Michael Pollan on the New Science of Psychedelics and Consciousness

just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good Wolfe thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Michael Pollen, author of many books, including Cooked Food, Rules in Defensive Food, The Omnivores Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of

which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to The New York Times magazine, Michael also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley. In two thousand ten, Time magazine named him one of the most influential people in the world. His new book is How to Change Your Mind. What the New Science of Psychedelics teaches Us about Consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and Transcendence. Hi, Michael, welcome to the show. To be here. It's a real pleasure

to have you on. Your writings have been wonderful over the years, and you have a new book called How to Change Your Mind. What the New Science of psych Adelics teaches Us about consciousness, dying, addiction, depression, and transcendence. And we'll jump into that book in just a second, but let's start off like we usually do with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that

are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and thinks about it for a second, looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins. And the grandfather says, the one you feed, So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well,

that's a good question, um. You know. I think fear is really a key driver of human action and inaction, and we feed it all the time. Our ego feed it. Our ego uses fear to uh try to defend us and relies on fear. I don't know. My dad actually was a very wise man. He died in January, and his clients used to call him a professional fear remover um in that he recognized that what kept us from realizing our dreams and doing what we want to do

in life was our fear. Um. You know. He said, your obstacles are all between your ears, and that obstacle was usually fear. I thought about that a lot in the case of working on psychedelics, because one of the things they do and you need to do in order to get a benefit from them is removed fear, overcome fear, stop feeding fear. Um, so terrible means quite a bit

to me, wonderful. So what I'd like to direct this conversation towards in a relatively short time is um sort of the second part of the book or the title, which is really what does the science of psychedelics tell us about consciousness? UM, dying, addiction, depressed, and transcendence. UM. It's kind of the whole book, and I'm I'm kind of asking you to maybe start us down that path. But but from your perspective, what are some of the things that psychedelics are telling us about how the human

experience works? Well, let's take consciousness. Consciousness is a big mystery. We don't know how brains produce consciousness. In fact, we're not even completely sure they do. That consciousness may some people believe reside outside of minds, and that minds tune it in in some sense, that it's a property of the universe like electro magnetic waves. You know, I don't have an opinion on that. It seems implausible to me,

but people do believe that. UM. One of the things that psychedelics and other technologies for changing consciousness do is show us normal, everyday, waking consciousness from a new perspective, and it it's sort of relativises it. You see that it's not the only way to go through life, and that curiously, as William James wrote more than a hundred

years ago. There are these other forms of consciousness that that have a very different flavor and a different kind of set of rules and laws than everyday normal consciousness, and they're not that far away. UM. I was really struck by the fact that either a molecule you ingest like a psychedelic or even a certain breathing exercise or a sweat lodge or a sensory deprivation, all these technologies rock normal consciousness and and suggests that, um, there are

other forms of consciousness. The other thing that I think that's really interesting, and this is kind of more on the neuroscience side, is that using these drugs now we can image the brain when it is tripping, when people are in these altered states of consciousness or alternate states of consciousness, and that has taught us some very interesting things about consciousness. So when they started this kind of imaging word using fMRI I and another technology called magneto

and cephalography, they discovered something surprising. They expected to see lots of brain areas light up, lots of activity, you know, consistent with the fireworks people report on the experience, the hallucinations and the synthesia and things like that. But what surprised them was that they found that a very important brain network that's deeply involved in our sense of the self goes quiet under the influence of psychedelics. And this

is called the default mode network. This is a tightly linked set of structures that's kind of at the top of the hierarchy in the brain and exerts a regulatory function on the whole um. And it's involved with self consciousness. It's involved with self criticism, it's involved with time travel, the ability to think of the past or the future, theory of mind, the ability to compute mental states to others, and something called the experiential self, the sort of place

where we go to tell the story of ourselves. You know, who we were, our biography, and who we want to be, and it's where we fit whatever happens to us into that story. You know, we're narrative beings. Without a sense of a continuous story, it's hard to be a self. I mean, if you don't have that sense of story,

you you have no sense of identity. So all this is going on in this particular network, and when you quiet, it is when people have this radically different set of consciousness, a sort of consciousness where they essentially feel their their sense of self or ego dissolved and when that happens, and I had an experience of ego dissolution during one of my experimental journeys for this book. When that happens,

