Fifteen Questions: Michael Pollan on Psychedelics, Consciousness, and Journalism

Michael K. Pollan is the Lewis K. Chan Arts Lecturer and Professor of the Practice Non-Fiction. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: Which artistic medium is best at capturing mystical experiences?

MKP: I’m not sure. It may just be a personal prejudice, but I tend to think writing works better than visual media. Right now, we have a psychedelic film festival going on at the at the Harvard Film Archive, and having read a lot of accounts of mystical experiences, as well as seen efforts to capture them cinematically, I feel like cinematic representations are just too specific and so hard to enter into as a viewer. Whereas when something is written, you have to provide a lot more. You have to imagine your way into it. All you have are the words. So I tend to think that that is the most effective.

FM: Within literature, is there a specific genre — say, poetry, fiction or memoir — that’s best at capturing these types of experiences?

MKP: The one that sticks for me — that I think has influenced not just me, but the whole culture — is Aldous Huxley’s account of his mescaline experience in “The Doors of Perception,” a very short, powerful essay that does a really good job of capturing it and not just capturing it, but shaping it for everyone who’s read that book and for lots of people who haven’t. I think the metaphors he uses and the way he framed the experience have — since it was one of the first accounts in the West — influenced everybody who’s come after.

FM: How similar are mystical experiences when they’re induced by different means? For example, in what ways is a psychedelic trip similar to a transcendent religious experience?

MKP: Well, I haven’t had a transcendent religious experience. I may not be qualified to answer that, but there’s been a lot of interesting writing comparing the two. In fact, there was a study done at Johns Hopkins at NYU a few years ago that has yet to be published, where they gave high doses of psilocybin to religious leaders. The people who received psilocybin and had powerful mystical experiences — and that was everybody, except the Buddhist priest, who did not have an encounter with the divine, as she called it — felt that these were authentic mystical experiences, no different than ones they have had in their own lives that were spontaneous and, in many cases, inspired their desire to make religion their vocation.

FM: Treatment for trauma typically helps the patient ground themselves in the present and leave the traumatic event in the past. Psychedelics do the opposite: Like trauma, transcendence tends to collapse a person’s experience of time. Do you think there is something about the similarities of these experiences that gives transcendence the ability to heal trauma?

MKP: Well, the way psychedelics are being used to heal trauma is not through this mystical experience. Typically, the medicine of choice is MDMA. The idea there is that the drug leads to a very quick bond with the therapist, and it also allows people to explore very painful material without feeling the pain. These are both very powerful things. Normally, it takes a long time to build up that bond with your therapist, and normally reliving these experiences retraumatizes you. But MDMA appears to work by allowing you to go into very difficult material without feeling the associated emotional charge.

FM: In a previous interview, you’ve argued that humans have “a basic interest in transcendence, no matter how it’s achieved.” Why do you think this is so?

MKP: We, for some reason, are not satisfied with everyday normal consciousness, and we do all sorts of things to alter it, from drinking coffee — which most of us do every day — to more radical, transcendent forms of change, like psychedelics. But there are a lot of non-pharmacological ways to achieve these states. Experiences of awe in nature, for example, can do it. Religious practice can do it. Sports can do it. Extreme physical activity and risk can do it. Breathing exercises can do it. It’s something we seem to be wired for.

I think that boredom is part of what drives it. For most of history, most people’s lives have been pretty monotonous, and relief from that is a powerful thing. I think relief from pain is also something that changes in consciousness give us, and that’s very important for most of history. Medicine could do very little for people, but we had opiates and cannabis that could help people either not feel their pain or dissociate from their pain. So that’s a really powerful thing.

FM: In several of your books, you’ve engaged in experiential reporting for the sake of better understanding your subject. What is the most memorable thing you’ve done in the name of journalism?

MKP: Well, two come to mind. One was buying a cow and following it through the meat system. I wrote a piece called “Power Steer” in 2002 — it became a chapter in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” — to understand the industrial meat system. I bought it from these ranchers in Vale, South Dakota, and then followed it to the feedlot and to the slaughterhouse to see how we produce a steak in this country. It was number 534 — that was his tag.

The other was having a handful of psychedelic experiences when I was researching “How To Change Your Mind.” That was much more frightening than buying the cow, because I had had very limited experience. I had a high dose psilocybin experience, ayahuasca, and a couple other less well known psychedelics.

FM: When is it more useful to immerse yourself in your story, and when is it more useful, if ever, to keep yourself out of the story?

MKP: You have to pick your spots. If there’s a way I can put myself in this situation that will help illuminate it, great. But if I have wonderful characters who are doing that well enough, there’s no need.

I felt like in the case of psychedelics, there was Huxley and a couple other accounts, but I honestly didn’t understand how a single experience of consuming a mushroom could change people’s outlook on death, for example. I had interviewed all these cancer patients from my first article on psychedelics, and many of them had completely lost their fear of death after a single experience, and that seemed so improbable to me. There was no way for me to test that without trying it myself.

FM: Tell me about your forthcoming book on the science and philosophy of consciousness.

MKP: It’s been the hardest project I’ve worked on. It’s not called “the hard problem” for nothing.

Consciousness is an interesting subject in that, since scientists haven’t made that much progress, philosophers have a very large role to play in the conversation. It’s unusual to see scientists deferring to philosophers. Usually everybody in the humanities defers to the scientists. So I always enjoy that.

