How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

By the time I got to chapter four, “The Dangers of Mistaken Identification,” I was ready to throw in the towel. “Mistakes in mushroom identification can be lethal,” Stamets begins, before displaying a photograph in which a Psilocybe stuntzii is seen growing cheek by jowl with a trio of indistinguishable Galerina autumnalis, an unremarkable little m

It informed my cosmology—that there is a world beyond this one.”

just the pure awareness of a realm without form and void of content.

He experienced the disintegration of the outer world and the dissolution of his own ego.

Yet not all these shifts in the direction of greater openness were confined to the volunteers in the Hopkins experiments; the sitters, too, speak of having been changed by the experience of witnessing these journeys, sometimes in surprising ways.

when I last visited Hopkins, in 2015, some twenty people were working on various studies involving psychedelics. Not since Spring Grove has there been such strong institutional support for the study of psychedelics, and never before has an institution of Hopkins’s reputation devoted so many resources to what is, after all, the study of mystical sta

His father’s engineering company went belly-up when Paul was a boy, the family “going from riches to rags pretty quickly.” Dad began to drink heavily, and Paul began looking up to his older brother John as a role model.

What’s left to do the doubting if not your I?

Such pronounced and lasting changes in the personalities of adults are rare.