How to Change Your Mind

A key question that the science of psychedelics has not even begun to answer is whether the new neural conne ...

these get stronger the more exercise they get. The long-term fate of the novel connections formed duri ...

any question reality poses, whether it’s about how to soothe a child or mollify a spouse, repair a sentence, ...

Brewer, the neuroscientist who studies meditation, has found that a felt sense of expansion in consciousness cor ...

psychologist and philosopher who happens to be a colleague of mine at Berkeley. Alison Gopnik and Robin Carhart ...

present—qualities that she believes psychedelics can help us to better appreciate and, possibly, reexperie ...

temperature search; in their quest to make sense of things, their minds explore not just the nearby and most ...

they don’t create the new environment, but in every generation they build the kind of brain that can be ...

of thought—“lubricate cognition,” in Carhart-Harris’s words—in ways that might enhance well-being, make us mor ...

Harris was running (not a clinical trial, it should be pointed out), a volunteer in his late thirties na ...

CHAPTER SIX THE TRIP TREATMENT Psychedelics in Psychotherapy One: Dying AT NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, psilocybin trips tak ...

guided Mettes that day, and his colleague Stephen Ross, the Bellevue psychiatrist who directed the trial, whi ...

Yet even as psychedelic therapies are being tested by modern science, the very strangeness of these molecules ...

setting in order to put the “hyper-suggestible properties” of these medicines to best use. This is precisely ...

Stephen Ross and Tony Bossis in the NYU treatment room, I was struck by their excitement, verging on giddiness ...

turned yellow. By 2010, the cancer had spread to Patrick’s lungs, and he was buckling under the weight of an e ...

• • • THE IDEA OF GIVING a psychedelic drug to the dying was first broached not by a therapist or sci ...

unity” such that death, “instead of being seen as the absolute end of everything and a step into n ...

Many of the volunteers I interviewed reported initial episodes of intense fear and anxiety before giving thems ...

again . . . wars would be impossible to wage. The room and everything in it was beautiful. Tony and K ...