Love is Psychedelic
Mind Expanding vs. Mind Narrowing
Mind Expanding vs. Mind Narrowing
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Michael Pollan’s book “How to Change Your Mind” is about the psychedelic renaissance and its potential to revolutionize psychotherapy. As he points out, the early days of any movement like this can be overly idealizing and optimistic (like any honeymoon period). But it seems clear that psychedelic therapy can have some profound effects on conditions that have historically been very hard to treat, such as extreme anxiety (including death anxiety), deep depression, and addictions.
It’s not known exactly how psychedelics achieve these results, but Pollan’s interviews and investigations reveal some promising leads. One set of ideas has to do with the idea of a sort of brain reset, similar to rebooting a computer, or as one person put it “like shaking a snow globe.” This would be in the tradition of insulin shock, or what used to be called electroshock — now call electroconvulsive t…