Who among the first generation of psychedelic researchers would dispute a word of this classic gust of Leary exuberance, circa 1963: “Make no mistake: the effect of consciousness-expanding drugs will be to transform our concepts of human nature, of human potentialities, of existence. The game is about to be changed, ladies and gentlemen. Man is

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A key question that the science of psychedelics has not even begun to answer is whether the new neural connections that psychedelics make possible endure in any way, or if the brain’s wiring returns to the status quo ante once the drug wears off. The finding by Roland Griffiths’s lab that the psychedelic experience leads to long-term changes in the

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So it may be that some brains could stand to have a little more entropy, not less. This is where psychedelics come in. By quieting the default mode network, these compounds can loosen the ego’s grip on the machinery of the mind, “lubricating” cognition where before it had been rusted stuck. “Psychedelics alter consciousness by disorganizing brain

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Alison Gopnik and Robin Carhart-Harris come at the problem of consciousness from what seem like completely different directions and disciplines, but soon after they learned of each other’s work (I had e-mailed a PDF of Robin’s entropy paper to Alison and told him about her superb book, The Philosophical Baby), they struck up a conversation that has

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The next day’s Crimson put the controversy on page 1: “Psychologists Disagree on Psilocybin Research.” The day after that, the story was picked up by the Boston Herald, a Hearst paper, and given a much punchier if not quite as accurate headline: “Hallucination Drug Fought at Harvard—350 Students Take Pills.” Now the story was out, and very soon

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Andrew Solomon, in his book The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, traces the links between addiction and depression, which frequently co-occur, as well as the intimate relationship between depression and anxiety. He quotes an expert on anxiety who suggests we should think of the two disorders as “fraternal twins”: “Depression is a response to

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“He gathered everyone together and said good-bye and explained that this is how he wanted to die. He had a very conscious death.” Patrick’s seeming equanimity in the face of death exerted a powerful influence on everyone around him, Lisa said, and his room in the palliative care unit at Mount Sinai became a center of gravity in the hospital.

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A few years ago, Stamets won a patent for a “mycopesticide”—a mutant mycelium from a species of Cordyceps that, after being eaten by carpenter ants, colonizes their bodies and kills them, but not before chemically inducing the ant to climb to the highest point in its environment and then bursting a mushroom from the top of its head that releases

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One way to think about this blooming of mental states is that it temporarily boosts the sheer amount of diversity in our mental life. If problem solving is anything like evolutionary adaptation, the more possibilities the mind has at its disposal, the more creative its solutions will be. In this sense, entropy in the brain is a bit like variation

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