How to Change Your Mind

depression study, the lab’s first foray into clinical research. Watts guided
several sessions and then conducted qualitative interviews with all of the
volunteers six months after their treatments, hoping to understand
exactly how the psychedelic session had affected them.
Watts’s interviews uncovered two “master” themes. The first was that
the volunteers depicted their depression foremost as a state of
“disconnection,” whether from other people, their earlier selves, their
senses and feelings, their core beliefs and spiritual values, or nature.
Several referred to living in “a mental prison,” others to being “stuck” in
endless circles of rumination they likened to mental “gridlock.” I was
reminded of Carhart-Harris’s hypothesis that depression might be the
result of an overactive default mode network—the site in the brain where
rumination appears to take place.
The Imperial depressives also felt disconnected from their senses. “I
would look at orchids,” one told Watts, “and intellectually understand
that there was beauty, but not experience it.”
For most of the volunteers, the psilocybin experience had sprung them
from their mental jails, if only temporarily. One woman in the study told
me that the month following her session was the first time she had been
free from depression since 1991. Others described similar experiences:
“It was like a holiday away from the prison of my brain. I felt free,
carefree, reenergized.”
“It was like the light switch being turned on in a dark house.”
“You’re not immersed in thought patterns; the concrete coat has come
off.”
“It was like when you defrag the hard drive on your computer . . . I
thought, ‘My brain is being defragged, how brilliant is that!’”
For many of the volunteers, these changes in the experience of their
own minds persisted:
“My mind works differently. I ruminate much less, and my thoughts
feel ordered, contextualized.”
Several reported reconnecting to their senses:
“A veil dropped from my eyes, things were suddenly clear, glowing,
bright. I looked at plants and felt their beauty. I can still look at my
orchids and feel that: that is one thing that has really lasted.”
Some reconnected to themselves:
“I had an experience of tenderness toward myself.”