How to Change Your Mind

line. This suggests that the ability to visualize our thoughts should be the
rule rather than the exception. Some neuroscientists suspect that during
normal waking hours something in the brain inhibits the visual cortex
from presenting to consciousness a visual image of whatever it is we’re
thinking about. It’s not hard to see why such an inhibition might be
adaptive: cluttering the mind with vivid images would complicate
reasoning and abstract thought, not to mention everyday activities like
walking or driving a car. But when we are able to visualize our thoughts—
such as the thought of ourselves as a smoker looking like a coughing
gargoyle—those thoughts take on added weight, feel more real to us.
Seeing is believing.
Perhaps this is one of the things psychedelics do: relax the brain’s
inhibition on visualizing our thoughts, thereby rendering them more
authoritative, memorable, and sticky. The overview effect reported by the
astronauts didn’t add anything to our intellectual understanding of this
“pale blue dot” in the vast sea of space, but seeing it made it real in a way
it had never been before. Perhaps the equally vivid overview effect on the
scenes of their lives that psychedelics afford some people is what makes it
possible for them to change their behavior.
Matt Johnson believes that psychedelics can be used to change all
sorts of behaviors, not just addiction. The key, in his view, is their power
to occasion a sufficiently dramatic experience to “dope-slap people out of
their story. It’s literally a reboot of the system—a biological control-alt-
delete. Psychedelics open a window of mental flexibility in which people
can let go of the mental models we use to organize reality.”
In his view, the most important such model is the self, or ego, which a
high-dose psychedelic experience temporarily dissolves. He speaks of
“our addiction to a pattern of thinking with the self at the center of it.”
This underlying addiction to a pattern of thinking, or cognitive style, links
the addict to the depressive and to the cancer patient obsessed with death
or recurrence.
“So much of human suffering stems from having this self that needs to
be psychologically defended at all costs. We’re trapped in a story that sees
ourselves as independent, isolated agents acting in the world. But that
self is an illusion. It can be a useful illusion, when you’re swinging
through the trees or escaping from a cheetah or trying to do your taxes.
But at the systems level, there is no truth to it. You can take any number