the orders of the CIA director Richard Helms.
* During his LSD session, Engelbart invented a “tinkle toy” to toilet train children, or at least boys: a waterwheel floating in a toilet that could be powered by a stream of urine. He went on to considerably more significant accomplishments, including the computer mouse, the graphical computer interface, text editing, hypertext, networked computers, e-mail, and videoconferencing, all of which he demonstrated in a legendary “mother of all demos” in San Francisco in 1968.
* Hubbard hated the idea of street acid and the counterculture’s use of it. According to Don Allen, he played a role in at least one bust of an important underground LSD chemist in 1967. Hubbard sent Don Allen to a meeting to pose as a Canadian buyer looking to purchase “pure LSD” from a Bay Area group that included the notorious LSD chemist (and Grateful Dead sound engineer) Owsley Stanley III. Federal agents tailed the people at the meeting back to Stanley and his lab in Orinda, California; during the bust, they reportedly found 350,000 doses of LSD.
* The two best accounts of the counterculture’s (and its chemicals’) influence on the computer revolution are Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) and John Markoff’s What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
* Leary wrote in Flashbacks that he was initially frightened to take psilocybin in a prison with violent criminals. When he confessed his fear to one of the prisoners, the inmate admitted he was afraid too. “Why are you afraid of me?” Leary asked, puzzled. “I’m afraid of you ’cause you’re a fucking mad scientist.”
* In a 1992 letter to Betty Eisner, Humphry Osmond wrote, “Where both Al [Hubbard] and Aldous [Huxley] disagreed with Timothy Leary was that they believed that he had got the time scale wrong, and that the US had a
much greater inertia than he supposed. They both believed for quite different reasons that working inconspicuously but determinedly within the system could transform it in the long run. Timothy believed that it could be taken by storm.”
* In Don Lattin, The Harvard Psychedelic Club (New York: HarperOne, 2010), 94.
* One could argue that the LSD dropout problem began back in the 1950s, when successful engineers like Myron Stolaroff, Willis Harman, and Don Allen left Ampex and Stanford to tune in to psychedelics.
* Several of these urban legends have been traced to their source and discredited. For example, a 1967 Newsweek story about six college students tripping on LSD who went blind after staring into the sun turned out to be a hoax concocted by Pennsylvania’s state commissioner for the blind, Dr. Norman Yoder. According to the governor, who disclosed the hoax, Yoder had “attended a lecture on the use of LSD by children and became concerned and emotionally involved.” Yet once introduced into the culture, these urban legends survive and, on occasion, go on to become “true” when people tripping on LSD are inspired to imitate them, as has happened in the case of the staring-into-the-sun story. See David Presti and Jerome Beck, “Strychnine and Other Enduring Myths: Expert and User Folklore Surrounding LSD,” in Psychoactive Sacramentals: Essays on Entheogens and Religion, ed. Thomas B. Roberts (San Francisco: Council on Spiritual Practices, 2001).
* There are quotations in this piece that should have set off any editor’s bullshit detector. “When my husband and I want to take a trip together,” says the psychedelic mother of four, “I just put a little acid in the kids’ orange juice in the morning and let them spend the day freaking out in the woods.”
* Originally published in Harvard Review (Summer 1963) and reprinted in Timothy Leary and James Penner, Timothy Leary, The Harvard Years: Early Writings on LSD and Psilocybin with Richard Alpert, Huston Smith, Ralph Metzner, and Others (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2014). The paragraph also appears in the transcript of a 1966 Senate hearing on federal regulation of LSD by the Senate Subcommittee on Executive Reorganization, p. 141.
* A version of the guidelines can also be found in James Fadiman’s book The Psychedelic Explorer’s Guide: Safe, Therapeutic, and Sacred Journeys (Rochester, Vt.: Park Street Press, 2011).
* I subsequently learned that hyperventilation, which plays a role in breathwork, changes the CO2 levels of the blood, which in turn can alter the rhythms of the heart in some people. What I assumed was a physiologically benign alternative to MDMA turns out to be nothing of the kind; even without a drug, it is possible to change one’s blood chemistry in ways that can affect heart rhythms.
* Family constellation therapy, which was founded by a German therapist named Bert Hellinger, focuses on the hidden role of ancestors in shaping our lives and works to help us make peace with these ghostlike presences.
