There's a mind-blowing moment in Michael Pollan's new book that, if you're anything like me, might mess up your day. He's explaining a concept of neuroscience called "predictive coding," a process by which our brains understand the world around us. The main (somewhat frightening) gist is: what you think you see may not actually be there. See, many neuroscientists view the "brain as a prediction-making machine." Because it wants to be maximally efficient—that was useful when the speed at which you could answer "What was that noise?" decided whether you survived or got eaten by a lion—your brain uses as little sensory information as possible to determine what's happening around you. Instead, it relies on your entire backlog of experience, taking just a little bit of data from the senses and then forming historically-educated guesses based on everything else you've ever seen.
"The model suggests that our perceptions of the world offer us not a literal transcription of reality but rather a seamless illusion woven from both the data of our senses and the models in our memories," Pollan writes. "Normal waking consciousness feels perfectly transparent, and yet it is less a window on reality than the product of our imaginations—a kind of controlled hallucination. This raises a question: how is normal waking consciousness any different from other, seemingly less faithful productions of our imagination—such as dreams or psychotic delusions or psychedelic trips? In fact, all these states of consciousness are 'imagined': they're mental constructs that weave together some news of the world with priors of various kinds."
Makes you think, huh?
The book, called How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence is full of moments like that. Inspired by a new wave of psychedelic research that has been showing promising therapeutic benefits for those with mental health illnesses like addiction, depression, and anxiety—which was the basis of his 2015 New Yorker story "The Trip Treatment"—Pollan does a deep dive into the world of hallucinogens. He even goes on a few trips himself (specifically using LSD, Psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT—basically, toad poison—and Ayahuasca).
The resulting work is fascinating, and presents a compelling case that these drugs might be the next big thing in American public health. So we called him up to ask, What the hell happens now? Here, he talks why an ego-dissolving trip (what one person calls "an orgasm of the soul") might be the antidote to our capitalist culture; how expanding our consciousness might help fix global warming and tribalism; why we should be worried about these substances; and the surprising link between hallucinogens and Shakespeare.
GQ: What are the tangible takeaways or insights from your psychedelic experiences that you’re maybe still using or that you come back to?
Michael Pollan: It's made me a somewhat less defensive, more open person. I'm a better meditator in that I can quiet my mind with a little more success. I was always a very frustrated meditator. And there's kind of a cognitive space I can enter that I learned during the experiences, which is very disinterested, where you can really just watch your thoughts and fantasies unfurl without investing in them.
That all flows from the slightly different relationship to your ego that I think you acquire if you've had the experience of your ego being blasted to confetti. You realize that you're not necessarily identical to your ego. He's kind of a character that inhabits you. It's great to have him in the driver's seat when you're trying to write a book, or get something hard done, but it's also not necessarily your best self. It's the self that defends you against strong emotions, your subconscious, other people, and really being open to experience and the minds of others. I'm able to quiet his chatter a little more effectively than I used to be able to.
Now, that's nothing you wouldn't acquire in ten years with a good shrink, or ten years in meditating. But I got there in an afternoon, and that was kind of remarkable.
What is it about us that makes us so hesitant to let go of that ego, to want to keep that membrane between self and other, object and subject?
Well, I don't know that the researchers have any answer. But, first of all, this kind of egoic consciousness that most of us bring to the world is, historically, probably a new thing. I think it's a product of capitalism. There's a great power that comes from objectifying nature and objectifying other people. You can turn them into workers or slaves, you can use nature for your benefit, you can extract and exploit it. So it's very powerful and very useful for certain things.
On the other hand, it can be very destructive. It's not the way personality always was, probably. But it is the way it is in our time, and getting a little perspective on that is really useful. People are reluctant to let it go because it does get them lots of goodies. But it also leads to a lot of unhappiness because it closes off our access to other people, our access to our own subconscious. So it's a trade-off.
Listen only if you want smart people giving real advice on how to stay sane in an insane world.
What about the future of psychedelics most excites you, and what about it most worries you?
What excites me is the potential of these medicines to help people for whom we don't have a lot to offer. Mental health care in this country and worldwide has not been that effective. We still deal with very high rates of mental illness, and that's all getting worse. The last important innovations were in the early '90s, with the introduction of the SSRI's [think: Prozac and Zoloft], and not too much has happened since then. So the idea that we might have a tool that could help with a whole range of different problems—from addiction and depression to obsession and anxiety—that's very exciting.
On the dark side, I do worry that we are on the verge of seeing a giant fashion for psychedelics. They are not without risk. The risks are not so much physical. The safety profile is remarkably good. They are not toxic, and they are non-addictive, so compared with other psychoactive medicines we take, they are very safe for our bodies. But, there are people who shouldn't take them: people at risk for serious mental illness, for psychosis, for schizophrenia. People do have really negative experiences, and the reason there haven't been any adverse events in all these trials so far is that they've screened people very carefully. But if everybody is taking psilocybin because they've heard it's so safe, some of those people are going to have really difficult experiences, and are at risk for some lasting psychic damage...Irrational exuberance has been an occupational hazard for people working with these substances since at least the time of Timothy Leary. I'm hoping that people will keep a lid on their enthusiasm.
The challenge is really figuring out how to incorporate these medicines in the culture in a safe way. That doesn't mean simply legalizing them. It means legalizing them with a really strong, regulatory regime so that you can only get them from trained guides who, ideally, will accompany you on the journey. We don't really have models for giving a drug under those circumstances. Our culture tends to swing from complete prohibition to complete legalization, and I think both of those points on the arch are mistaken.
