How to Change Your Mind [Media Notes 75b] – Psilocybin brings depth to the series.

As I’ve already indicated, I found the first episode in Michael Pollan’s series, about LSD, to be disappointing. The second one, about psilocybin, is much better. Or at least I found it so.

It was natural to begin the series with LSD, for that’s the drug that brought psychedelics to public consciousness. The story’s simple: 1) Swiss chemist accidentally discovers it, 2) Timothy Leary turns on, tunes in, and urges the world to drop out, and 3) HIPPIES! I more or less lived through this story – I’m a bit older than Michael Pollan, who missed it – so the history wasn’t new to me, and this episode was mostly the history.

The second episode has history as well, the story of how Gordon Wasson, a J.P. Morgan banker and amateur mycologist, traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, to meet María Sabina, a curandera, and thereby brought knowledge of psilocybin to the 20th century Western world. This brings a new dimension to the story. The story of LSD is a story of 20th century pharmaceuticals. But psilocybin is a naturally occurring substance that has been used by humans for centuries and centuries around the world to take these journeys, these trips, these investigations, making them a facet of humanity that has been sidelined by Western culture.

But that’s not how the episode opened. It opened with the story of an older woman who had been diagnosed with cancer. She took psilocybin (in a clinical setting) to help her overcome her fear of death, which it did. Here we see special effect used to present us with her trip, convincingly but not flamboyantly. This is done, I believe, three more times in the series. Once with Paul Stamets, a mycologist, once with a man suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and finally with Pollan himself. I thought this was quite effective. We also learned about the work done on psychedelics at the Spring Grove Clinic in Baltimore – I was aware of it at the time.

Taken in conjunction with the first episode, on LSD, we now have a much more rounded and fully realized picture of psychedelics. In particular, the first episode makes a connection between psychedelics and computer culture through the figure of Steward Brand, best-known as the creator of the Whole Earth Catalogue. Brand had settled in San Francisco, which was an important center of counter-cultural activity (Haight Ashbury was legendary), but the surrounding area, Silicon Valley to the southeast, was important in computer culture as well. Thus these two pivotal movements matured in close proximity.

In one sense they are very different. Computers are highly complex technology used to facilitate things in the external world. Whatever the chemical complexity of psychedelic drugs, anyone can ingest them, and take an inward journey. Both, however, are mind technologies, one a set of devices for externalizing mental activities, the other a group of drugs for re-ordering one’s own mind. Their physical conjunction is thus important. If we are to understand the course of cultural growth and change since the middle of the 20th century, we need to track the parallel evolution of these two movements.

Here's a brief chronology indicating some of the conjunctions of these two movements. It is derived from a book proposal I’d created, but failed to sell, about the interaction of these developments.