How to Change Your Mind

addiction, depression, anxiety, mania, and obsession; in his view, all
these disorders involve learned habits of negative thinking and behavior
that hijack our attention and trap us in loops of self-reflection. “What
started as a pleasure becomes a need; what was once a bad mood
becomes continuous self-indictment; what was once an annoyance
becomes persecution,” in a process he describes as a form of “inverse
learning.” “Every time we respond [to a stimulus], we strengthen the
neural circuitry that prompts us to repeat” the same destructive thoughts
or behaviors.
Could it be that the science of psychedelics has a contribution to make
to the development of a grand unified theory of mental illness—or at least
of some mental illnesses? Most of the researchers in the field—from
Robin Carhart-Harris to Roland Griffiths, Matthew Johnson, and Jeffrey
Guss—have become convinced that psychedelics operate on some higher-
order mechanisms in the brain and mind, mechanisms that may underlie,
and help explain, a wide variety of mental and behavioral disorders, as
well as, perhaps, garden-variety unhappiness.
It could be as straightforward as the notion of a “mental reboot”—Matt
Johnson’s biological control-alt-delete key—that jolts the brain out of
destructive patterns (such as Kessler’s “capture”), affording an
opportunity for new patterns to take root. It could be that, as Franz
Vollenweider has hypothesized, psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity.
The myriad new connections that spring up in the brain during the
psychedelic experience, as mapped by the neuroimaging done at Imperial
College, and the disintegration of well-traveled old connections, may
serve simply to “shake the snow globe,” in Robin Carhart-Harris’s phrase,
a predicate for establishing new pathways.
Mendel Kaelen, a Dutch postdoc in the Imperial lab, proposes a more
extended snow metaphor: “Think of the brain as a hill covered in snow,
and thoughts as sleds gliding down that hill. As one sled after another
goes down the hill, a small number of main trails will appear in the snow.
And every time a new sled goes down, it will be drawn into the
preexisting trails, almost like a magnet.” Those main trails represent the
most well-traveled neural connections in your brain, many of them
passing through the default mode network. “In time, it becomes more
and more difficult to glide down the hill on any other path or in a
different direction.