I think we have to get it right, and all the researchers are being very careful. But if the demand for a guided psychedelic session becomes as strong as it could, there are going to be a lot of charlatans getting into this space. That's what I worry about.
Are there political or social ills that that you think might benefit from the sort of entropy that psychedelics can introduce into our consciousness?
I do and I don't. I do in the sense that the experience addresses what I see as two of the biggest problems we face as a society. One is an environmental crisis, born of our sense of distance from nature: our willingness to objectify nature and see it merely as a resource. The other is tribalism: our inability to see the other as like us, and the egotistical zero-sum game with other people, whether it's other countries, other races, other religions.
Along comes these medicines that actually change consciousness in those two domains, very specifically, by making us feel really connected to nature, that we sense the subjectivity of other species. Which should lead to treating them with more respect and care, and feeling a deep implication that you're part of nature, not just a spectator. And then, on the tribalism side, [it] makes you feel deeply connected to all different kinds of other people. So you could argue that this is exactly the drug we need right now.
But then you need to stand back and say, “Wait, is it possible to prescribe a drug for an entire country?” How many people do you have to give this experience before you change the culture? And that was something Timothy Leary spent a lot of time on, he had these predictions of how many people he'd have to trip before the world changed. There's no model for prescribing treatment to a culture. That takes you into a really terra incognita of social change. I think, for that stuff, we still need politics.
I’m thinking of Aldous Huxley’s book The Island—something like that where where you need a whole community.
He was someone who was irrationally exuberant about psychedelics, like Leary. He really did think that these drugs could change society in a way that would soften it, and eliminate the pathologies. It's a very appealing idea, and that's one of the reasons the tech community is so interested in these drugs, because there's a utopian vibe, they're going to hack everything, and fix [it]. But I think we have to maintain some skepticism about that project.
You have this quote that says, “If psychedelic therapy proves successful, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the brain and the mind in the practice of psychotherapy.” I was wondering if you could just unpack that a little bit.
Psychotherapy was really—think about Freud—all about talk, and it was all about the mind, and very little attention was paid to the fact that you had a biological organ that uses chemicals and waves and electrical signals to organize experience and present experience to us. Then, when we discovered neurochemistry, the pendulum went all the way to the other side, where talking therapy is a waste of time. You just have to get people the right drug. Depression is a chemical imbalance. Schizophrenia is a chemical imbalance. It was all drugs all the time. Now we simply put people on SSRIs without a lot of care. Your primary physician can put you on an SSRI, and you're not getting any real psychotherapy.
Psychedelics, the way they're being used most successfully, really shouldn't be called “psychedelic therapy.” It should be called “psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy,” because the presence of the guide is really important for organizing the experience, creating a safe setting for it, helping you set your expectations and your intentions, and then helping you integrate it after. So you can't just take one of these pills and go off, [or just] take your prescriptions to the CVS. You need the whole package. It doesn't work without it. You need the guide, the music, the blindfolds.
I think we're very reductive in our thinking about stuff, and we tend to assume, “Well, it's all about the chemicals.” But, in this case, it's not. The chemical produces very different things under very different circumstances. It's highly variable, and set and setting determine the trip. So you need to combine the tools off talking therapy and that support with pharmacology. And that's a new thing, and I think it will be hard for psychiatry to absorb that, but it seems to me that's where the power here is.
Once doctors have the power to prescribe psilocybin, hopefully it’ll come with certain rules about who can do it, and how they have to be trained, and the circumstances. I don't know if the drug will even attach those kinds of conditions to writing a prescription, but I think, in this case, we'll have to.
The last idea I wanted to get into was something that psychedelic experiences can help with: this idea of negative capability. How would you define "negative capability"?
It was a term invented by the poet John Keats to describe a quality he had observed in Shakespeare, which is: Shakespeare doesn't take sides in his play. He doesn't really care who's right or who's wrong. He's very comfortable with the fact that there are really different points of view on reality, on any given scene. He didn't feel the need, the way most of us do, to drive through [to] a conclusion, or have an argument. His plays don't really have arguments.
And that ability to exist with the uncertainty of real life where things aren't black and white is a very powerful thing. It's really far into our culture right now: everybody is on one side or the other, and everything is black and white. That's the egotistical way of thinking, right? It's a way of interpreting the world through your values and ideologies. To give that up, the way the experienced meditator becomes disinterested and just watches the parade of thoughts without taking sides? That's negative capability, and I think it is something I've felt these experiences allowed me to get closer to. By no means do I think I possess this quality, but I try to cultivate it.
And what are the downsides of not being able to exist in that uncertain state?
We tend to demonize people who don't agree with us. We fail to see their point of view. I mean, Shakespeare could see everyone's point of view in a play very clearly—20-30 different points of view. We're not very good at that. We don't have that quality of empathy. I think you tend not to respect the other, you tend to see everything through a very selfish lens. Now it may make you less likely to act, maybe it paralyzes you. But it seems to me it's a prerequisite for genuine empathy and compassion.
Was there any link between Shakespeare and psychedelics?
[laughs] Not that we know. You know, the alchemists who were active in his lifetime they were interested in psychedelics, and witches that he does a lot of work with in his plays—in Macbeth. Witches' brews, those were psychedelic drugs, so maybe. I won't rule it out.
There’s your next book.
You can have that one.
This interview has been edited and condensed.