348. How to Change Your Mind

Link to Table of Contents

How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

Penguin Press 2018

P41-42 I am not always on the same page as the Dalai Lama, but he’s right here. Given a pantheistic metaphysic there’s nothing problematic about any of this. Having an experience like the one Bob Jesse describes is like leaving the theater to take a pee during a movie. (I really try not to do this and I also try to avoid making-of information for films I really like.)

P46 “Bob Jesse spent the early 1990s excavating the knowledge about psychedelics that had been lost when formal research was halted and informal research went underground. In this, he was a little like those Renaissance scholars who rediscovered the lost world of classical thought in a handful of manuscripts squirreled away in monasteries...” I really like this comparison. I also like that this was happening around SF at the same time I was at the peak of my coding career. So much is going on at the same time around here.

P55-56 Henri Bergson, I shouldn’t be surprised. HOWEVER, again, this is a metaphysical assumption. It is also possible that these experiences are MERELY creations of our minds/brains. That they are one of the possible states for our minds. Just as near-death experiences are simply that, and not a view to the other side, that we are capable of achieving “spiritual” states either with or without chemical assistance doesn’t necessarily mean that a reality outside the human mind is being revealed. In a way, these spiritual states are no different than dreams. Dreams do suggest a connection to a deeper reality (and a creative dreamer) but they do not prove that reality. P75 especially deals with this. After thinking about this some more, I really do think that people underestimate the significance of dreams and that these mystical experiences really add nothing new to what dreams already show in a less dramatic way. 

Also, consider the convincing stories our minds make up to explain something like Korsakoff syndrome. That we find the stories subjectively convincing doesn’t mean they are true.

Also, while Pollan is suggesting that the “magic” molecules cause mystical states of mind, isn’t it more reasonable to say that these molecules, along with near death experiences and other things, cause the mind/brain to generate these states of mind? If these “states” are simply something our brains do when stressed in particular ways, it’s harder to see how this is a window into something that exists beyond us. So I’m still at 50/50 odds.

I would think the Good Friday people, and others, would have trouble with Church dogma after their spiritual experiences. I wonder if this is ever mentioned.(No.)

P128 The questions about how psychoactive molecules developed with fungus is not really any different than how Capsaicin developed with peppers. Well, I guess it is different to the extent that capsaicin keeps animals away, but its effect on humans is encouraging. So did peppers plan this or was it just a happy accident. And if the latter, why wouldn’t it be the same thing with psilocin? Isn’t it more likely that psilocin is simply a failed toxin, something that was supposed to kill the person who consumed it but instead had an unanticipated effect on their brains/minds? Are all the similar but deadly LBMs just failed attempts at psilocin?

P161 This is interesting. That psychedelics turn off our normal filter so that we can see what we normally can’t. That we perhaps gave up the ability to see all this so that we could better handle life in the world. Ohhh... that suggests that this could be what is actually meant by Adam’s Fall. This is what we lost when we were kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Psychedelics return us to the Garden. Now I’m thinking this is a song lyric from the ‘60s. (Joni Michell’s “Woodstock”:

We are stardust, we are golden
We are billion year old carbon
And we got to get ourselves back to the garden)

And what if psychedelics reveal to us the reality experienced by the rest of nature? All but “Fallen” man? Could this be a possible explanation of The Fermi paradox? Could being isolated from nature be amazingly rare? Also, could this be why Autism and genius seem to be related? 

I knew this book would be more thought provoking than the last one.

Bergson and “The Perennial Philosophy” again.

P194 “Huxley and Hubbard and Osmond shared Leary’s sense of historical mission, but they had a very different idea of how best to fulfill it. The three were inclined to a more supply-side kind of spiritualism -- first you must turn on the elite, and then let the new consciousness filter down to the masses, who might not be ready to absorb such shattering experience all at once... But Leary and Ginsberg, both firmly in the American grain, were determined to democratize the visionary experience, make transcendence available to everyone now...” This is like Erasmus vs Luther and Calvin. Though Luther vs Calvin is probably even better. 

P214 Psychedelics as a Dionysian force undermining the Appolonian order.

First LSD trip: What’s with the eyeshades? Is this so you aren’t distracted by the patterns? Are people really blindfolded? I’m not sure if that would be easier or not? You would certainly be missing a lot.

P292 “Curiously, LSD has an even stronger affinity with the 5-HT2A receptor -- is ‘stickier’ -- than serotonin itself, making this an instance where the simulacrum is more convincing, chemically, than the original. This has led some scientists to speculate that the human body must produce some other, more bespoke chemical for the express purpose of activating the 5-HT2a receptor -- perhaps an endogenous psychedelic that is released under certain circumstances, perhaps when dreaming.” Or maybe humans have lost the ability to produce this chemical and that is why we are disconnected from the Logos.

P305 Individuation and the DMN.

P310 This is back to “the tree with the lights in it” from Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. Unfiltered experience.

P314 Not sure how autism works with this theory.

P317-319 This may be the best part of the book so far. How psychedelics increase entropy in the brain. I’d argue alcohol can do that as well, as in my insight into Patton and Petersburg.

P320-321 “The idea that increasing the amount of entropy in the human brain might be good for us is surely counterintuitive... entropy suggests the gradual deterioration of a hard-won order, the disintegration of a system over time. Certainly getting older feels like an entropic process -- a gradual running down and disordering of the mind and body. But maybe that’s the wrong way to think about it. Robin Carhart-Harris’s paper got me wondering if, at least for the mind, aging is really a process of declining entropy, the fading over time of what we should regard as a positive attribute of mental life.

