“How To Change Your Mind” Book Review – The Phenomenology Of Psychedelic Experience

Part of the guide: MLM Reviews: The Honest Index

If you typed “how to change your mind book review” into Google, you probably want two things: an honest read on whether Michael Pollan’s book is worth your hours, and a straight answer on whether the science behind psychedelics holds up or whether it’s hippie folklore in a hardcover. I read all 480-odd pages, I’ve had my own profound experience with these compounds, and I’ll give you the version most reviews skip. Reviewed and updated June 2026.

In my last post about vision, I mentioned that I’ve read around 250 books in 18 months. Most mornings I’m up by 6am and reading until noon. That habit puts away a book every one to four days, and it has changed how I think about almost everything: economics, psychology, politics, marketing, science. “How To Change Your Mind” by Michael Pollan was one of the few that I closed and immediately wanted to talk to someone about.

The subtitle tells you the scope: “What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.” That’s a tall order for one book. It delivers.

In this guide

1. Why I picked it up (and why I’m not a neutral reviewer)
2. The study that broke the dam
3. Set, setting, and the safety record
4. The addiction research most people have never heard
5. My honest take on the politics
6. The part that matters most: your brain is not finished
7. Where the book points, and what you can do tomorrow
8. The verdict on this How To Change Your Mind book review

Why I picked it up (and why I’m not a neutral reviewer)

I’ll be honest with you about my bias before I review anything, because a review is only worth reading if the reviewer tells you where he’s standing.

On May 20th, 2017, while I was staying in Puerto Rico, I went through a dramatic and profound spiritual healing experience facilitated by a high-dose psychedelic mixture I prepared myself. The full story is beyond this post, and I’ll write it properly one day. For now it’s enough to say that day rearranged me, and I’ve paid close attention to the science of these compounds ever since. So I came to Pollan’s book already convinced something real happens here. What I wanted was the history, the research, and the honest accounting of the problems.

Bring up psychedelics in a room and you get two camps. One group lights up. The other files them under “drug addicts and hippies.” After reading the book, I’m convinced the second reaction survives only on a lack of information. The depth of legitimate research here is enormous, and most people have simply never been shown it.

The study that broke the dam

Pollan anchors the modern story in a 2006 Johns Hopkins paper, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” He writes:

The study demonstrated that a high dose of psilocybin could be used to safely and reliably “occasion” a mystical experience, typically described as the dissolution of one’s ego followed by a sense of merging with nature or the universe… What was most remarkable about the results reported in the article is that participants ranked their psilocybin experience as one of the most meaningful in their lives, comparable to “the birth of a first child or death of a parent.” Two-thirds of the participants rated the session among the top five most spiritually significant experiences of their lives; one-third ranked it the most significant such experience in their lives. Fourteen months later, these ratings had slipped only slightly.

Read that twice. People rating a single afternoon as one of the five most meaningful events of their entire lives, and still saying so over a year later. That is not a recreational drug story. That is a story about how plastic the adult mind turns out to be, which is the thread I want to pull all the way through.

Set, setting, and the safety record

The part I respect most about Pollan’s book is that he refuses to romanticize. He’s emphatic that these are clinical tools that demand structure, not party favors. On page 14:

…it’s important to distinguish what can happen when these drugs are used in uncontrolled situations, without attention to their set and setting, from what happens under clinical conditions, after careful screening and under supervision. Since the revival of sanctioned psychedelic research beginning in the 1990s, nearly a thousand volunteers have been dosed, and not a single serious adverse event has been reported.

That last line did a lot of work on me. Nearly a thousand supervised sessions, zero serious adverse events. “Set and setting,” the mindset you bring and the environment you’re in, is the whole game. The compound is almost never the variable. The conditions around it are. I learned the same lesson the hard way in 2017, and it’s the single most important thing anyone considering this should understand.

The clinical results he reports are not modest. On page 78:

Completed studies suggest that psilocybin, or rather the mystical state of consciousness that psilocybin occasions, may be useful in treating both addiction (a pilot study in smoking cessation achieved an 80 percent success rate, which is unprecedented) and the existential distress that often debilitates people facing a terminal diagnosis… the study found one of the largest treatment effects ever demonstrated for a psychiatric intervention. The majority of volunteers who had a mystical experience reported that their fear of death had either greatly diminished or completely disappeared.

A worth-knowing 2026 update, because a 2018 book deserves a current footnote: the FDA granted psilocybin therapy “breakthrough therapy” designation for depression back in 2018, and in 2023 Australia became the first country to allow authorized psychiatrists to prescribe psilocybin and MDMA for specific conditions. In the United States, MDMA-assisted therapy hit a wall when the FDA declined Lykos Therapeutics’ application in 2024 and asked for another trial. So the field is moving, and it’s moving with the normal friction of real science, not the smooth ride the enthusiasts promised. Pollan’s caution aged better than the hype.

The addiction research most people have never heard

The addiction chapter is where the book quietly detonates a few assumptions. On page 149, on an old LSD alcoholism program:

Over the next decade, Osmond and Hoffer tested this hypothesis on more than seven hundred alcoholics, and in roughly half of the cases, they reported, the treatment worked: the volunteers got sober and remained so for at least several months… “From the first,” Hoffer wrote, “we considered not the chemical, but the experience as a key factor in therapy.”

Half. Now hold that against this: Bill Wilson, the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, credited his own sobriety to a hallucinogenic experience on belladonna given to him at Towns Hospital in Manhattan in 1934. AA’s long-term sobriety rate is generally estimated in the single digits to low teens. Bill W. actually thought LSD might have a place in AA. The board shot it down, worried it would muddy the brand. Pollan quotes the moment on page 153. Sit with the irony: the most famous sobriety movement on earth was sparked by a psychedelic experience, then spent decades distancing itself from the very category of thing that started it.

