Review of 'How to Change Your Mind' by Michael Pollan

Good science writing about psychedelics, that made me think a lot about whether I wanted to try them or not, and also about how the mind and brain work. There's a section about the modern history of the drugs, including the scientists who experimented with using them as treatments in the 1950s and early 1960s, and whose research progams were shut down following the exhuberance mischief-making of Timothy Leary...the CIA's MK-Ultra program also gets a mention. There's a discussion about the natural history of psychedelics as they occur in nature - like, why? And a 'travelogue' recounting the author's own experiences, which is honest, nuanced, and not entirely attractive, even though he's pretty sure he benefitted from taking the drugs.

There's a section on the therapeutic uses of psychedelics, which was  interesting and more convincing, and some speculation about the big picture - what does it mean about consciousness and about the universe that these things exist?

I have some entirely amateur thoughts about this - I wonder if the aspect of a memory or an experience that marks it down as 'mine' - as happening to me now, or as having happened to me - is a sort of meta-tag added by the brain, and that my sense of self comes from threading together memory items with that meta-tag. But it's possible for that tag to be added to things that didn't actually happen to me - as when I feel that something is a real memory, even though it didn't happen to me...I've witnessed this sort of false memory in others, and have some experience of it in myself. Conversely, experiences that actually did happen to me might not get the tag for chemical reasons, in which case my experience of selfness would not apply even to things that actually did happen to me - perhaps even at the time they were happening. Hence the sense of dissolution of self and one-ness with everything that some psychedelic users seem to feel.

BTW Pollan is advised not to try MDMA because of his heart issues - a particular shame because I'd like to see how he reacted to that, and how he described it.