How to Change Your Mind - Revision history

Robert.adlington: /* 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy */

2026-09-21T20:35:23Z

6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy

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 *Children and trippers: hotter searches, diffused attention, more mental noise/entropy, magical thinking, and little sense of a self that is continuous over time.
 == 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy ==
 * -
 == Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity ==
-* -
+* The images and the narratives and the insights don't come from nowhere, and they certainly don't come from a chemical. They come from inside our minds, and at the very least have something to tell us about that.

Robert.adlington: /* 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics */

2026-09-19T12:20:07Z

5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics

← Older revision		Revision as of 12:20, 19 September 2026
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	*When I'm feeling especially generous or grateful, open to feelings and people and nature, I register a sense of expansion, often accompanied by a diminution of ego, as well as a falloff in the attention paid to past and future on which the ego feasts (and depends). By the same token, there is a pronounced sense of contraction when I'm obsessing about things or feeling fearful, defensive, rushed, worried, and regretful. At such times, I feel altogether more me, and not in a good way.		*When I'm feeling especially generous or grateful, open to feelings and people and nature, I register a sense of expansion, often accompanied by a diminution of ego, as well as a falloff in the attention paid to past and future on which the ego feasts (and depends). By the same token, there is a pronounced sense of contraction when I'm obsessing about things or feeling fearful, defensive, rushed, worried, and regretful. At such times, I feel altogether more me, and not in a good way.
	*Lantern and spotlight consciousness - Children rarely exhibit sustained periods of the latter, but adults can occasionally enjoy the former. Lantern consciousness is expansive, why spotlight consciousness is narrow or contracted.		*Lantern and spotlight consciousness - Children rarely exhibit sustained periods of the latter, but adults can occasionally enjoy the former. Lantern consciousness is expansive, why spotlight consciousness is narrow or contracted.
			*Low temperature searches succeed more often than not. A high-temperature search requires more energy because it involves reaching for less likely but possibly more ingenious and creative answers - those found outside the box of preconception. Drawing on its wealth of experience, the adult mind performs low-temperature searches most of the time.
			*Gopnik: Each generation of children confronts a new environment, and their brains are particularly good at learning and thriving in that environment. Think of the children of immigrants, or four-year-olds confronted with an iPhone. Children don't invent these new tools, they don't create the new environment, but in every generation they build the kind of brain that can best thrive in it. Childhood is the species' ways of injecting noise (ie entropy) into the system of cultural evolution.
			*The child's brain is extremely plastic, good for learning, not accomplishing, better for exploring rather than exploiting. It also has a great many more neural connections than the adult brain. But as we reach adolescence, most of these connections get pruned, so that the human brain becomes a lean, mean, acting machine. A key element of that developmental process is the suppression of entropy, with all of its implications, both good and bad. The system cools, and hot searches become the exception rather than the rule. The DMN comes online.
			*Children and trippers: hotter searches, diffused attention, more mental noise/entropy, magical thinking, and little sense of a self that is continuous over time.
	== 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy ==		== 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy ==
	* -		* -
	== Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity ==		== Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity ==
	* -		* -

Robert.adlington: /* 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics */

2026-09-19T11:45:35Z

5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics

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 * "If it were possible to temporarily experience another person's mental state, my guess is that it would feel more like a psychedelic state than a "normal" state, because of its massive disparity with whatever mental state is habitual with you."
 * Will the mind, unconstrained, tend to favor its priors or the evidence of its senses?
 == 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy ==
 * -
 == Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: /* 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics */

2026-09-18T18:32:31Z

5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics

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 == 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics ==
-* -
+* All three molecules are tryptamines, a type of organic compound (an indole, to be exact) distinguished by the presence of two linked rings, one of them with six atoms and the other with five.
 == 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy ==
 * -
 == Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: /* The Toad */

2026-09-18T13:54:23Z

The Toad

← Older revision		Revision as of 13:54, 18 September 2026
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	=== The Toad ===		=== The Toad ===