One of the things you learn when you study consciousness is that science has been structured since the time of Galileo to ignore consciousness, and, in fact, doesn’t have the tools to understand consciousness. So there’s a real question of whether science will ever be able to solve this problem, at least the way it’s currently constituted. Realizing that, I looked at other ways of thinking about consciousness. I interview philosophers, I interview Buddhists, I interview poets, I interview novelists. I think this is one area where the humanities is perhaps ahead of the sciences, and the trajectory of the book moves from science to poetry.

FM: Do you think it’s possible for artificial intelligence to gain consciousness?

MKP: That’s the subject of chapter two. I do not. I think the belief that it will happen, and that as machines get smart enough, consciousness will sort of come along for the ride, as it did for us, is false. I think intelligence and consciousness are orthogonal. They’re very different capabilities.

Computers are very good at simulating the so-called higher functions of the mind — abstract reasoning, symbolic representation — but they’re not really good at the more emotional, physical things. Current thinking about consciousness is rooted in the body. It’s rooted in our flesh, in our vulnerability, in our ability to feel pain. An immortal computer, it’s hard to think will ever feel, because our feelings are tied to our mortality. Without feeling, I don’t think you will have anything we would call consciousness or that would deserve moral consideration.

So my argument is, no, I don’t think computers will become conscious. However — and this is a big but — they will be able to fool us into thinking they are, and I think this is going to lead to enormous confusion.

So then the question will become: If you can simulate consciousness, isn’t that as good as the real thing? I argue that it’s not, but there are many people who think it is. It’s going to be a mess.

FM: Could conscious non-human animals have mystical experiences?

MKP: There’s many reports of animals who like to change consciousness like we do. I tell a story about a cat I had who had a real catnip problem. Every day I went down in the garden to cut some lettuce for a salad, Frank would follow me into the garden, which was fenced, and he would look at me, and he needed to be reminded where the catnip was, because he would get so wrecked on catnip that he forgot where it was.

The interesting thing is: Why do plants produce chemicals that have these effects on animals? The Frank-the-cat episode gave me a hypothesis, which was that if you’re trying to protect yourself from a predator as a plant, you are better off discombobulating the mind of the predator, ruining the predator’s appetite, and making the predator forget where you are than outright killing the predator. If you’re so poisonous that you kill the cat, you’re going to select for resistance very quickly, and your poison will no longer work. Whereas if you just discombobulate your predator, the tool is more likely to keep its value.

FM: Before you begin researching psychedelics, you wrote extensively about food and cooking. I’m curious to hear your thoughts on Ozempic and how it’s affecting our cultural relationship to food, health, and pleasure.

MKP: I think that’s a really interesting subject, and I don’t think we know yet. We don’t know the long-term effects of Ozempic. I have some concern that Ozempic will allow people to continue eating badly because they’re losing weight and they’re still eating junk. Eating junk has other effects besides weight gain. Ultra-processed food, you know, has inflammatory qualities, has an impact on the cardiovascular system, may have an impact on mental function and dementia. If we’ve created a drug that allows people to go on eating food that’s unhealthy, we may solve one problem and do nothing for another.

It also strikes me as the classic capitalist fix. Instead of going back to the root of the problem and addressing it — which is the way we grow food, the way we eat, the way we process food — we come up with another business to profit off the problems we’ve created. This is how capitalism works. It creates messes and then creates new businesses to clean up the messes.

FM: What is the best meal you’ve had at Harvard Square?

MKP: God, that’s a tough one. It’s a little out of Harvard Square, but it’s close enough: I’ve had some wonderful meals at Pammy’s.

FM: You teach within Harvard’s creative writing program, and your academic background is in English. How can the techniques of creative writing inform journalistic work?

MKP: I think learning to write for an audience is a very important skill. A lot of what I do, and I think some of my colleagues do, is deprogram students from academic writing, which is a very artificial genre. Unless you become an academic, you’re not going to use it in your life very much, and I think there are better ways to write.

I taught in a high school many years ago, at a prep school in Vermont, and the students were all learning their four-paragraph essays: this very artificial genre that they were unfamiliar with, for an audience of one, their teacher. I was charged with teaching writing, and I had them do journalism instead. They were working in these recognizable forms that spoke to them and their peers and their parents. That taught me that teaching journalism or creative writing is a very good way to teach writing in general.

FM: Would you ever explore your journalistic interest in another literary genre, such as fiction or poetry?

MKP: I don’t think I would be very good at that. I wrote some poetry in college, and I wasn’t very good at it.

FM: Would you recommend that Harvard undergraduates take psychedelics?

MKP: I did not experiment with psychedelics until I was in my 50s. There are some really good reasons to wait. One of the things psychedelics often do is dissolve the ego. And there is an argument for waiting until an ego is fully formed before you dissolve it.

I think there are many people for whom they’re useful. There are many people who should not go anywhere near them. It’s a very consequential decision, and there are real risks, and people should be aware of them. An important part of my work now is addressing risk, because many people are taking psychedelics and they’re doing it recklessly. These are not party drugs. They should be approached with intention and care. So no, I wouldn’t recommend that everybody take them.

— Magazine Editor-at-Large Yasmeen A. Khan can be reached at yasmeen.khan@thecrimson.com.