How to Change Your Mind

were encouraging enough to win the attention and cautious support of
the mental health community, which has called for more research.
Dozens of medical schools have asked to participate in future trials, and
funders have stepped forward to underwrite those trials. After decades in
the shadows, psychedelic therapy is suddenly respectable again, or nearly
so. New York University, which proudly promoted the results of a trial it
had once only tolerated somewhat grudgingly, invited Stephen Ross to
move his treatment room from the dental college into the main hospital.
Even the NYU cancer center, which had initially been reluctant to refer
patients to the psilocybin trial, asked Ross to set up a treatment room on
its premises for an upcoming trial.
The papers offered little in the way of a theory to explain the effects of
psilocybin, except to point out that the patients with the best outcomes
were the ones who had the most complete mystical experience. But
exactly why should that experience translate into relief from anxiety and
depression? Is it the intimation of some kind of immortality that accounts
for the effect? This seems too simple and fails to account for the variety of
experiences people had, many of which did not dwell on an afterlife. And
some of the ones that did conceived of what happens after death in
naturalistic terms, as when the anonymous volunteer imagined herself as
“part of the earth,” molecules of matter being taken up by the roots of
trees. This really happens.
Of course the mystical experience consists of several components,
most of which don’t require a supernatural explanation. The dissolution
of the sense of self, for example, can be understood in either
psychological or neurobiological terms (as possibly the disintegration of
the default mode network) and may explain many of the benefits people
experienced during their journeys without resort to any spiritual
conception of “oneness.” Likewise, the sense of “sacredness” that
classically accompanies the mystical experience can be understood in
more secular terms as simply a heightened sense of meaning or purpose.
It’s still early days in our understanding of consciousness, and no single
one of our vocabularies for approaching the subject—the biological, the
psychological, the philosophical, or the spiritual—has yet earned the right
to claim it has the final word. It may be that by layering these different
perspectives one upon the other, we can gain the richest picture of what
might be going on.