Several times while listening to the audio of the recent new book How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan, I paused the playback and thought to myself, “wow”.
Pollan is a gifted writer. He strings together words and sentences in a highly elegant way. But my reactions to his book were caused by the audacity of the ideas conveyed, even more than by the powerful rhythms and cadences of the words doing the conveying.
Pollan made his reputation as a writer about food. The most famous piece of advice he offered, earlier in his career, is the seven word phrase “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants”. You might ask: What do you mean by food? Pollan’s answer: “Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.”
With such a background, you might not expect any cutting-edge fireworks from Pollan. However, his most recent book bears the provocative subtitle What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. That’s a lot of big topics. (On reflection, you’ll realise that your great grandmother might have had things to say about all these topics.)
The book covers its material carefully and patiently, from multiple different perspectives. I found it engaging throughout – from the section at the beginning when Pollan explained how he, in his late 50s, became more interested in this field – via sections covering the evolutionary history of mushrooms, thoughtful analyses of Pollan’s own varied experiences with various psychedelics, and the rich mix of fascinating characters in psychedelic history (many larger-than-life, others preferring anonymity) – to sections suggesting big implications for our understanding of mental wellbeing, illnesses of the mind, and the nature of spirituality.
If any of the following catch your interest, I suggest you check out How to Change your Mind:
- The likely origins of human beliefs about religion
- Prospects for comprehensive treatments of depression, addiction, and compulsive behaviour
- The nature of consciousness, the self, and the ego
- Prospects for people routinely becoming “better than well”
- Ways in which controversial treatments (e.g. those involving psychedelics) can in due course become accepted by straight-laced regulators from the FDA and the EMA
- The perils of society collectively forgetting important insights from earlier generations of researchers.
Personally, I particularly enjoyed the sections about William James and Aldous Huxley. I already knew quite a lot about both of them before, but Pollan helped me see their work in a larger perspective. There were many other characters in the book that I learned about for the first time. Perhaps the most astonishing was Al Hubbard. Mind-boggling, indeed.
I see How to Change your Mind as part of a likely tipping point of public acceptability of psychedelics. It’s that well written.
In case it’s not clear, you ought to familiarise yourself with this book if:
- You consider yourself a futurist – someone who attempts to anticipate key changes in social attitudes and practices
- You consider yourself a transhumanist – someone interested in extending human experience beyond the ordinary.
dw2 
This book has been on my to-read list since before it was even released. Thanks for the great review–I’m definitely going to pick it up the next time I go to the book store. 🙂
Comment by esoterica — 17 July 2018 @ 10:22 pm
I hope you enjoy the book. I definitely did!
Comment by David Wood — 17 July 2018 @ 10:36 pm
I didn’t understand the title of this book.If i have learnt to be happy in any situation then is there need to change mind?
Comment by dpranita583 — 1 October 2018 @ 6:34 pm
Hi dpranita, You can find out more about what this book offers by clicking through to a description of it on Amazon or Goodreads etc. I am personally wary of the viewpoint that says we should learn to be happy in every situation. That risks encouraging acceptance of things that actually should be changed (rather than accepted). I covered that topic in a previous blogpost, https://dw2blog.com/2016/06/23/acceptance-and-change/.
Comment by David Wood — 1 October 2018 @ 10:47 pm
okay, thanks for the good suggestion .I will try.
Comment by dpranita583 — 20 October 2018 @ 6:11 pm