How to Change Your Mind
Michael Pollan · 2018
How to Change Your Mind (2018) is a book by Michael Pollan on health & the body. Michael Pollan investigates the science and history of psychedelics. LSD and psilocybin, from their 1950s promise through prohibition to a research renaissance treating depression, addiction, and the fear of death, including his own guided trips.
A skeptical, sober-minded food writer takes psychedelics seriously as medicine and mystery, and comes back convinced they may reshape how we treat dying, addiction, and the healthy mind itself.
Two of the ideas you’ll keep
The Clif summary of How to Change Your Mind pulls out 7 insights. Here are the first two.
- Pollan frames psychedelics not as recreational escape but as tools for the "betterment of well people", substances that reliably occasion mystical experiences whose lasting value depends almost entirely on set (mindset) and setting (environment).
- Robin Carhart-Harris's brain imaging showed that psilocybin quiets the Default Mode Network, the hub tied to the ego, self-reflection, and rumination. Ego dissolution isn't metaphor; it corresponds to a measurable drop in that network's activity.
The other 5 — and the full 12-minute summary — are in the app.
What’s inside: 8 chapters
The whole summary runs about 12 minutes, read or listened to.
- A Renaissance the Culture Missed
- The Mushroom Emerges From Prehistory
- The First Wave and Its Self-Destruction
- Journeying Underground
- Your Brain on Psychedelics
- The Dying: Psilocybin and the Fear of Death
- Rewiring Ruts: Addiction and Depression
- In Praise of Neural Diversity
Finish How to Change Your Mind tonight.
Read or listen to the full summary in about 12 minutes, then keep the ideas with a minute of review a day. Start with the 2-minute quiz — no card required.
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