you're not annihilated. Um. We we think we're identical with ourselves, but in fact there is another place to stand and and experience life and another form of constance. And it is a most uncanny thing. I had this experience, and many other people have reported the same thing of watching myself essentially scattered to the wind as as a bunch of post its. And then I saw myself spread out over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter Um. Now,

when I say I saw what am I talking about? Um? Well, there was a split in my consciousness between my usual ego self and this other, much more disinterested, objective, unperturbable way of experiencing things that you know, to whom all this was fine? You know, what could have been a catastrophe losing your sense of self was absolutely just hey interesting. So anyway, that's the kind of stuff we're learning about. Consciousness. Is a long answer to your question, but it's very

rich and I think we stand to learn more. Um. You know, one of the psychedelic pioneers, a psychiatrist named Stanislav Kra, said back in the sixties or seventies that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind what the microscope was for biology or the telescope was for astronomy. That was a really audacious thing to say, But I no longer think that's crazy. Yeah, there's so much you

said there. There was one point in the book and we're talking about consciousness, and I'm just gonna read what you wrote. You basically said, no single one of our vocabularies for approaching the subject, that subject being consciousness, the biological, the psychological, the philosophical, or the spiritual, has yet earned the right to claim it has the final word. It may be that layering these different perspectives one upon the other we can gain the richest picture of what might

be going on. And I agree with that so much. I've read that, and I was almost like, that's almost a description of what we're trying to do on this show, is layer these different approaches biological, psychological, philosophical, spiritual. And I love the way you said that and I'm going to jump right to one of the models that you come up with here, which I think it's not yours, but you talk about in the book, and I think it encapsulates so much of what we're trying to talk about,

whether it be ego disillusionment or the mind expanding. But you talk about Robin Carhart Harris's theory of the entropic brain, and the idea is that as we get older, right, we begin to see the world as we're used to seeing it. We become kind of set in our ways.

We drive the entropy out of the system. And entropy is a synonymy or for uncertainty, right, I mean, the brain is trying to reduce uncertainty and surprise, and we do that by developing these mental algorithms that kind of predict what's going to happen at any given time and reach for the most conventional solution to any problem that life presents to us. But that this this tends to

narrow consciousness and make it very rigid. It's adaptive, it's very efficient, it gets the job done, but it blinds us also in the way that habits blind us to the present moment and to experience. So Robin's theory, and I think it's a very compelling one, is that you need a certain amount of entropy or uncertainty in the brain,

or it treeses, it gets stuck. And if you think about the mental illnesses that have responded in most robust leaks and psychedelic therapy so far, depression, addiction, anxiety, and fear of death, these are the products of rigid thinking, of getting trapped in a loop and trapped in a story that you just can't get out of. I mean, this is what this is what happens to depress people.

They tell they keep telling themselves a very destructive story that shape eventually shades out reality and other people, and it disconnects them from life. Same with addiction. UM. So, all these disorders may be the result of insufficient entropy in the brain, and that there is a kind of point of criticality, you know, where you have just the right amount of to be are uncertainty in the system or noise as some people would describe it. Now you

can go too far. Um And in Robin's model, you know schizophrenia, maybe the as magical thinking and you know, paranoid fantasy. All these things may be the result of too much entropy in the brain. Um. But there's this sweet spot, is what he's suggesting, and many of us are not there. Uh. We we move away from that sweet spot as we get older and we become less entropic.

So we you know, we tend to think of getting older as as entropy, as things slowing down and breaking down, but in fact, in the mind, it's just the opposite things. Things are freezing up tight and we need to lubricate our cognition, as he says, and or or shake the snow globe is another lovely metaphor he has, and psychedelics appear to do this. They inject noise into that system.

