these get stronger the more exercise they get. The long-term fate of the
novel connections formed during the psychedelic experience—whether
they prove durable or evanescent—might depend on whether we recall
and, in effect, exercise them after the experience ends. (This could be as
simple as recollecting what we experienced, reinforcing it during the
integration process, or using meditation to reenact the altered state of
consciousness.) Franz Vollenweider has suggested that the psychedelic
experience may facilitate “neuroplasticity”: it opens a window in which
patterns of thought and behavior become more plastic and so easier to
change. His model sounds like a chemically mediated form of cognitive
behavioral therapy. But so far this is all highly speculative; as yet there
has been little mapping of the brain before and after psychedelics to
determine what, if anything, the experience changes in a lasting way.
Carhart-Harris argues in the entropy paper that even a temporary
rewiring of the brain is potentially valuable, especially for people
suffering from disorders characterized by mental rigidity. A high-dose
psychedelic experience has the power to “shake the snow globe,” he says,
disrupting unhealthy patterns of thought and creating a space of
flexibility—entropy—in which more salubrious patterns and narratives
have an opportunity to coalesce as the snow slowly resettles.
• • •
THE IDEA that increasing the amount of entropy in the human brain might
actually be good for us is surely counterintuitive. Most of us bring a
negative connotation to the term: entropy suggests the gradual
deterioration of a hard-won order, the disintegration of a system over
time. Certainly getting older feels like an entropic process—a gradual
running down and disordering of the mind and body. But maybe that’s
the wrong way to think about it. Robin Carhart-Harris’s paper got me
wondering if, at least for the mind, aging is really a process of declining
entropy, the fading over time of what we should regard as a positive
attribute of mental life.
Certainly by middle age, the sway of habitual thinking over the
operations of the mind is nearly absolute. By now, I can count on past
experience to propose quick and usually serviceable answers to just about