By Michael Pollan
After years of telling us to eat plants, he wrote a book about eating mushrooms. I didn’t receive anything too mind-blowing in the book although I enjoyed it anyway. Pollan was a good messenger for me. He self described as an atheist, materialist, without any prior enthusiasm for drugs. That fits me. I am interested in the studies and potential new world of treatments/therapies/explorations of the mind that were unnecessarily banned by the government until recently.
Something that stood out to me was the note that the brain scans of someone who had a psychedelic experience resembled those of an advanced meditator. Connecting meditation to the altered states of mind assisted by the drugs makes me interested in making another attempt at establishing a mindfulness habit.
There were descriptions of the mental state being more child-like, with lantern rather than spotlight attention. I was intrigued by the notion that people in mid life may benefit greatly from “shaking the snow globe” to add some plasticity to a brain with some heavily worn paths.
He did point out that the experiences and mindset tended to fade over time. Also, people are prone to having epiphanies in the moment that don’t amount to any real lasting change. However, he seemed to find some paths back to his prior experience and suggested there was benefit in knowing that another state exists, even if you can’t inhabit it perpetually.