How to Change Your Mind

This careful preparation means that a certain expectancy effect is
probably unavoidable. After all, the researchers are preparing people for
a major experience, involving death and rebirth and holding the potential
for transformation. “It would be irresponsible not to warn volunteers
these things could happen,” Griffiths pointed out when I asked if his
volunteers were being “primed” for a certain kind of experience. One
volunteer—the physicist—told me that the “mystical experience
questionnaire” he filled out after every session also planted expectations.
“I long to see some of the stuff hinted at in the questionnaire,” he wrote
after an underwhelming session—perhaps on the placebo. “Seeing
everything as alive and connected, meeting the void, or some
embodiment of deities and things like that.” In this and so many other
ways, it seems, the Hopkins psilocybin experience is the artifact not only
of this powerful molecule but also of the preparation and expectations of
the volunteer, the skills and worldviews of the sitters, Bill Richards’s
flight instructions, the decor of the room, the inward focus encouraged by
the eyeshades and the music (and the music itself, much of which to my
ears sounds notably religious), and, though they might not be pleased to
hear it, the minds of the designers of the experiments.
The sheer suggestibility of psychedelics is one of their defining
characteristics, so in one sense it is no wonder that so many of the first
cohort of volunteers at Hopkins had powerful mystical experiences: the
experiment was designed by three men intensely interested in mystical
states of consciousness. (And it is likewise no wonder that the European
researchers I interviewed all failed to see as many instances of mystical
experience in their subjects as the Americans did in theirs.) And yet, for
all the priming going on, the fact remains that the people who received a
placebo simply didn’t have the kinds of experiences that volunteer after
volunteer described to me as the most meaningful or significant in their
lives.
Soon after a volunteer takes her pill from the little chalice, but before
she feels any effects, Roland Griffiths will usually drop by the session
room to wish her bon voyage. Griffiths often uses a particular metaphor
that made an impression on many of the volunteers I spoke to. “Think of
yourself as an astronaut being blasted into outer space,” Richard Boothby
recalled him saying. Boothby is a philosophy professor who was in his
early fifties when he volunteered at Hopkins. “You’re going way out there