My honest take on the politics

Here’s where I’ll plant a flag, because the book invites it. LSD has been a Schedule 1 substance in the US since 1970, a classification that effectively shut down research even though more than a thousand clinical studies had already been completed and much of the psychiatric community at the time was calling it a wonder drug.

I’ve thought about this in historical context for years. The 1960s psychedelic wave produced a generation in open rebellion against authority, a lot of them unwilling to march off to Vietnam. I’ve long wondered whether the war on drugs was, in part, a way to put that rebellion back in its box. I can’t prove that from one book, and I won’t pretend to. But the timing is hard to ignore, and I’ll keep reading the history until I have a firmer answer.

What I will say plainly: if someone objects to reclassifying these substances, it is almost never because the evidence is thin. The evidence is deep and empirical. It’s usually because they haven’t read it, or because they’re protecting a belief they formed before the research existed. I land where I’ve landed on most things like this. Governments should largely stay out of what adults choose to do with their own minds and bodies. That’s just life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, applied honestly.

The part that matters most: your brain is not finished

Now to the chapter that reframed the whole book for me, and the reason I’m even qualified to bridge this to my work. The neuroscience.

Pollan reports on Robin Carhart-Harris’s research into what these compounds actually do to the brain:

Carhart-Harris believes that people suffering from a whole range of disorders characterized by excessively rigid patterns of thought, including addiction, obsessions, and eating disorders as well as depression, stand to benefit from “the ability of psychedelics to disrupt stereotyped patterns of thought and behavior by disintegrating the patterns of [neural] activity upon which they rest.”

And the mechanism, in plain English:

…when the brain operates under the influence of psilocybin, thousands of new connections form, linking far-flung brain regions that during normal waking consciousness don’t exchange much information. In effect, traffic is rerouted from a relatively small number of interstate highways onto myriad smaller roads linking a great many more destinations. The brain appears to become less specialized and more globally interconnected.

This is the real headline of the book, and it has almost nothing to do with getting high. The big idea is that a lot of human suffering is the mind stuck in rigid grooves: the same loop of thought, the same reaction, the same story about who you are. These compounds appear to loosen those grooves for a few hours, which is why people emerge able to see their lives from a new angle. Pollan’s tidiest line on it:

If psychedelic therapy proves successful, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the brain and mind in the practice of psychotherapy.

Cognitive flexibility. The capacity to break a fixed pattern and connect ideas that don’t normally talk to each other. That’s the cash value of the whole book, and once you see it, you start asking the obvious question: if flexibility is that valuable, is a supervised psychedelic session the only way to build it?

It isn’t. And that’s the bridge I want to be careful and honest about.

Where the book points, and what you can do tomorrow

Let me be clear about what I am and am not saying, because the high-income, skeptical reader I write for can smell an overreach from across the room.

I am not telling you a brain-training app reproduces a mystical experience. It doesn’t, and anyone who claims that is selling you something. A guided psychedelic session and a daily cognitive workout are different animals doing different jobs. CortexSurge makes no medical claims and won’t treat your depression.

What I am saying is that the deepest, most defensible insight in “How To Change Your Mind” is that the adult brain stays plastic. It keeps forming new connections your whole life. The book proves that one dramatic way to push on that plasticity is a supervised psychedelic session. The quieter, repeatable way is deliberate practice that trains the brain to relate ideas more flexibly. That’s exactly what Relational Frame Theory training does, and it’s the science I built CortexSurge on. Train the 19 relational frames to fluency and you get measurable improvements in reasoning and fluid intelligence, the published research is real, and unlike Lumosity (which the FTC fined for overclaiming) I’d rather point you to the studies than to a slogan.

Here’s the concrete thing to try this week, drawn straight from the book’s own logic. Pick one belief you treat as fixed about yourself. “I’m not a numbers person.” “I can’t sell.” “My memory’s shot.” Then deliberately argue the opposite case for ten minutes, out loud, as if you had to win it. You’re doing by hand what the research describes: forcing far-flung ideas to connect and breaking a rigid groove. It feels strange. That strangeness is the point. That’s flexibility being built.

The verdict on this How To Change Your Mind book review

Read it. Pollan is a careful, skeptical writer who happens to be a beautiful one, and he refuses to let either the cheerleaders or the prohibitionists off easy. You’ll close it understanding the history, the research, the genuine risks, and the political wreckage around a class of compounds that the evidence says can heal addiction, depression, and the fear of death. I came to it already changed by my own 2017 experience, and it still taught me things I didn’t know.

But the takeaway I keep returning to isn’t really about psychedelics at all. It’s that your mind is far more changeable than the culture told you. You are not stuck with the thinking you have. That’s a hopeful fact, and it’s also a responsibility, because once you know the mind can be trained, sitting still with a duller one becomes a choice.

If you want to go further on the trainable-mind side of this, two places to start. Start here if you’re new to how I think about all of this, and browse the systems and tools I actually recommend, including the cognitive training I use myself.

And here’s the bottom line under the title. The book is called “How To Change Your Mind.” It turns out you don’t need a Schedule 1 substance to start. You need to accept that the mind can change, and then do one deliberate thing about it.

Love,
David Wood

P.S. You can grab Pollan’s book on Amazon here. This was the first book I’ve read on psychedelics, and it won’t be the last. Leave me your honest take in the comments, especially if you land somewhere different than I did on the politics. I read them.

Related reading: Brain Fog Is Costing You Money: How to Think Clearly Under Pressure, Is IQ Fixed? What the Science Actually Says in 2026, The High Earner’s Daily Routine for Mental Performance.