Michael Pollan's New Book
Listening to Michael Pollan read his new book How to Change Your Mind while driving over the Cascade Mountains caused me to break out laughing a dozen times. The book is really funny. Not just his phraseology but his story telling ability about people from my youth like Ram Das, Timothy Leary, and Ken Kesey. I had forgotten how outrageous they all were, and how weirdly bent on gurudom. At Portland State University I saw Leary do his 'turn on, tune in, drop out' lecture. What is a 22 year old to make of that? Around the same time I also went to a lecture by Allen Ginsburg and afterwards asked him if the mind state induced by hallucinogenic drugs was the same as that acquired by years of meditation or other eastern religious practices. He hemmed and hawed and didn't really answer. But Pollan does answer and this brings us to the subject of this book and my take on it.
The book is about psilocybin and LSD (psychelics) and the effect they have on the minds of the people who take them. Basically, the experience induced by these substances is very similar to the states of wonder described by religious mystics such as St. John of the Cross and Hildegard of Bingen but also very similar to the altered mental states induced by meditation and eastern breathing practices. Not everyone who takes psychelics interprets the experience as religious. Most people have a 'profound' or 'awe inspiring' experience but its nature is often determined by the 'set' and 'setting' in which the drug is ingested. Pollan himself, describes his experience on psilocybin as becoming aware of the plants in his garden watching him while he watches them. This anthropomorphism of plants is not surprising since he has spent much of his life writing about plants in books such as The Botany of Desire. Also in this new book he describes hunting the potent Psilocybe cyanescens mushroom with Paul Stamets who apparently believes that the mycelia of these mushroom are like a neural network of plant materials that interact with trees and other vegetation to create some kind of plant brain that speaks to us through its chemical psilocybin. Under the influence of psychedelics Pollan used almost the exact same words to describe his feeling about nature that David Abrams uses in his book The Spell of the Sensuous to describe the relationship of humans to nature in the era before there was written language.
Something happens to people who take these drugs that makes them see the world differently. What could that be? Well the answer is close to home. But let us start with another human bodily process that everyone agrees on before we venture into an area less discussed or studied. Let's start with inflammation.
The human body is parsimonious. Our body doesn't have 20,000 different chemical pathways to deal with attack from the outside; it has one, the process of inflammation. If a virus enters our body our immune system attempts to kill it by amplifying one of the 20,000 plasma cells that produce the correct antibody to bind with that particular virus. These antibodies attach to the virus and kill it by setting off a bodily reaction that everyone is familiar with. You get a fever, your throat swells and turns red, it hurts, you want to sleep, your muscles ache, and you just feel bad. Many viruses and bacteria induce this inflammatory reaction and you get similar feelings with each; sometime mild and occasionally fatal such as the dramatic inflammatory reaction to some strains of influenza. You also experience the inflammatory reaction when you get a mosquito bite. It demonstrates all the hallmarks of inflammation: redness, swelling and pain, and sometimes itching. Sometimes inflammation gets initiated by unknown proteins in our bodies and we develop an 'autoimmune' disease like rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosus. These are all diseases of the inflammatory process, one process, that manifests itself in numerous ways.
Well, our parsimonious body has another process that is used in a number of ways - Love. I suspect, if one did a word count of Pollan's book that 'love' would be near the top of list. Many people, in describing their experiences with psychedelics conclude that love is everything, including Pollan and the Beatles: 'Love is all there is'. What do they mean?
Once again, the human body is parsimonious. Our bodies use the same chemical pathways that were developed and still exist in the single cell organisms that preceded us. We share their chemistry. As we became more complicated we developed new systems to pass our genes forward. One of the big systems is love. If you have ever really fallen head-over-heels in love you know that it is like someone gave you a drug. Some chemical pathway in the brain is turned on and gets hard-wired quickly. If we could look at the growth of the synaptic projections that occur when we really fall in love we would find they grew like wildfire.
