This is Your Mind on Plants | Natural Drugs | Betwain

This is Your Mind on Plants by Michael Pollan

Published by Penguin Press; First Edition (July 6, 2021)

Genre: Nonfiction

Format: I audiobooked via Libby

It has been my impression that to Michael Pollan, all food is medicine. All plants are medicine. If the human brain has receptors perfect for the molecules and chemical impact of certain plants, why not harness the impact for the good of our lives? In This is Your Mind on Plants, Pollan writes about his experiences with three plant-derived substances: caffeine, opium, and mescaline and how they change human minds. 

Pollan also considers the arbitrary nature of the legality and illegality of substances in the US. Is it the toxicity of substances? The mind-altering power of substances? What quality makes a substance illegal? Pollan notes that he can grow tobacco freely in his garden along with rhubarb, which has leaves that could sicken or kill him. He can brew beer freely, but not distribute it. He can take a Prozac, but opium tea? Maybe not. Pollan, as ever the experimental journalist, quit caffeine during this book, considered making opium, and embarked on a religious journey with mescaline. 

Read Pollan's How to Change Your Mind and his caffeine essay in addition. Here's one of Pollan's related caffeine interviews.

It might be worth doing your own investigation of the plants you engage with every day. You may find they enhance your experience as a human.

LOVELY BIT

“In a famous experiment conducted by NASA in the 1990s, researchers fed a variety of psychoactive substances to spiders to see how they would affect their web-making skills. The caffeinated spider spun a strangely cubist and utterly ineffective web, with oblique angles, openings big enough to let small birds through, and completely lacking in symmetry or a center. (The web was far more fanciful than the ones spun by spiders given cannabis or LSD.)”

“Human consciousness is always at risk of getting stuck, sending the mind around and around in loops of rumination; mushroom chemicals like psilocybin can nudge us out of those grooves, loosening stuck brains and making possible fresh patterns of thought.”

RATING

Pollan muses that when we take these plants into our bodies and let them change our minds, we are engaging with nature in one of the most profound ways possible. Without the exchange of chemistry, these psychedelics are inert.