* Henri Michaux, a contemporary of Huxley’s who also wrote about his psychedelic experiences, took a very different tact, refusing the offer of metaphor to make sense of something he believed was beyond comprehension. In his book Miserable Miracle, he aimed to be “attentive to what’s going on—as it is—without trying to deform it and imagine it otherwise in order to make it more interesting to me.” Or sensible to his readers: the book is intermittently brilliant but for long stretches unreadable. “I had no longer any authority over words. I no longer knew how to manage them. Farewell to writing!” I know what he means, but I’ve elected to resist, even if that means tolerating some measure of deformation in my account.
* Specifically, I took the Revised Mystical Experience Questionnaire, or MEQ30.
* “Kelson” is a nautical term for a structural member in the hull of a boat.
* Or at least fifty-five years, because I think young children have ready access to these kinds of experiences, as we will see in the next chapter.
* In his 2012 book, Drugs Without the Hot Air, Nutt writes that “psychedelics overall are among the safest drugs we know of . . . It’s virtually impossible to die from an overdose of them; they cause no physical harm; and if anything they’re anti-addictive” (254).
* The key structures making up the default mode network are the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior parietal lobule, the lateral temporal cortex, the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, and the hippocampus formation. See Randy L. Buckner, Jessica R. Andrews-Hanna, and Daniel L. Schacter, “The Brain’s Default Network,” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1124, no. 1 (2008). While neuroimaging indicates strong links between these structures, the concept of the default mode network remains new and is still not universally accepted.
* It’s important to keep in mind the limitations of fMRI and other neuroimaging technologies. Most of them measure not brain activity directly but proxies of it, such as blood flow and oxygen consumption. They also depend on complex software to translate faint signals into dramatic images, software the accuracy of which critics have recently questioned. In my experience, brain scientists who work with animals they can insert probes into are dismissive of fMRI, while brain scientists who work with humans accept it as the best tool available.
* I’m using the terms more or less interchangeably here. However, the ego, being closely associated with Freud’s model of the mind, implies a construct that stands in a dynamic relationship to other parts of the mind, such as the unconscious, or id, acting on behalf of the self.
* It’s worth noting that these findings seem to be at odds with Amanda Feilding’s initial hypothesis that psychedelics work by increasing blood flow to the brain.
* David Nutt and Amanda Feilding are coauthors.
* Brewer has since moved to the University of Massachusetts Medical School, where he’s the director of research at the Center for Mindfulness.
* Exactly how psychedelics accomplish this, neurochemically, is still uncertain, but some of Carhart-Harris’s research points to a plausible mechanism. Because of their affinity with the serotonin 2A receptors, psychedelic compounds cause a set of neurons in the cortex (“layer five pyramidal neurons,” to be exact) that are rich in these receptors to fire in such a way as to desynchronize the usual oscillations of the brain. Carhart-Harris likens these oscillations, which help to organize brain activity, to the synchronized clapping of an audience. When a few wayward individuals clap out of order, the applause becomes less rhythmic and more chaotic. Similarly, the excitation of these cortical neurons appears to disrupt oscillations in a particular frequency—the alpha waves—that have been correlated with activity in the default mode network and, specifically, in self-reflection.
* This research was published in 2017: Matthew M. Nour et al., “Psychedelics, Personality, and Political Perspectives,” Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. “Ego dissolution experienced during a participant’s ‘most intense’ psychedelic experience positively predicted liberal political views, openness and nature relatedness, and negatively predicted authoritarian political views.”
* The panel was recorded and is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v2VzRMevUXg.
* As in the case of many drugs, the SSRI antidepressants introduced in the 1980s were much more effective when they were new, probably owing to the placebo effect. Today, they perform only slightly better than a placebo.
* The statistical “effect size” of these results—at or above 1.0 for most of the outcome measures used in both trials—is remarkable for a psychiatric treatment. As a comparison, when the SSRI antidepressants had their first clinical trials, the effect size was only 0.3—which was good enough for them to be approved.
* A few critical voices were heard. In a pair of blog posts on PLOS, James Coyne raised several methodological objections having to do with the size and composition of the patient group, the reliability of the diagnoses, the placebo control, the blinding, and the theoretical assumptions: “Since when are existential/spiritual well-being issues psychiatric?”
http://blogs.plos.org/mindthebrain/2016/12/14/psilocybin-as-a-treatment-for-cancer-patients-who-are-not-depressed-the-nyu-study/.
* Several of the NYU therapists referred me to the writing of Viktor E. Frankl, the Viennese psychoanalyst and the author of Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl, who survived both Auschwitz and Dachau, believed that the crucial human drive is not for pleasure, as his teacher Freud maintained, or power, as Alfred Adler maintained, but meaning. Frankl concurs with Nietzsche, who wrote, “He who has a Why to live for can bear almost any How.”
How to Change Your Mind Page 49