Research & Culture7 min read

Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind: What a Skeptic Learned From Psilocybin

Before 2018, Michael Pollan was best known for his plain-spoken advice about eating real food, mostly plants. He was a journalist, a gardener and a professor, and nobody would have called him a psychonaut. Then he published How to Change Your Mind, a book that did more than almost anything else to bring psychedelics back into mainstream conversation. This post walks through what the book covers, what Pollan experienced himself, and what everyday people can take from it.

Who is Michael Pollan?

Pollan is an American writer whose earlier books, including The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food, explored how humans and plants shape each other. He has taught journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, and later helped found Berkeley's Center for the Science of Psychedelics. His reputation matters to this story: he came to the subject as a cautious, middle-aged skeptic with a journalist's habit of checking everything.

How to Change Your Mind was published by Penguin Press in May 2018, became a number one New York Times bestseller, and was later turned into a four-part Netflix documentary series (2022) covering LSD, psilocybin, MDMA and mescaline.

What the book covers

The book has six main chapters, and it's structured a bit like a journey:

A Renaissance: why researchers started studying psychedelics again after decades of silence.
Natural History: a deep dive into mushrooms, including time with mycologist Paul Stamets hunting for psilocybin species in the Pacific Northwest.
History: the first wave of research in the 1950s and 1960s, and how it collapsed.
Travelogue: Pollan's own guided experiences.
The Neuroscience: what brain imaging suggests is happening during a trip.
The Trip Treatment: the modern clinical trials for depression, addiction and end-of-life distress.

It reads like a long, careful piece of journalism rather than a manifesto. Pollan interviews researchers, therapists, patients and underground guides, and he is honest about the risks and the gaps in the evidence.

Pollan's early mushroom experiences

Pollan was not completely new to mushrooms. In a 2018 talk at Berkeley, he explained that he had tried them a couple of times in his late twenties, once pleasantly in the countryside with his wife Judith, and once uncomfortably in a busy Manhattan park, where he spent the whole time worrying that strangers could tell he was high. That second memory is a perfect lesson in setting, and it's one many people will recognize.

As part of researching the book, he tried mushrooms again, this time at a higher dose at home. Judith felt the effects come on fast and wanted to be inside and safe. Pollan wandered out to the small writing house in his garden, lay down on the daybed and looked out at the trees. Reading from the book in that Berkeley talk, he described the moment this way: "It seemed to me these were the most beautiful leaves I had ever seen." He went on to describe feeling as though the plants were looking back at him with a kind of gentle curiosity.

What we love about this account is how ordinary the setting was. No ceremony, no jungle, just a garden, a daybed and a person paying attention. That is very much the kind of thing people report at moderate doses: a sense that familiar things are suddenly vivid, alive and meaningful.

The guided psilocybin session

The heart of the Travelogue chapter is a set of guided sessions with experienced underground guides. These followed a structure very similar to the one used in clinical trials: preparation conversations beforehand, a comfortable room, eyeshades, headphones with a carefully chosen playlist, and a guide present the whole time.

In his higher-dose psilocybin session, Pollan described the experience of his sense of self coming apart. At a 2019 talk reported by the Boston Globe, he summarized it this way: "Something I recognized as me burst into a little cloud of Post-It notes, which is kind of appropriate for a writer." He has described the rest of himself as being spread out like paint, and the feeling of awareness carrying on without any "I" at the centre of it.

The most famous moment in the book comes when one of Bach's cello suites begins playing in his headphones. Pollan describes losing the ability to tell where he ended and the music began, feeling as though he had become the instrument itself. In the book's words, as quoted by The Marginalian: "So I became the cello and mourned with it for the twenty or so minutes it took for that piece to, well, change everything."

That passage resonates with so many readers because it describes something people genuinely report at strong doses: music stops being something you listen to and becomes something you are inside. It's also a good reminder of why playlists matter so much. Our playlist guide has tips on building one.

The hard parts

Pollan doesn't pretend it was all beauty. He has spoken about how much of his psychedelic experience circled around death. His father was dying of cancer during much of the research, and in the Berkeley talk he said that "a lot of my psychedelic experiences dealt with death." He also tried 5-MeO-DMT from the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad, which he described as utterly terrifying, like being inside an explosion, and said he had no wish to repeat.

This honesty is part of the book's value. Big experiences can be hard, and the hard parts are often where the meaning sits. It's also why preparation and a calm, trusted person nearby matter so much.

The neuroscience chapter in a nutshell

One of the book's most useful sections explains, in plain language, what researchers think is going on in the brain. Pollan spends time with scientists who study the default mode network, a set of connected brain regions that is especially active when we daydream, think about ourselves, replay the past or worry about the future. Brain-imaging studies suggest that psychedelics quiet the usual activity of this network while letting other regions communicate more freely than normal. Pollan uses this to make sense of his own experience: if the network that maintains our everyday sense of "me" goes quiet, it's not surprising that the self can seem to dissolve. He is careful to present this as a working model rather than a final answer, and researchers continue to debate the details. Still, it gives readers a helpful frame for why a trip can feel like stepping outside your usual habits of mind, and why those habits can feel a little looser for a while afterwards.

What Pollan took away

In interviews since, Pollan has described coming out of the experiences more open and less defensive, more present, and more interested in the idea that the ego is a useful tool rather than the whole of who we are. He has been careful not to oversell psychedelics as a cure for anything. He is enthusiastic about the research while being clear that these substances carry real risks and are not for everyone.

What is normal, based on accounts like his

Pollan's experiences line up well with what is commonly reported at different doses of dried Psilocybe cubensis. These ranges are approximate, and potency varies by strain and batch:

Low (about 0.5 to 1 g): vivid colours, a sense of things being beautiful or funny, mild body sensations. His "most beautiful leaves" moment is the kind of thing that can happen even at the gentler end.
Moderate (about 1 to 2.5 g): stronger visuals, emotional waves, deep thought, time stretching, music feeling enormous.
Strong (about 2.5 to 3.5 g): the sense of self loosening, merging with music or surroundings, intense emotions, possible confrontation with big themes like death or love.
Very high (around 5 g, McKenna's "heroic dose"): often a complete dissolving of the sense of self. Read our Terence McKenna post for more.

Also normal: yawning, nausea and chills on the come-up, crying or laughing without a clear reason, and feeling tired and reflective the next day. Not normal, and a reason to call 911: chest pain, trouble breathing, seizures, fainting or anyone becoming a danger to themselves or others.

Bringing Pollan's lessons home

You don't need a professional guide or a Netflix crew to borrow the best parts of Pollan's approach:

Prepare. Think about your intentions and what's going on in your life. Our set and setting guide walks you through it.
Pick a calm, private place. His Manhattan park story is the cautionary tale.
Have a sober sitter. Read Trip Sitting 101.
Use eyeshades and music. Turning inward is where much of the depth comes from.
Integrate afterwards. Write, talk and reflect. Our integration guide has ideas.

Safety and legal notes

Psilocybin is a controlled substance in Canada. Pollan's sessions were part of journalistic research, and he consistently encourages people to respect the risks. Avoid psilocybin if you have a personal or family history of psychosis or bipolar disorder, are pregnant, or take lithium, MAOIs, tramadol or antidepressants without medical advice. You must be 19 or older to shop with us, and never drive after taking mushrooms.

If his story has you curious, start gently with a first-timer kit or a low dose of Golden Teacher, and read What Are Magic Mushrooms? first.

Sources

This guide is general information, not medical or legal advice. If you have health questions, talk to a health professional.