	* -		* Being on the outside of a rocket after launch. I'm holding on with both hands, legs clenched around it, while the rapidly mounting g-forces clutch at my flesh, pulling my face down into a taut frimace, as the great cyclinder rises through successive layers of clouds, exponentially gaining speed and altitude, the fuselage shuddering on the brink of self-destruction as it strains to break free from Earth's grip, while the friction it generates as it crashes through the thinning air issues in a deafening roar.
			* The other metaphor was the big bang, but the big bang run in reverse, from our familiar world all the way back to a point before there was anything, no time or space or matter, only the pure unbounded energy that was all there was then, before an imperfection, a ripple in its waveform, caused the universe of energy to fall into time, space, and matter. Rushing backward through 14Bn years, I watched the dimensions of reality collapse one by one until there was nothing left, not even being. Only the all-consuming roar. It was just horrible.
			* And then suddenly the devolution of everything into the nothingness of pure force reverses course. One by one, the elements of our universe begin to reconstitute themselves: the dimensions of time and space returned first, blessing my still-scattered confetti brain with the cozy coordinates of place; this is somewherei And then I slipped back onto my familiar "I" like an old pair of slippers and soon after felt something I recognized as my body begin to reassemble. The film of reality was now running in reverse, as if all the leaves that the thermonuclear blast had blown off the great tree of being and scattered to the four winds were suddenly to find their way back, fly up into the welcoming limbs of reality, and reattach. The order of things was being restored, me notably included. I was alive!
			* And yet as I felt myself reconstitute as a self and then a body, something for which I now sought confirmation by running my hands along my legs and squirming beneath the blanket, I felt ecstatic - as happy as I can ever remember feeling. But this ecstasy was not sui generis, not exactly. It was more like the equal and opposite reaction to the terror I had just endured. less of a divine gift than the surge of pleasure that comes from the cessation of unendurable pain. But a sense f relief so vast and deep as to be cosmic.
			* I felt for the first time gratitude for the very fact of being, that there is anything whatsoever. Rather than being necessarily the case, this now seemed quite the miracle, and something I resolved never again to take for granted. Everybody gives thanks for "being alive", but who stops to offer thanks for the bare-bones gerund that comes before "alive"? I had just come from a place where being was no more and now vowed never to forget what a gift (and mystery) it is, that there is something rather than nothing.
			* True, one had to favor doing in order to get anything done, but wasn't there also a great virtue and psychic benefit in simply being? In contemplation rather than action? I decided I needed to practice being with stillness, being with other people as I find them (imperfect), and being with my own unimproved self. To savor whatever is at this very moment, without trying to change it or even describe it. (Huxley struggled with the same aspiration during his mescaline journey: "If one always saw like this, one would never want to do anything else.")
			* For me, "spiritual" is a good name for some of the powerful mental phenomena that arise when the voice of the ego is muted or silenced. If nothing else, these journeys have shown me how that psychic construct - at once so familiar and on reflection so strange - stands between us and some striking new dimensions of experience, whether of the world outside us or of the mind within. The journeys have shown me what the Buddhists try to tell us but I have never really understood: that there is much more to consciousness than the ego, as would see if it would just shut up. and that its dissolution (or transcendence) is nothing to fear; in fact, it is a prerequisite for making any spiritual progress.
			* The ego, that stingy, vigilant security guard admits only the narrowest bandwidth of reality, "a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive." It's really good at performing all those activities that natural selection values: getting ahead, getting liked and loved, getting fed, getting laid. Keeping us on task, it is a ferocious editor of anything that might distract us from the work at hand, whether that means regulating our access to memories and strong emotions from within or news of the world without.
			* So perhaps spiritual experience is simply what happens in the space that opens up in the mind when "all mean egotism vanishes." Wonders (and terrors) we're ordinarily defended against flow into our awareness; the far ends of the sensory spectrum, which are normally invisible to us, our sense can suddenly admit. While the ego sleeps, the mind plays, proposing unexpected patterns of thought and new rays of relation. The gulf between self and world, that no-man's-land which in ordinary hours the ego so vigilantly patrols, closes down, allowing us to feel less separate and more connected, "part and particle" of some larger entity. Whether we call that entity Nature, the Mind at Large, or God hardly matters. but it seems to be in the crucible of that merging that death loses some of its sting.

	== 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics ==		== 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics ==

Robert.adlington: /* 4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground */

2026-09-17T15:59:35Z

4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground

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 ** Psycholytic - Mind loosening.
 ** Psychedelic - Mind manifesting. In 1956, the word "had no particular connotation of madness, craziness, or ecstasy, but suggested an enlargement and expansion of mind."
 *"Unsanity": "a state beyond the control of the ego".
 *Drugs like LSD and psilocybin promised a better route into the subconscious (than Freud's royal road of dreams)
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 *Before 1943, our society had never had such powerful mind-changing drugs available to it.
 == 4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground ==
 * -
 == 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: /* 3. History: The First Wave */

2026-09-16T17:05:07Z

3. History: The First Wave

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 * Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child's-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, or ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.
 == 3. History: The First Wave ==
-* -
+* The evolution of terms:
 == 4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: /* 2. Natural History: Bemushroomed */

