How to Change Your Mind

wishes and fears, prejudices and emotions, begin to inform what we see—
a hallmark of primary consciousness and a recipe for magical thinking.
Likewise, the establishment of new linkages across brain systems can give
rise to synesthesia, as when sense information gets cross-wired so that
colors become sounds or sounds become tactile. Or the new links give rise
to hallucination, as when the contents of my memory transformed my
visual perception of Mary into María Sabina, or the image of my face in
the mirror into a vision of my grandfather. The forming of still other
kinds of novel connections could manifest in mental experience as a new
idea, a fresh perspective, a creative insight, or the ascribing of new
meanings to familiar things—or any number of the bizarre mental
phenomena people on psychedelics report. The increase in entropy allows
a thousand mental states to bloom, many of them bizarre and senseless,
but some number of them revelatory, imaginative, and, at least
potentially, transformative.
One way to think about this blooming of mental states is that it
temporarily boosts the sheer amount of diversity in our mental life. If
problem solving is anything like evolutionary adaptation, the more
possibilities the mind has at its disposal, the more creative its solutions
will be. In this sense, entropy in the brain is a bit like variation in
evolution: it supplies the diversity of raw materials on which selection can
then operate to solve problems and bring novelty into the world. If, as so
many artists and scientists have testified, the psychedelic experience is an
aid to creativity—to thinking “outside the box”—this model might help
explain why that is the case. Maybe the problem with “the box” is that it is
singular.