By: Dr. Thomas F. Shipley and Dr. Lauren Ellman

We begin the new school year with a column about Michael Pollan's recent outreach and translation effort.  Readers may be familiar with Pollan from his 2006 book The Omnivore's Dilemma.  Pollan likes to take on big topics in his quest to elucidate human's relationship with nature.  In "Omnivore", he considered why we eat what we eat, and how meals have changed from being socially guided by family traditions and culture to guided by experts so that eaters are inclined to treat food as medicine that will cure our individual ills. The new book similarly considers the transition from cultural practices (e.g., shamanic) to modern medicinal practices (e.g., psychiatric) in the treatment of mental disorders. The book is about entheogens (a replacement term for hallucinogens, such as LSD and Psilocybin, which can induce spiritual experiences) and what they can tell us about the mind. The wide-ranging book weaves together neuroscience, meditation, fear of dying, addiction treatment, and the author's personal experiences into a narrative about why it is so hard to change our behavior and how such changes might be facilitated.

Entheogens appear to disrupt the "default mode network", which links functional areas of the brain involved in goal-oriented tasks. Studying the way entheogens affect mental processes may allow a greater understanding of how various parts of the brain communicate to form conscious experience and the importance of the experienced sense of self to our daily decisions. The neuroscience research with adults may help us understand how the default mode network develops over the lifespan. There has been a recent resurgence of interest in the entheogens, which may have clinical applications in a variety of areas. For instance, research from the 1950s and 60s on use of hallucinogens (LSD, Mescaline, Psilocybin) to treat addiction has been rediscovered. A consistent and intriguing finding from that research is that the effectiveness of entheogens on disrupting undesired behavior and thoughts (e.g., quitting smoking, overcoming fear of death in terminal cancer patients, overcoming depression) was correlated with the patient's degree of mystical experience when taking the entheogen. 

In his book, Pollan makes a cogent argument for outreach in the sense of connecting diverse disciplines and modes of experience. For example, understanding how medical outcomes and mystical experiences might be related necessitates, for researchers in the materialist mode, outreach from science to religious studies.  The book is also relevant to a very different form of outreach, this time within individuals. By temporarily allowing connections to form among circuits that have not formerly been connected, entheogens may allow a form of neural outreach. By temporarily promoting distant network connections, entheogens may allow the neural system may get out of a local "rut" and find a different state. Although clearly this is a difficult area to carry out research in, it is possible that careful and controlled neuroscience studies will help illuminate this suggestion. In the meantime, Pollan's book gives us an interesting and highly personal account relevant to the dynamic and complex relations between brain, mind, and experience.