The love object, a person usually, becomes a magical thing. It is as if someone painted the loved one with a florescent marking pen making them stand out from everything around them. When the beloved speaks they they sound wise and intelligent, when they are across the table from you at dinner everyone else seems to be made from two dimensional cardboard, when they are not near you, you crave their presence. The words used to describe being in love are very similar to the words used to describe being addicted to drugs like opiates. And they are very similar to the words used to describe God. Sir William Osler, when he started Johns Hopkins Medical school only allowed one medicine to be used on patients until the pharmacy committee could certify other, and that was morphine, which he called 'God's own medicine.'
Love is what keeps our genes alive. As some scientists say, a human being is just a gene's way of making another gene. We are built to pass our gene's on to the next generation. To do this our children need to live to adulthood, which for humans is 15 -16 years. We need to protect them until they can reproduce and this requires that we stay attached to their them and to their other parent for this long. This is solid attachment and requires a profound connection which is why love happens. We love our spouse and we love children. And we love them for years and years usually. This is probably the fundamental purpose of the love addiction.
Many people would say that next to their spouse and family the most important love-object in their lives is God. Most people who take psychedelics feel they see God or they feel everything is Love or sometimes both. Many trippers also relive their own birth, or give birth to a child. Where does this love attachment to a god that no one has ever seen come from? Well, we have seen god. When we are born, arguably the most overwhelming, awe inspiring event in one's life, when we open our eyes for the first time, we see the adoring face of our mother looking down at us. We have never seen anything before. This is our first glimpse of the real world. We have no memory of anything except her heartbeat, and, if we were lucky, some Mozart played to use through an trans-abdominal loudspeaker. When we see her face looking down at us, it becomes our first 'flash memory', forever burned into our newly functioning visual memory circuits. But, we have no context for this memory! We have no words. We have never seen a face before. We have nothing to compare it to. And it always seems to be there. When we need food the face provides it. When we are cold the face wraps us in warm clothes. It keeps us alive. It is our god. No one remembers this experience like they remember their last vacation, they remember it in a much more profound, undefined, deeper, way. We imprint on this face and it becomes our god-head. We can never let it go. Hence the power of belief in god.
Falling in love, imprinting, awe, rapture, anything that induces a solid, unwavering belief in a person, entity, of idea come from a common brain mechanism. This mechanism is probably related to the feeling induced by stimulating opiate receptors but more complex and long lasting. You can leave out all the metaphysics and philosophy and explain things in terms of a neurophysiology even if it is not yet defined.
Another common psychedelic experience is hallucination. I learned from Pollan's book that functional MRI scanning shows that the visual cortex of the brain lights up when someone thinks of a visual object even if they aren't seeing that object. If one sees a goat, an area of the visual cortex lights up. If one thinks about a goat, the same area lights up even though we usually see nothing unless we are on drugs or withdrawing from drugs, or psychotic. The most clear visual hallucinations occur during alcohol withdrawal. I've sat by the bed of people with DTs who describe in detail objects that aren't there, such as the bald eagle on the window sill or the crying baby on the foot of the bed. Schizophrenics hallucinations are usually vague and dark, without many details. Auditory hallucinations are almost always clear and accusatory.
My overarching concept of the human body as a parsimonious entity concludes that hallucinations are side effects of our ability to predict the future. In order to make predictions. we must build virtual worlds in our brain and manipulate the pieces in order to make predictions, a very useful tool for survival. In certain circumstances, these concepts become actually visualized by our brain's occipital cortex, if we lack the proper suppression. We also have very details memories of people, like our parents and friends. Some people might call these mini-thems embedded in our memory. We know what they look like, what clothes they wear, their vocabulary and the sound of their voice. Sometimes we can 'see them clearly' and under the right circumstances such a psychedelics, alcohol withdrawal or mental illness, we might really see them or hear them. This is probably where ghosts and other apparitions come from.
