How to Change Your Mind

“run”—lasting a few minutes—he would project a bar graph on the screen
in front of me; the length of each bar indicates to what extent the activity
in my PCC had exceeded or dropped below baseline, in ten-second
increments. I could also follow the ups and downs of my PCC activity by
listening to rising and falling tones on a monitor, but I found that too
distracting.
I began by trying to meditate, something I’d gotten into the habit of
doing early in my foray into the science and practice of psychedelic
consciousness. A brief daily meditation had become a way for me to stay
in touch with the kind of thinking I’d done on psychedelics. I discovered
my trips had made it easier for me to drop into a mentally quiet place,
something that in the past had always eluded me. So I closed my eyes and
began to follow my breath. I had never tried to meditate in front of other
people, and it felt awkward, but when Brewer put the graph up on the
screen, I could see that I had succeeded in quieting my PCC—not by a lot,
but most of the bars dipped below baseline. Yet the graph was somewhat
jagged, with several bars leaping above baseline. Brewer explained that
this is what happens when you’re trying too hard to meditate and become
conscious of the effort. There it was in black and white: the graph of my
effortfulness and self-criticism.
Next Brewer asked me to do a “loving-kindness” meditation. This is
one where you’re supposed to close your eyes and think warm and
charitable thoughts about people: first yourself, then those closest to you,
and finally people you don’t know—humanity at large. The bars dropped
smartly below baseline, deeper than before: I was good at this! (A self-
congratulatory thought that no doubt shot a bar skyward.)
For the next and last run, I told Brewer I had an idea for a mental
exercise I wanted to try but didn’t want to tell him what it was until
afterward. I closed my eyes and tried to summon scenes from my
psychedelic journeys. The one that came to mind first was an image of a
pastoral landscape, a gently rolling quilt of field and forest and pond,
directly above which hovered some kind of gigantic rectangular frame
made of steel. The structure, which was a few stories tall but hollow,
resembled a pylon for electrical transmission lines or something a kid
might build from an Erector set—a favorite toy of my childhood. Anyway,
by the odd logic of psychedelic experience, it was clear to me even in the