The Author's Credentials
Michael Pollan (born 1955) was already one of America's most influential non-fiction writers when he turned to psychedelics. His previous books -- The Botany of Desire (2001), The Omnivore's Dilemma (2006), and In Defense of Food (2008) -- had reshaped public understanding of agriculture, nutrition, and the human relationship with plants. He held the Knight Professorship of Science and Environmental Journalism at UC Berkeley and was a regular contributor to the New York Times Magazine.
Pollan was not, by his own account, a countercultural figure or a psychedelic enthusiast. He was a 60-year-old journalist who had never taken a psychedelic drug and whose primary substances of choice were caffeine and wine. This outsider perspective proved to be his greatest asset: when Pollan wrote about psychedelics, Middle America listened.
The Book: Structure and Content
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence was published by Penguin Press on May 15, 2018. Its 480 pages are organized into six chapters that braid three narrative threads: the history of psychedelic research, the current scientific renaissance, and Pollan's own guided psychedelic experiences.
Chapter 1: A Renaissance. Pollan surveys the resurgence of psychedelic research after decades of suppression, focusing on clinical trials at Johns Hopkins University (led by Roland Griffiths), New York University, and Imperial College London. He introduces the key finding that has driven the renaissance: a single high-dose psilocybin session, conducted in a carefully prepared setting with trained guides, can produce lasting reductions in depression, anxiety, and addiction, effects that persist months or even years after the experience.
Chapter 2: Natural History. A tour of psychedelic compounds in nature -- psilocybin mushrooms, ayahuasca, ergot, and the broader ecology of plant-derived psychoactive substances.
Chapter 3: History. The full arc from Albert Hofmann's discovery of LSD in 1943, through the first wave of research in the 1950s and 1960s, to Timothy Leary's messianic excesses, Nixon's War on Drugs, and the shutdown of legitimate research.
Chapter 4: Travelogue. Pollan's personal psychedelic experiences form the book's emotional core. He undergoes guided sessions with psilocybin mushrooms, LSD, 5-MeO-DMT (the "toad"), and ayahuasca, and describes each with characteristic precision and honesty. His psilocybin experience, in which he reported feeling his ego dissolve into a "sheaf of little papers, wafting up a chimney," became one of the book's most quoted passages.
Chapter 5: The Neuroscience. Pollan engages with the emerging neuroscience of psychedelics, particularly the work of Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College, whose "entropic brain" hypothesis proposes that psychedelics increase the entropy (randomness and flexibility) of neural activity, temporarily relaxing the brain's default mode network -- the circuit associated with self-referential thought, rumination, and the narrative sense of self.
Chapter 6: The Trip Treatment. Detailed case studies of patients who have undergone psilocybin-assisted therapy for cancer-related anxiety, smoking cessation, alcoholism, and treatment-resistant depression. Pollan profiles individuals whose lives were transformed by a single session.