They disorder the brain literally and give an opportunity for a reboot, in the same way that your computer gets frozen after know, if you haven't turned it off in a long time and everything gets kind of sticky and frozen, and what do you do. You wouldn't plug it, and then you plug it back in, Suddenly it's lubricated. H h. This episode is brought to you by Casper. Mattress and Casper is a sleep brand that makes expertly designed products to help you get your best rest. One night at

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stay alive. So Huxley saying that these mystical experiences that they have are the same thing as what people are having in religious experiences or meditation experiences. And you know a little bit about me is I'm recovering from alcoholism and drug addiction, I have dealt with depression. I'm a

long term meditator. I just came back from a seven day silent retreat, and so all these things really resonate with me, and I just wanted to sort of talk about how that, you know, we're looking at these mystical experiences being occasioned by lots of different methods, psychedelics being

one of them. Yeah, I think that, um, if we could look at the mind during the vision quest, or sensory deprivation, or or holotropic breathwork, all these other modalities, we might find the same suppression of activity in the depot mode network, and we have found it in UH meditation. The brains of people are very experienced meditators. If you put them in an fm R time machine and let them meditate, their brains will look very much like the

tripping brain. The same networks are turned off. And and that makes sense because the experience is similar in in the sense of it may not be as visually dramatic, but there is this sense of ego dissolution. That that is achieved in meditation is a transcendence of the self. You know this better than I do. But Buddhist or convinced that the self is an illusion, and uh, it's a contingent thing. It's a projection of our minds. And one of the things psychedelics give you, and you can

do it sort of more easily than you can. Meditating is a glibs of an ego free state of consciousness, and that is there's something very liberating about that. So yeah, I think we're talking about the same phenomenon, just different technologies for getting there. And some people think it's cheating to use a drug to achieve these states, But you know, no doubt there is some chemical that's involved in the

in the more natural achievement of that state through meditation. Um. You know, all mental experience is mediated by chemicals and electricity in the brain. Um. So you know, I think it's our moralism to say that one is more legit

or earned than the other. I think so too, And I think you've you made a very interesting point about that in the book, where you said that a lot of going to use the word civilizations thought that the fact that it came from nature, that they got this experience from nature a plant made it more valid, not less valid than them. Induced. Yeah, yeah, you know, we think that if you get it from nature, from matter, uh,

it's less spiritual. But they thought and that this owed to their relationship to nature, that it was more sacred thing that nature was doing this to you. I mean, how amazing that a mushroom or a plant could change your consciousness. Um. And you know, we tend to look down on that idea because we're we want our spirituality to be so pure. We conceive of spirituality as in oppositions who materialism. And I think that that some mistake.

And I conceived of it that way. There was you know, the supernatural and the natural in the big insight I had after you know, my own psychedelic experiences. Um, was a reconception of what the spiritual is. And I realized the opposite of spiritual is not material as I had thought. The opposite of spiritual is egotistical. Um. It is the ego that keeps us from having this deep, profound sense of connection with other people, or with nature, or with

the universe or whatever. Our concept of the divine that opened a big door for me. And uh, you know, I mean, I know other people have different concepts of the spiritual, but it created an opening that had been closed before. Yeah. Actually I was headed right towards that, because spiritual is one of those words that means a million things to a million people. But you gave what I thought was a very never heard it phrase this

way before. But spiritual is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomenon that a rise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. Yeah that's um, well, I wrote it, so it is exactly what I believe. But but I had forgotten that line. But that there, it is there. It is what pages that on. I can't do any underline that I don't I don't have pages. I have lots of pages and pages and notes, but

I can't reference the book page. This is where this experience took me, you know, I I just really you know, I had not explored spiritual paths in my life at all, um and and I was held back from it by this very naive understanding of what spirituality was. And thanks to my experience of these molecules and also the people, you know, all the people I interviewed who had transformative experiences, some on these drugs and some on you know, through meditation.

I went down this path I never thought i'd be going down as a writer. Uh And it was actually quite um thrilling for me too, you know, at this age I'm now in my early sixties, to have embarked on such a such a journey. That makes me think

of something else that you said in the book. You said sort of tongue in cheek but maybe not, but that psychedelics are wasted on the young, and that you himself had said, Hey, you know, it's not the young people that need an experience of the numinous, which is another way to sort of phrase what we're talking about. Its people experience. People are transitioning into the second half of their lives are the people who need that more

transcendent experience. And I thought that was as somebody who's transitioning into the second half of their life, or maybe maybe a little bit beyond the transition. I totally agree. Yeah, you know, I didn't mean to demean the experience that some young people have on psychedelics. It really can be profound, But it seems to me what they're particularly good for well, two things is this breaking of a mental rigidity of habit that that you know, that that kind of ossifying

mental patterns that we get into as we age. And that's that's very important. I mean, the young don't have patterns like that. They're still open to experience, they don't have all these mental algorithms, these priors in their minds to organize their experience yet. And the other is the contemplation of death um and people in their twenties, you know, pretty much think of themselves is eternal or um. Uh. You know death is it's such a great distance, it's

