How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

Despite his behaviorist orientation as a scientist, Griffiths had always been interested in what philosophers call phenomenology—the subjective experience of consciousness. He had tried meditation as a graduate student but found that “he couldn’t sit still without going stark-raving mad. Three minutes felt like three hours.” But when he tried it ag

Where did these mushrooms grow, and how? Why did they evolve the ability to produce a chemical compound so closely related to serotonin, the neurotransmitter, that it can slip across the blood-brain barrier and temporarily take charge of the mammalian brain?

I was surprised to learn that psychedelics are far more frightening to people than they are dangerous.

entheogen: From the Greek, “generating the divine within.” A psychoactive substance that produces or facilitates a spiritual experience. Entheogens have been used by many cultures for thousands of years,

In the fall of 1938, Hofmann made the twenty-fifth molecule in this series, naming it lysergic acid diethylamide, or LSD-25 for short. Preliminary testing of the compound on animals did not show much promise (they became restless, but that was about it), so the formula for LSD-25 was put on the shelf.

By the time Griffiths turned fifty, in 1994, he was a scientist at the top of his game and his field.

time had come, she suggested, for science “to recognize these extraordinary subjective experiences … even if they sometimes involve claims about ultimate realities that lie outside the purview of science.”

The study demonstrated that a high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably “occasion” a mystical experience—typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe.

Hayes particularly recommends the experience to people in middle age for whom, as Carl Jung suggested, experience of the numinous can help them negotiate the second half of their lives.