How to Change Your Mind

that at 2:30 Patrick had said, “I went into my lungs and saw two spots. They were no big deal. “I was ...

When we met in the NYU treatment room, Dinah, who has auburn curls and wore large hoop earrings, told ...

Several cancer patients described edging up to the precipice of death and looking over to the other side be ...

HOW MUCH SHOULD THE AUTHENTICITY of these experiences concern us? Most of the therapists involved in the rese ...

development, which I confessed was still fairly rudimentary; I told him my worldview has always been ...

were encouraging enough to win the attention and cautious support of the mental health community, which has calle ...

In a follow-up study to the NYU trial, “Patient Experiences of Psilocybin-Assisted Psychotherapy,” published in t ...

contracts, and one’s focus narrows as the mind turns in on itself, shutting out the world. Loops of rumination ...

Under the influence of the psychedelic, however, volunteers attributed marked and lasting personal meaning to t ...

wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly ...

After the psilocybin session, Lisa somehow convinced herself that Patrick was not going to die after all. He ...

bedside, Patrick slipped away. “I went home to shower and he died.” We were speaking on the phone, and I ...

“And suddenly I realized that the molecules of my body, and the molecules of my spacecraft, the molecule ...

Hopkins office, “but I figured that was a long way off in the future.” Yet soon after Johnson arrived at ...

body to a funeral pyre floating on the Ganges,” and found herself “standing on the edge of the universe ...

see it. If you don’t stop to look, you’ll never see it. It’s the statement of an obvious thing, I know, b ...

harder to avoid thinking about. These sessions deprive people of the luxury of mindlessness”—our default stat ...

line. This suggests that the ability to visualize our thoughts should be the rule rather than the exce ...

of more accurate perspectives: that we’re a swarm of genes, vehicles for passing on DNA; that we’r ...

THE WHOLE IDEA of using a psychedelic drug to treat addiction is not new. Native Americans have long ...