unimaginable to them. When you're in your sixties, that's not the case. And I think that the psychedelics are, as his meditation, an excellent tool for um figuring out what you think about death and and um and what it means UM and so in that sense, I think that they're particularly valuable later in life. And Uh, it's ironic that they were discovered by the young by and large in the West. UM. That's not true in other in

traditional cultures. UM. But I think they're greater uses for people as their aging and UM and and and the particular I mean, one of the great successes in the research has been thus are has been with people really facing their mortality with a sense of urgency. I'm talking about the cancer patients who have been tre treated with psilocybin. In a very substantial percentage of them found relief, found comfort, uh, you know, had their had their anxiety and their depression

and their fear diminished and in some cases eliminated. That's quite a gift. We have very few uh tools to offer comforts to offer people in that boat, and at least on the basis of these small studies, I mean, only eight people are in these two trials and referencing there's a really strong signal that these drugs have something important to offer people facing death. You mentioned the research into psychedelics, and research into psychedelics is really having a resurgence.

And I don't want to go into the history too much, but it's interesting that you talk about before you know, the cat got out of the bag, so to speak, into the sixties culture with LSD, that there had been forty thousand research participants and more than a thousand clinical papers from people who were researching psychedelics as really psychological tools, you know, as as a way to facilitate improving our quality of life for lack of a better mental health. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah.

I was surprised by that too. I thought, you know, I thought the story began in the sixties, began with Timothy Leariam Harvard psilocybin project, but in fact he came kind of late to the to the game, and that there had been all this fertile period of research all through the fifties that you know, was showing, um, really good results, and that many people in the psychiatric establishment regarded these drugs as potential wonder drugs, and um, that that research got choked off at the end of the

sixties in the early seventies, it just is a shame in retrospect, because imagine, had we not had this thirty year hiatus between the closing of research in uh, you know, in the early seventies and the resumption in our own time, imagine what more we would have learned We you know, these drugs might already be in the pharmacopeia as something available.

I think it's important for people to realize also just how limited our tools are to help with what is becoming a crisis and mental health in this country, only about half the people who need mental health care ever get it. UM. Rates of depression are rising, rates of addiction arising, rates of suicide are rising alarmingly. And the last big innovation was S S R I antidepressants in the late eighties early nineties, and those work for some people,

but there their effectiveness phades over time. They don't work much better than placebo, and people don't like taking them, they have side effects, they're hard to get off. And so the prospect of a new tool that can treat a lot of the same illnesses anxiety, depression, obsession, UM is very exciting to people in the mental health community. And UM, you know, we're not there yet. We have to prove these drugs work in larger trials on a bigger scale, So we shouldn't all rush to the conclusion

we've got the panacea here. But the data is very encouraging, and you know, we can hope that within five years or so that we may have a new tool to help people struggling with a very high level of suffering in our society. Yeah, for sure, you've mentioned that in the psychiatry community that we've we've had a conflict between biological based treatments, so drugs and psychodynamic treatments, right, talking therapy, and they've been fighting each other for legitimacy and resources.

And you know, the question you you write, is mental illness and disorder of chemistry or is it a loss of meaning in one's life? Psychedelic therapy is the wedding of those two approaches. And I think that's such an interesting thing because I do think it's the answer isn't one or the other. It really the answer is it is both a disorder of chemistry and a loss of meaning in life in a lot of cases, and those

things are probably connected in ways we don't understand. And that, yeah, it's a very novel approach because it shouldn't be called psychedelic therapy, should be called psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. And you are using a chemical not to change the brain's chemistry long term, but to occasion an experience, a powerful experience that some call a mystical experience or ego dissolution. That's, you know, just just a different set of terms for

the same thing. I think, um, but that that experience is so powerful that it becomes transformed. It's kind of like this um reverse trauma in the brain instead of a negative trauma. It's a positive trauma, but it's a quantum change in some people, not in everybody. And that that's a new approach um that you're administering an experience rather than a drug, and that's hard to get, you know,

our head around. We're gonna have to organize mental health care if this works, because we're set up, you know, either with the weekly therapy session that goes on forever or the daily drug that also goes on forever. Here would be something you would do that would be quite dramatic. In short term, it would be one session or two sessions, or maybe a session every six months or every year. We don't really know how long the effects will last. So it's going to take some doing to create a

