How to Change Your Mind

harder to avoid thinking about. These sessions deprive people of the
luxury of mindlessness”—our default state, and one in which addictions
like smoking can flourish.
Johnson believes the value of psilocybin for the addict is in the new
perspective—at once obvious and profound—that it opens onto one’s life
and its habits. “Addiction is a story we get stuck in, a story that gets
reinforced every time we try and fail to quit: ‘I’m a smoker and I’m
powerless to stop.’ The journey allows them to get some distance and see
the bigger picture and to see the short-term pleasures of smoking in the
larger, longer-term context of their lives.”
Of course, this re-contextualization of an old habit doesn’t just
happen; countless people have taken psilocybin and continued to smoke.
If it does happen, it’s because breaking the habit is the avowed intention
of the session, strongly reinforced by the therapist in the preparatory
meetings and the integration afterward. The “set” of the psychedelic
journey is carefully orchestrated by the therapist in much the same way a
shaman would use his authority and stagecraft to maximize the
medicine’s deep powers of suggestion. This is why it is important to
understand that “psychedelic therapy” is not simply treatment with a
psychedelic drug but rather a form of “psychedelic-assisted therapy,” as
many of the researchers take pains to emphasize.
Yet what accounts for the unusual authority of the rather ordinary
insights volunteers brought back from their journeys? “You don’t get that
on any other drug,” Roland Griffiths points out. Indeed, after most drug
experiences, we’re fully aware of, and often embarrassed by, the
inauthenticity of what we thought and felt while under the influence.
Though neither Griffiths nor Johnson mentioned it, the connection
between seeing and believing might explain this sense of authenticity.
Very often on psychedelics our thoughts become visible. These are not
hallucinations, exactly, because the subject is often fully aware that what
she is seeing is not really before her, yet these thoughts made visible are
nevertheless remarkably concrete, vivid, and therefore memorable.
This is a curious phenomenon, as yet unexplained by neuroscience,
though some interesting hypotheses have recently been proposed. When
neuroscientists who study vision use fMRIs to image brain activity, they
find that the same regions in the visual cortex light up whether one is
seeing an object live—“online”—or merely recalling or imagining it, off-