How to Change Your Mind

thirtysomething neuroscientist named Robin Carhart-Harris has been
working since 2009 to identify the “neural correlates,” or physical
counterparts, of the psychedelic experience. By injecting volunteers with
LSD and psilocybin and then using a variety of scanning technologies—
including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and
magnetoencephalography (MEG)—to observe the changes in their brains,
he and his team have given us our first glimpses of what something like
ego dissolution, or a hallucination, actually looks like in the brain as it
unfolds in the mind.
The fact that such an improbable and potentially controversial
research project ever got off the ground owes to the convergence of three
most unusual characters, and careers, in England in the year 2005: David
Nutt, Robin Carhart-Harris, and Amanda Feilding, a.k.a. the Countess of
Wemyss and March.
Robin Carhart-Harris’s path to David Nutt’s psychopharmacology lab
was an eccentric one, having first passed through a graduate course in
psychoanalysis. These days psychoanalysis is a theory few neuroscientists
take seriously, regarding it less as a science than as a set of untestable
beliefs. Carhart-Harris felt strongly otherwise. Steeped in the writings of
Freud and Jung, he was fascinated by psychoanalytic theory while at the
same time frustrated by its lack of scientific rigor, as well as by the
limitations of its tools for exploring what it deemed most important about
the mind: the unconscious.
“If the only way we can access the unconscious is via dreams and free
association,” he explained the first time we talked, “we aren’t going to get
anywhere. Surely there must be something else.” One day he asked his
seminar professor if that something else might be a drug. (I asked Robin
if his hunch was based on personal experience or research, but he made
clear this was not a subject he wished to discuss.) His professor sent him
to read a book called Realms of the Human Unconscious by Stanislav
Grof.
“I went to the library and read the book cover to cover. I was blown
away. That set the course for the rest of my young life.”
Carhart-Harris, who is a slender, intense young man in a hurry, with a
neatly trimmed beard and large pale blue eyes that seldom blink,
formulated a plan it would take him a few years to put into motion: he
would use psychedelic drugs and modern brain-imaging technologies to