container really for this, this new kind of therapy. And this is where I remind everybody what you just said, that this is psychedelic experience is assisted by mental health professionals. And so every time, every time I bring up any slightly strange approach to men illness, I get some sort of message from people that it's dangerous and don't rush off and get rid of your s s R ey S tomorrow and go drop acid. That's not what we're

talking about here now. And these experiences also, it's very important to remind your listeners that these are this is not the way that people use psychedelics recreational. You're not going to get a prescription to go to CBS. These are guided trips. You're with someone the whole times, trained therapist prepares you very carefully what to expect, how to deal with adverse you know, feelings or events in the trip.

Then they sit with you, um the whole time. They don't say very much, but they're they're watching out for your body so you don't do anything stupid, you know, walk out into traffic or or leave the session room. Uh. And then afterward they help you to integrate the experience because it's a it can be a very destabilizing experience.

And that's where the talk therapy comes in. And they also help you figure out how to take whatever insights you've you've earned during this trip, how to apply them to your how to make this an enduring change not just a temporary change. So it's a big commitment on everybody's part. Uh. It's not done casually and um, and it's not done alone. And that's you know, that's the lesson. Actually, the traditional cultures who use psychedelics have taught us. We

ignored it in the sixties. I think that's one of the reasons we've got into trouble. But they always had a cultural container for the experience. You never did it alone. You always did it with elders or shamans or some kind of person who really knew the territory, and it was always surrounded by some ritual and ceremony. Um. There was a profound understanding that this was not something to be taken lightly, and we took it lightly in the sixties,

and that's one of the reasons that you had some casualties. Yeah, I did psychedelics as a young person. I have not re experienced them as an older person, and they were certainly lost on me because I used them more in a almost a party sense. But I do remember one particularly horrific experience where my little brother, who I still cursed to this day for this, convinced me to take LSD the night of my grandmother's funeral and things got

things really went down, really went downhill for me. Um, he seemed fine, But I want to circle back I know we're out of time and you've got to talk to get to but I want to circle back to what you just said. They're about integration, and then we'll wrap up, because, um, you quote Houston Smith who says a spiritual experience does not by itself make a spiritual life. Integration is essential to making sense of the experience, whether in or out of the medical context or else it

just remains a drug experience. And I would go further. We've been talking about psychedelics, but mystical experiences of all stripes, from wherever they come from, I think fall right into this category. Is somebody who's working to integrate a couple of mystical experiences I've had. I realized that the experience itself does not make a spiritual life. Integration is essential. And I love that you kind of hit that at the end there. Yeah, And I saw that myself. I mean,

I'll leave you with this note. I had, Um, you know, I had this experience of ego dissolution and and then I met with my guide and uh, and I said, so it was amazing. I realized you don't have to react to everything you know with your usual ego consciousness and she said, well, that's worth the price of admission, isn't it. And I said, well yes, but now my egos back, you know, in uniform and on patrol. So, um,

what what good is that? What good is that? And she said, well, now that you've had a taste of that way of looking at things, you can cultivate it. Um. And you can exercise that that new muscle and strengthen it and uh. And I asked her how to do that and she said, well, one important way to do it is through meditation. Uh. And that's kind of how

I now reconnect with that experience. That's the difference between having a mind blowing experience and then having an actual state of consciousness connected to it that you can access through other means. So yeah, I think I think that Houston Smith was so as he was on so many things. He was so on on mark. We we you know, we've all had amazing experiences and experiences of awe. But it's what do you do with them? It really matters.

And and that's where the hard work starts. Yep. And I'm gonna leave you with one quote that came out of my silent retreat this week that I think plays into all this that you can ponder as you go to your talk. And the spiritual teacher said that ego is nothing but a contraction. The whole process of ego is just that it's a contraction. And that gave me a lot to think about and for you and the listeners also. But Michael, thank you so much. I really enjoyed the book. Um, it was great and I was

really happy to get a chance to talk with you. Oh, thank you well. I enjoyed this and thanks for leaving me with something to think about. All right, take care, good luck tonight. Oh thanks a lot. All right, take care you take care to okay, bye bye ba m m. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to one you Feed dot net slash support.

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