“Certainly by middle age, the sway of habitual thinking over the operation of the mind is nearly absolute...
...

“Reading Robin’s paper helped me better understand what I was looking for when I decided to explore psychedelics: to give my own snow globe a vigorous shaking, see if I could renovate my everyday mental life by introducing a greater measure of entropy, and uncertainty, into it...”

This, I think, is related to why time seems to pass quicker when you are older. Too much order reduces friction so you just slide by with nothing to really hold on to.

P322 “In both physics and information theory; [I hope he comes back to this... (no)] entropy is often associated with expansion -- as in the expansion of a gas when it is heated or freed from the constraints of a container. As a gas’s molecules diffuse in space , it becomes harder to predict the location of any given one; the uncertainty of the system thus increases...

“... Judson Brewer, the neuroscientist who studies meditation, has found that a felt sense of expansion in consciousness correlates with a drop in activity in one particular node of the default mode network -- the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), which is associated with self-referential processing...”

So the DMN has a PCC.

P324-25 Again I’m noticing exceptions with regard to the autistic. Autistic children are famous for their spotlight focus. For example when observing grains of sand. Not sure what to make of this.

Going back a bit, the increased entropy and additional neural links of the brain on psychedelics may also explain why synesthetes tend to be more creative than normals.

P326 I love Gopnik’s experiment where 4 year olds score better than adults. Because they think outside the box.

P327 “‘Their thinking is less constrained by experience, so they will try even the most unlikely possibilities’; that is, they’ll conduct lots of high-temperature searches, testing the most far-out hypotheses. ‘Children are better learners than adults in many cases when the solutions are non obvious’ or, as she puts it, ‘further out in the space of possibilities,’ a realm where they are more at home than we are...”
...

“‘Each generation of children confronts a new environment,’ she explained, ‘and their brains are particularly good at learning and thriving in that environment. Think of the children of immigrants, or four-year-olds confronted with an iPhone. Children don’t invent these new tools, they don’t create the new environment, but in every generation they build the kind of brain that can best thrive in it. Childhood is the species’ way of injecting noise into the system of cultural evolution.’ ‘Noise,’ of course, is in this context another word for entropy.”

So much to add to this. First there’s that story of children creating new languages. This ties in with that as well, as they are open to breaking all the rules that they don’t understand to get something that works.

Then there’s the negative consequence of people living longer and being more removed from the cultural context they grew up in. Or the adult immigrants who never adjust to their new home. Perhaps we may need for all the older people to step aside and let the kids find a way out of the mess we are currently in. Because in my experience, even the people doing psychedelics are not really doing anything helpful. Of course this was also the notion behind “don’t trust anyone over 30,” and my Burkian conservatism doesn’t much care for that. 

What would be the psychedelic equivalent of Maxwell’s Demon? I really have no idea, I may be too old. Of course the Demon would be reducing entropy so it would be like a stroke that wiped out all but a few neural paths. Though really an extreme form of OCD like Joey Ramone.

Damn it, he didn’t return to information theory entropy. So... if increased entropy in a message meant that it was more open to interpretation, then Goethe’s Faust and strange movies where the director is trying to confuse you would be the equivalent of psychedelics. Rather than meaning being hardwired, the receiver would be able to free associate and derive whatever meaning they pleased. Again, Faust. Goethe would love this.

P334 They protest too much about the unscientific quality of psychedelic research on mental health issues since there is no objective scientific basis for any of these conditions. You can’t confirm a diagnosis of depression or addiction with a blood or other test. They are subjective conditions. So “applied mysticism” is a rather apt means of treating them.

P347 “...Here we bump into one of the richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials... its effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can explain. Science is being used to validate an experience that would appear to undermine the scientific perspective...” 

I don’t think that is particularly true. Or no more so than many quantum experiments that demonstrate results that violate common-sense. Also, having a mystical experience doesn’t necessarily prove a mystical reality. 

P356-7 Now this is weird. Patrick’s death is the first actual death I’ve run into that sounds like the ones Dostoevsky wrote in The Brothers K. And his slipping away while she was out of the room is so true.

P382 To me that the depression effect is not as long lasting makes perfect sense. People facing death are otherwise “balanced” but dealing with a particular problem. People with depression -- and chemical dependencies -- probably have long standing issues that contribute to the depression. It’s not surprising that they would need more than one experience. That their highly ordered entropic state needs to be repeatedly disturbed.

The sign of a good writer, this next is exactly what I was thinking, “Yet the fact that psychedelics have produced such a signal across a range of indications can be interpreted in a more positive light. When a single remedy is prescribed for a great many illnesses... it could mean that those illnesses are more alike than we’re accustomed to think. If a therapy contains an implicit theory of the disorder it purports to remedy, what might the fact that psychedelic therapy seems to address so many indications have to tell us about what those disorders might have in common? And about mental illness in general?”

This is all the more true as Western Medicine has no idea what mental illness is, how to identify it, or how to treat it. This, in particular the bit about the DMN, actually offers science a chance to spot a mental health problem and even test to see if it has been fixed. This is offering science as much as it offers the patients.

P389 Describing the spiritual aspect of the psychedelic experience, “...The predictive brain is getting so many error signals that it is forced to develop extravagant new interpretations of an experience that transcends its capacity for understanding. 


“Whether the most magnificent of these stories represents a regression to magical thinking, as Freud believed, or access to transpersonal realms such as the ‘Mind at Large,’ as Huxley believed, is itself a matter of interpretation. Who can say for certain?...”