by Michael Pollan
Pollan chronicles the scientific rediscovery of psychedelics like psilocybin and LSD, weaving first-person trip reports with accounts of Johns Hopkins and NYU clinical trials in depression, addiction, and end-of-life distress. He argues that psychedelics loosen rigid cognitive patterns in the default-mode network, offering a materialist framework for why mystical experiences reliably produce lasting psychological benefits.
In this collection, How to Change Your Mind references 3 other books and is cited by 1 other book.
It draws on Why We Sleep, Waking Up and Flow.
It’s picked up by Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art.
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The books Pollan references and why each one mattered to the argument.
Pollan cites Walker's Why We Sleep research on REM dreaming when discussing how psychedelics and dream states share mechanisms of loosening the default-mode network's grip on cognition.
Pollan engages Sam Harris's Waking Up on the phenomenology of non-dual consciousness, using Harris's secular mysticism framework to describe the ego-dissolution reported in psilocybin sessions.
Pollan draws on Csikszentmihalyi's Flow to describe the absorbed, timeless quality of the psychedelic mystical experience and its overlap with peak states.
The exact passages where other authors bring up “How to Change Your Mind” and what they take from it.
Nestor cites Pollan's account of holotropic breathwork and altered states to show how breath manipulation can access the same default-mode-network changes as psychedelics
How ideas flow through the citation network. Ancestors are books this title builds on; descendants are books that build on it.
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Books from completely different categories that share citation overlap with this one. These are the reads you would not find by browsing a single shelf.
Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
James Nestor
The Creative Act: A Way of Being
Rick Rubin
Creativity, Inc.
Ed Catmull
Deep Work
Cal Newport
Peopleware
Tom DeMarco
Stillness Is the Key
Ryan Holiday
Books with the highest citation overlap within the same categories.
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