How to Change Your Mind

contracts, and one’s focus narrows as the mind turns in on itself, shutting
out the world. Loops of rumination and worry come to occupy more of
one’s mental time and space, reinforcing habits of thought it becomes
ever more difficult to escape.
Existential distress at the end of life bears many of the hallmarks of a
hyperactive default network, including obsessive self-reflection and an
inability to jump the deepening grooves of negative thinking. The ego,
faced with the prospect of its own extinction, turns inward and becomes
hypervigilant, withdrawing its investment in the world and other people.
The cancer patients I interviewed spoke of feeling closed off from loved
ones, from the world, and from the full range of emotions; they felt, as
one put it, “existentially alone.”
By temporarily disabling the ego, psilocybin seems to open a new field
of psychological possibility, symbolized by the death and rebirth reported
by many of the patients I interviewed. At first, the falling away of the self
feels threatening, but if one can let go and surrender, powerful and
usually positive emotions flow in—along with formerly inaccessible
memories and sense impressions and meanings. No longer defended by
the ego, the gate between self and other—Huxley’s reducing valve—is
thrown wide open. And what comes through that opening for many
people, in a great flood, is love. Love for specific individuals, yes, but also,
as Patrick Mettes came to feel (to know!), love for everyone and
everything—love as the meaning and purpose of life, the key to the
universe, and the ultimate truth.
So it may be that the loss of self leads to a gain in meaning. Can this be
explained biologically? Probably not yet, but recent neuroscience offers a
few intriguing clues. Recall that the Imperial College team found that
when the default mode network disintegrates (taking with it the sense of
self), the brain’s overall connectivity increases, allowing brain regions
that don’t ordinarily communicate to form new lines of connection. Is it
possible that some of these new connections in the brain manifest in the
mind as new meanings or perspectives? The connecting of formerly far-
flung dots?
It may also be that psychedelics can directly imbue otherwise
irrelevant sensory information with meaning. A recent paper in Current
Biology* described an experiment in which pieces of music that held no
personal relevance for volunteers were played for them while on LSD.