Tripping of a different sort

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Here's a short post on something we've been reading and want to recommend.  As we head west in our Toyota 4-runner and Airstream Sport (collectively called "home"), we've been listening to Michael Pollan read us his book, How to Change Your Mind.  Today's installment concerned reports of the drug psilosybin used at high doses in subjects that volunteered for the study.  They could be enrolled in the trial if they had a diagnosis of cancer carrying a life-shortening prognosis and were anxious about their impending decline and death.  I found the report astounding.  As a life long "dabbler" and current practitioner in eastern philosophy and Buddhism, the descriptions of what might be going on in "the mind" of the participants as they have a drug-induced trip were familiar.  Not the hallucinations and all that, but what might be happening in the brain and the mind to change what we accept as the "truth" of our  experience of reality.

Pollan also reports on his discussions with and reading of psychiatrists and others in the field as they try to make sense of what's happening.  Have you heard of the default mode network (DMN)?  How about how certain problems of mental functioning such as obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, and depression might be explained partly by an overactive DMN?  I am finding the book exceptional. 

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