One last thing about hallucinations. Opiates are well now for inducing vivid dreams. Coleridge's poem Xanadu was, allegedly, the transcription of an opium dream. Opiate receptors seem to be implicated in hallucination and in the feeling of being in love, or having met God, if you listen to people who describe the profound effect of their first few experiences with opiates. Some people never lose it. One 55 year old heroine addict told me, after I asked him why he was still using, that heroine teaches you things about yourself you can never learn in any other way.
Another idea that Pollan keeps coming back to in his book is that our brains might be like radio receivers that allow us to tap into a universal mind that hovers about us like electromagnetic radiation. Every time he brought this up, I felt as if he wanted it to be true. Universal consciousness is a great idea as is universal connectedness. But, other than the strange behavior of some quantum particles, there is no evidence that a universal mind or universal connectedness exists. Of course we are all connected by our atoms. After we die our atoms and go on to become something else. It is likely each of our bodies contain a few atoms of Cleopatra.
I loved Michael Pollan's book. I feel the real lesson of psychedelic drugs is 'simplicity is beauty.' Pollan invoked a lot of science, metaphysics, philosophy and religion to explain or clarify what he was saying. If he had taken the statements of many of his subjects at face value he might not have needed to write the book at all. Simple, banal seeming sentiments, such as 'eat right, exercise and don't smoke' hold wisdom. Paul Dudley White, the father of cardiology, when asked for his thoughts about living a long life, said the same thing. Wisdom is present in the simplest things, like Blake, the ultimate tripper, said, 'in a grain of sand'. So, if Pollan had just realized that when one of his subject said 'everything is love' he would have taken it as truth rather than a metaphor, he might have found an answer to all his questions sooner. A wise person is a connoisseur of the common.
States of mind, whether induced by drugs, meditation, breathing, or mental illness, serve a function just as that red, swollen lump on your arm caused by a mosquito bite, serves a function. That function is to enhance the possibility that our genes will be passed along to the next generation. I agree with Michael Pollan that sometimes these states of mind my help staunch mental suffering or addiction, but these are simply positive side effects, and not insights. There is no evidence that an altered state of mind is an open door to a new realm. There is no evidence that our brain is tapping into a universal consciousness. There is no evidence that God exists anywhere but in our deepest memory of that face that took care of us when we first opened our eyes.
I wish I could write like Michael Pollan.
The book is about psilocybin and LSD (psychelics) and the effect they have on the minds of the people who take them. Basically, the experience induced by these substances is very similar to the states of wonder described by religious mystics such as St. John of the Cross and Hildegard of Bingen but also very similar to the altered mental states induced by meditation and eastern breathing practices. Not everyone who takes psychelics interprets the experience as religious. Most people have a 'profound' or 'awe inspiring' experience but its nature is often determined by the 'set' and 'setting' in which the drug is ingested. Pollan himself, describes his experience on psilocybin as becoming aware of the plants in his garden watching him while he watches them. This anthropomorphism of plants is not surprising since he has spent much of his life writing about plants in books such as The Botany of Desire. Also in this new book he describes hunting the potent Psilocybe cyanescens mushroom with Paul Stamets who apparently believes that the mycelia of these mushroom are like a neural network of plant materials that interact with trees and other vegetation to create some kind of plant brain that speaks to us through its chemical psilocybin. Under the influence of psychedelics Pollan used almost the exact same words to describe his feeling about nature that David Abrams uses in his book The Spell of the Sensuous to describe the relationship of humans to nature in the era before there was written language.
Something happens to people who take these drugs that makes them see the world differently. What could that be? Well the answer is close to home. But let us start with another human bodily process that everyone agrees on before we venture into an area less discussed or studied. Let's start with inflammation.
