How to Change Your Mind summary

With all the attention given to the negative aspects of psychedelic drugs, like criminality and shady drug dealers, it’s easy to forget the origins of psychedelics.

While certain cultures have known about them for quite some time, it wasn’t until the 1950s that Westerners discovered that psychedelic substances are a natural part of certain mushrooms.

If you’ve taken a psychedelic drug once but didn’t enjoy it, there’s a good chance that your unpleasant experience was due to the environment. Things like loud music, alcohol and unruly strangers can make the experience scary or even traumatic.

But there are some simple precautions you can take to ensure that the drugs have a therapeutic effect and not a distressing one.

Believe it or not, Pollan felt somewhat underwhelmed after his first LSD experience. While the trip had encouraged him to be emotionally open to others, it wasn’t as transformative as he’d hoped.

So now he found himself ready to move on to another substance and to try a more mystical guide. This time it was psilocybin mushrooms, and the guide was a woman named Mary who lived on the East Coast.

Hearing someone describe unusual lights and changing faces is one thing, but you may be wondering: What’s really going on in the brain during a hallucinatory psychedelic trip? Are we seeing things we can’t normally see, or just plain seeing things.

Neuroscientists have recently looked into the effects of psychedelics and have found that they do cause the brain to be more interconnected.

Not all hospitals are the same. Certainly, they aren’t all equipped with state-of-the-art equipment, sterile white rooms and rows of patients recovering in beds. At the New York City Hospital, you’ll find a very different kind of hospital room – one that’s furnished like a cozy living room, complete with recliners and couches.

This room is a special one, reserved for terminal patients looking to receive a treatment of psychedelic drugs in comfort.

Here’s a question for you: What do astronauts and someone taking a psychedelic drug have in common? No, it doesn’t have anything to do with getting “high”; it’s about getting a new perspective on life.

During the era of NASA’s famous Apollo missions, over a dozen astronauts traveled to the moon, and many of them have spoken of the radically transformative experience that occurs when you’re able to see earth from a new perspective. It suddenly seems so fragile when seen as nothing more than a small blue orb surrounded by the infinite vastness of space.

If you need more proof of just how mainstream psychedelics are becoming, consider this: in 2017, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested a study to see how effective psychedelics are at curing depression. After all, clinical depression remains a widespread illness despite the efforts of prescription pharmaceuticals.

So far, the studies show that psychedelics are indeed effective at alleviating depression.