2026-09-16T16:45:30Z

2. Natural History: Bemushroomed

← Older revision		Revision as of 16:45, 16 September 2026
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	*James: "It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity." This ultimate unity, he suspected, was no mere delusion.		*James: "It is as if the opposites of the world, whose contradictoriness and conflict make all our difficulties and troubles, were melted into unity." This ultimate unity, he suspected, was no mere delusion.
	== 2. Natural History: Bemushroomed ==		== 2. Natural History: Bemushroomed ==
	* -		* The biggest organism on earth is not a whale or a tree but a mushroom - a honey fungus in Oregon that is 2.4 miles wide.
			* "The Universality of the Mycelial Archetype" - an intricate tracery of blue lines on a night sky, the lines representing at once mycelium, roots, neurons, the Internet, and dark matter.
			* The Wassons had a theory that each Indo-European people is by cultural inheritance either mycophobic (the Anglo-Saxons, Celts, and Scandinaviansà or mycrophilic (the Russians, Catalans, and Slavs.
			* Wasson: "I was seeing the archetypes, the Platonic ideas, that underlie the imperfect images of everyday life."
			* Terence McKenna's stoned ape theory that psilocybes gave our hominid ancestors access to realms of supernatural power, catalyzed the emergence of human self-reflection, and brought us out of the animal mind and into the world of articulated speech and imagination. This last hypothesis about the invention of language turns on the concept of synesthesia, the conflation of the sense that psychedelics are known to induce: under the influence of psilocybin, numbers can take on colors, colors attach to sounds, and so on. Language he contends, represents a special case of synesthesia, in which otherwise meaningless sounds become linked to concepts.
			* Samorini hypothesizes that during times of rapid environmental change or crisis it may avail the survival of a group when a few of its members abandon their accustomed conditioned responses and experiment with some radically new and different behaviors. Much like genetic mutation, most of these novelties will prove disastrous and be discarded by natural selection. But the laws of probability suggest that a few of the novel behaviors might end up being useful, helping the individual, the group, and possibly the species to adapt to rapid changes in their environment.
			* Samorini calls this a "depatterning factor." There are time in the evolution of a species when the old patterns no longer avail, and the radical, potentially innovative perceptions and behaviors that psychedelics sometimes inspire may offer the best chance for adoption. Think of it as a neurochemically induced source of variation in a population.
			* The psylocin in that mushroom unlocked the 5-hydroxytryptamine 2-A receptors in my brain, causing them to fire wildly and set off a cascade of disordered mental events that, among other things, permitted some thoughts and feelings, presumably from my subconscious (and, perhaps, my reading too), to get cross-wired with my visual cortex as it was processing images of the trees and plants and insects in my field of vision.
			* Not quite a hallucination, "projection" is probably the psychological term for this phenomenon: when we mix our emotions with certain objects that then reflect those feelings back to us so they they appear to glisten with meaning.
			* Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, once described a spiritually "realized being" as simply a person with "an acute sense of the astonishing mystery of everything." Faith need not figure. Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child's-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, or ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.
	== 3. History: The First Wave ==		== 3. History: The First Wave ==
	* -		* -

Robert.adlington: /* Prologue: A New Door */

2026-09-14T16:23:22Z

Prologue: A New Door

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 == Prologue: A New Door ==
-* -
+* Lysergic acid diethylamide, commonly known as LSD, was first synthesized by Albert Hofmann in 1938, shortly before physicists split an atom of uranium for the first time.
 == 1. A Renaissance ==
-* -
+* LSD is one of the most powerful psychoactive compounds ever discovered, active at doses measured in micrograms (1/1000 of a milligram)
 == 2. Natural History: Bemushroomed ==
 * -

Robert.adlington: Created page with "== Prologue: A New Door == * - == 1. A Renaissance == * - == 2. Natural History: Bemushroomed == * - == 3. History: The First Wave == * - == 4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground == * - == 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics == * - == 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy == * - == Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity == * -"

2026-09-14T15:49:01Z

Created page with "== Prologue: A New Door == * - == 1. A Renaissance == * - == 2. Natural History: Bemushroomed == * - == 3. History: The First Wave == * - == 4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground == * - == 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics == * - == 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy == * - == Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity == * -"

New page

== Prologue: A New Door ==
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== 1. A Renaissance ==
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== 2. Natural History: Bemushroomed ==
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== 3. History: The First Wave ==
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== 4. Travelogue: Journeying Underground ==
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== 5. The Neuroscience: Your Brain on Psychedelics ==
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== 6. The Trip Treatment: Psychedelics in Psychotherapy ==
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== Epilogue: In Praise of Neural Diversity ==
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