How to Change Your Mind

organisms can navigate mazes in search of food—sensing its location and then growing in that direction. ...

expression for psilocybin when asking him about going hunting for ’shrooms. “I really, really hate that word,” ...

the practice of mulching with wood chips has vastly expanded the range of a handful of potent Psilocybes ...

But while Stamets urges extreme circumspection in amateurs hoping to identify Psilocybes, he also equips the m ...

AT THE TIME OF MY VISIT, Paul Stamets lived with his partner, Dusty Yao, and their two big dogs, Plato ...

intricate tracery of blue lines on a night sky, the lines representing at once mycelium, roots, neurons ...

Five years his senior, John was an aspiring scientist—he would receive a scholarship to study neurophysiol ...

One spring afternoon toward the end of his freshman year, walking alone along the wooded ridgeline above camp ...

the most to spread their genes and, as Stamets now saw as his calling, their planetary gospel. Stamets got his ...

1976, Stamets and his Evergreen colleagues organized a series of now- legendary mushroom conferences, bringin ...

two of his heroes: Albert Hofmann and R. Gordon Wasson, whose 1957 article in Life magazine describing the first ...

generous contract that, in addition to the princely sum of eighty-five hundred dollars, granted him final ...

proposed to cook them for dinner. He refused to partake. “Not long married,” Wasson wrote, “I thought to ...

1930s, more than a quarter century before Timothy Leary set foot on the campus. For it was Schultes who firs ...

mushrooms had passed, they spoke one with another about the visions that they had seen. The Spanish sought to ...

• • • ON THE NIGHT OF JUNE 29–30, 1955 , R. Gordon Wasson experienced the sacred mushrooms firsthand. On his ...

Architectural Eyes out of focus—the candles we saw them double. Oriental splendor—Alhambra—chariot Table transfor ...

as a sacrament five hundred years earlier, but by 1955 many Mazatecs had become devout Catholics, and the ...

strange transformation. Everything assumed a Mexican character.” In 1962, Hofmann joined Wasson on one of his return t ...

As Stamets carried the heavy stones, one by one, from their cabinet to the coffee table, where he arranged t ...