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MICHAEL POLLAN was born a little too late to ride the first wave of psychedelics. “The only way I was going to get to Woodstock was if my parents drove me,” he says in How To Change Your Mind.

Fast-forward some decades and we join Pollan in his 50s, busy giving birth to himself. He has just smoked one of the world’s most potent psychotropic drugs, the venom of the Sonoran desert toad. “I felt something squeeze out from between my legs, but easily without struggle or pain. It was a boy: the infant me. That seemed exactly right: having died, I was now being reborn.”

This isn’t just an account of a middle-aged man’s foray into the underworld. In the 1950s, drugs like LSD and psilocybin found their way into psychotherapy. Viewed as little miracles, they were used to treat a variety of disorders, including alcoholism, anxiety and depression. Yet their disruptive effect on society – bad trips, psychotic episodes, suicide – meant exuberance gave way to moral panic. The establishment turned sharply against them.

Pollan’s book is the story of their renaissance, a fusion of history, philosophy and of science past, present and future. They are united through his personal quest for a spiritually significant experience, something that could change his mind in enduring ways. “To become more open… when the grooves of mental habit have been etched so deep as to seem inescapable was an appealing prospect,” he says.

The dangers of such a quest – particularly with a minor heart problem – are not lost on Pollan, who is an even-keeled sceptic (a professor of journalism). Thankfully, curiosity gets the better of fear. For under the mist of LSD, even a toilet trip is amazing: “The arc of water I sent forth was truly the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, a waterfall of diamonds cascading into a pool, breaking its surface into a billion clattering fractals of light.”

A book that focuses so much on the mystical experiences of the mind on drugs is in danger of becoming boring, much like reading about another person’s dreams. But Pollan navigates these waters carefully, drawing us onto firmer ground with accessible philosophy and neuroscience. For example, he sets out to show how combining neuroscientific technology with LSD and psilocybin is opening a window onto consciousness that may enable us to understand brain-mind links. This claim is a little grandiose, perhaps, but his take is certainly intriguing.

“I turned into a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its, being scattered to the wind”

New research shows how psychedelics introduce noise into the brain – how they make it link disparate concepts, shaking us up to produce more unconventional ideas. Whether this will help answer the big questions of consciousness is hard to say, but it seems to be leading us down useful therapeutic avenues: Pollan recounts heart-warming stories of people helped through depression, cancer and addiction.

This scientific backbone gives us distance when we need it. Take this episode: “I turned into a sheaf of little papers, no bigger than Post-its… being scattered to the wind. But the ‘I’ taking in this seeming catastrophe had no desire to chase after the slips and pile my old self back together.” It is compelling, but we are still able to question whether this is a drug-induced hallucination or a path into a normally inaccessible part of our mental landscape. All of which lends itself to a joyful and educational romp around the unexplored side of our minds – and how we need to change our brains to truly experience it.

This article appeared in print under the headline “Open your mind”