The human body is parsimonious. Our body doesn't have 20,000 different chemical pathways to deal with attack from the outside; it has one, the process of inflammation. If a virus enters our body our immune system attempts to kill it by amplifying one of the 20,000 plasma cells that produce the correct antibody to bind with that particular virus. These antibodies attach to the virus and kill it by setting off a bodily reaction that everyone is familiar with. You get a fever, your throat swells and turns red, it hurts, you want to sleep, your muscles ache, and you just feel bad. Many viruses and bacteria induce this inflammatory reaction and you get similar feelings with each; sometime mild and occasionally fatal such as the dramatic inflammatory reaction to some strains of influenza. You also experience the inflammatory reaction when you get a mosquito bite. It demonstrates all the hallmarks of inflammation: redness, swelling and pain, and sometimes itching. Sometimes inflammation gets initiated by unknown proteins in our bodies and we develop an 'autoimmune' disease like rheumatoid arthritis or systemic lupus erythematosus. These are all diseases of the inflammatory process, one process, that manifests itself in numerous ways.
Well, our parsimonious body has another process that is used in a number of ways - Love. I suspect, if one did a word count of Pollan's book that 'love' would be near the top of list. Many people, in describing their experiences with psychedelics conclude that love is everything, including Pollan and the Beatles: 'Love is all there is'. What do they mean?
Once again, the human body is parsimonious. Our bodies use the same chemical pathways that were developed and still exist in the single cell organisms that preceded us. We share their chemistry. As we became more complicated we developed new systems to pass our genes forward. One of the big systems is love. If you have ever really fallen head-over-heels in love you know that it is like someone gave you a drug. Some chemical pathway in the brain is turned on and gets hard-wired quickly. If we could look at the growth of the synaptic projections that occur when we really fall in love we would find they grew like wildfire.
The love object, a person usually, becomes a magical thing. It is as if someone painted the loved one with a florescent marking pen making them stand out from everything around them. When the beloved speaks they they sound wise and intelligent, when they are across the table from you at dinner everyone else seems to be made from two dimensional cardboard, when they are not near you, you crave their presence. The words used to describe being in love are very similar to the words used to describe being addicted to drugs like opiates. And they are very similar to the words used to describe God. Sir William Osler, when he started Johns Hopkins Medical school only allowed one medicine to be used on patients until the pharmacy committee could certify other, and that was morphine, which he called 'God's own medicine.'
Love is what keeps our genes alive. As some scientists say, a human being is just a gene's way of making another gene. We are built to pass our gene's on to the next generation. To do this our children need to live to adulthood, which for humans is 15 -16 years. We need to protect them until they can reproduce and this requires that we stay attached to their them and to their other parent for this long. This is solid attachment and requires a profound connection which is why love happens. We love our spouse and we love children. And we love them for years and years usually. This is probably the fundamental purpose of the love addiction.
Many people would say that next to their spouse and family the most important love-object in their lives is God. Most people who take psychedelics feel they see God or they feel everything is Love or sometimes both. Many trippers also relive their own birth, or give birth to a child. Where does this love attachment to a god that no one has ever seen come from? Well, we have seen god. When we are born, arguably the most overwhelming, awe inspiring event in one's life, when we open our eyes for the first time, we see the adoring face of our mother looking down at us. We have never seen anything before. This is our first glimpse of the real world. We have no memory of anything except her heartbeat, and, if we were lucky, some Mozart played to use through an trans-abdominal loudspeaker. When we see her face looking down at us, it becomes our first 'flash memory', forever burned into our newly functioning visual memory circuits. But, we have no context for this memory! We have no words. We have never seen a face before. We have nothing to compare it to. And it always seems to be there. When we need food the face provides it. When we are cold the face wraps us in warm clothes. It keeps us alive. It is our god. No one remembers this experience like they remember their last vacation, they remember it in a much more profound, undefined, deeper, way. We imprint on this face and it becomes our god-head. We can never let it go. Hence the power of belief in god.
Falling in love, imprinting, awe, rapture, anything that induces a solid, unwavering belief in a person, entity, of idea come from a common brain mechanism. This mechanism is probably related to the feeling induced by stimulating opiate receptors but more complex and long lasting. You can leave out all the metaphysics and philosophy and explain things in terms of a neurophysiology even if it is not yet defined.
Another common psychedelic experience is hallucination. I learned from Pollan's book that functional MRI scanning shows that the visual cortex of the brain lights up when someone thinks of a visual object even if they aren't seeing that object. If one sees a goat, an area of the visual cortex lights up. If one thinks about a goat, the same area lights up even though we usually see nothing unless we are on drugs or withdrawing from drugs, or psychotic. The most clear visual hallucinations occur during alcohol withdrawal. I've sat by the bed of people with DTs who describe in detail objects that aren't there, such as the bald eagle on the window sill or the crying baby on the foot of the bed. Schizophrenics hallucinations are usually vague and dark, without many details. Auditory hallucinations are almost always clear and accusatory.
My overarching concept of the human body as a parsimonious entity concludes that hallucinations are side effects of our ability to predict the future. In order to make predictions. we must build virtual worlds in our brain and manipulate the pieces in order to make predictions, a very useful tool for survival. In certain circumstances, these concepts become actually visualized by our brain's occipital cortex, if we lack the proper suppression. We also have very details memories of people, like our parents and friends. Some people might call these mini-thems embedded in our memory. We know what they look like, what clothes they wear, their vocabulary and the sound of their voice. Sometimes we can 'see them clearly' and under the right circumstances such a psychedelics, alcohol withdrawal or mental illness, we might really see them or hear them. This is probably where ghosts and other apparitions come from.
One last thing about hallucinations. Opiates are well now for inducing vivid dreams. Coleridge's poem Xanadu was, allegedly, the transcription of an opium dream. Opiate receptors seem to be implicated in hallucination and in the feeling of being in love, or having met God, if you listen to people who describe the profound effect of their first few experiences with opiates. Some people never lose it. One 55 year old heroine addict told me, after I asked him why he was still using, that heroine teaches you things about yourself you can never learn in any other way.
Another idea that Pollan keeps coming back to in his book is that our brains might be like radio receivers that allow us to tap into a universal mind that hovers about us like electromagnetic radiation. Every time he brought this up, I felt as if he wanted it to be true. Universal consciousness is a great idea as is universal connectedness. But, other than the strange behavior of some quantum particles, there is no evidence that a universal mind or universal connectedness exists. Of course we are all connected by our atoms. After we die our atoms and go on to become something else. It is likely each of our bodies contain a few atoms of Cleopatra.
I loved Michael Pollan's book. I feel the real lesson of psychedelic drugs is 'simplicity is beauty.' Pollan invoked a lot of science, metaphysics, philosophy and religion to explain or clarify what he was saying. If he had taken the statements of many of his subjects at face value he might not have needed to write the book at all. Simple, banal seeming sentiments, such as 'eat right, exercise and don't smoke' hold wisdom. Paul Dudley White, the father of cardiology, when asked for his thoughts about living a long life, said the same thing. Wisdom is present in the simplest things, like Blake, the ultimate tripper, said, 'in a grain of sand'. So, if Pollan had just realized that when one of his subject said 'everything is love' he would have taken it as truth rather than a metaphor, he might have found an answer to all his questions sooner. A wise person is a connoisseur of the common.
States of mind, whether induced by drugs, meditation, breathing, or mental illness, serve a function just as that red, swollen lump on your arm caused by a mosquito bite, serves a function. That function is to enhance the possibility that our genes will be passed along to the next generation. I agree with Michael Pollan that sometimes these states of mind my help staunch mental suffering or addiction, but these are simply positive side effects, and not insights. There is no evidence that an altered state of mind is an open door to a new realm. There is no evidence that our brain is tapping into a universal consciousness. There is no evidence that God exists anywhere but in our deepest memory of that face that took care of us when we first opened our eyes.
I wish I could write like Michael Pollan.
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