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The great advantage of being a "reasonable creature" is that you can find a reason for whatever you want to do"
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Michael Pollan |
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change our understanding of the links between our brains and our minds.
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Michael Pollan |
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The efficiencies of the adult mind, useful as they are, blind us to the present moment. We're constantly jumping ahead to the next thing. We approach experience much as an artificial intelligence (AI) program does, with our brains continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the futur..
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Michael Pollan |
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imagine for a moment if we once again knew, strictly as a matter of course, these few unremarkable things: What it is we're eating. Where it came from. How it found its way to our table. And what, in a true accounting, it really cost. We could then talk about some other things at dinner. For we would no longer need any reminding that however we choose to feed ourselves, we eat by the grace of nature, not industry, and what we're eating is n..
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food
meal
natural
organic
sustainability
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Michael Pollan |
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its power to imbue everything in our field of experience with a heightened sense of purpose and consequence.
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Michael Pollan |
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Not only does he choose his own words with great care, but he insists that you do too, so, for example, when I carelessly deployed the term "recreational use," he stopped me in mid-sentence. "Maybe we need to reexamine that term. Typically, it is used to trivialize an experience. But why? In its literal meaning, the word 'recreation' implies something decidedly nontrivial. There is much more to be said, but let's bookmark this topic for ano..
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Michael Pollan |
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We were martini people." I asked if he was a spiritual man. "Not really, though I think he would have liked to have been."
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Michael Pollan |
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Sugar was a rarity in eighteenth century America. Even after cane plantations were planted in the Caribbean, it remained a luxury good beyond the reach of most Americans...It wasn't until late in the nineteenth century that sugar became plentiful and cheap enough to enter the lives of many Americans...; before then the sensation of sweetness in the lives of most people came chiefly from the flesh of fruit. And in America that usually meant ..
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Michael Pollan |
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Sweetness is a desire that starts on the tongue with the sense of taste but doesn't end there. Or at least it didn't end there, back when the experience of sweetness was so special that the word served as a metaphor for a certain type of perfection... The best land was said to be sweet; so were the most pleasing sounds; the most persuasive talk; the loveliest views, the most refined people.
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Michael Pollan |
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323b29e
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Our brains developed under the pressure of natural selection to make us good foragers, which is how humans have spent 99 percent of their time on Earth. The presence of flowers, as even I understood as a boy ,is a reliable predictor of future food. People who were drawn to flowers , and who further could distinguish among them and remember where in the landscape they'd seen them, would be much more successful foragers than people who were b..
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Michael Pollan |
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great writers stamp the world with their minds, and the psychedelic experience will forevermore bear Huxley's indelible imprint.
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Michael Pollan |
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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."
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Michael Pollan |
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If you want to understand what an expanded consciousness looks like, all you have to do is have tea with a four-year-old.
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Michael Pollan |
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Goldsmith has so far raised three million pounds to fund and organize psilocybin trials (starting with treatment-resistant depression) at multiple sites in Europe. Already he is working with designers at IDEO, the international design firm, to redesign the entire experience of psychedelic therapy.
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Michael Pollan |
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Psychedelic drugs cause panic and temporary insanity in people who have not taken them.
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Michael Pollan |
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it tells me that consciousness is primary to the physical universe.
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Michael Pollan |
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Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too.
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Michael Pollan |
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The premise behind the approach was that our fear of death is a function of our egos, which burden us with a sense of separateness that can become unbearable as we approach death. "We are born into an egoless world," Cohen wrote, "but we live and die imprisoned within ourselves."
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Michael Pollan |
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the second possible explanation for the noetic sense: when our sense of a subjective "I" disintegrates, as it often does in a high-dose psychedelic experience (as well as in meditation by experienced meditators), it becomes impossible to distinguish between what is subjectively and objectively true. What's left to do the doubting if not your I?"
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Michael Pollan |
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7bff7a0
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Normal waking consciousness might seem to offer a faithful map to the territory of reality, and it is good for many things, but it is only a map--and not the only map.
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Michael Pollan |
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Part of the power of the ego flows from its command of one's rational faculties.)
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Michael Pollan |
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changing the course of history or, in a great many more cases, the course of their own lives. "No doubt" is the key. I can think of a couple of ways to account for such a phenomenon, neither entirely satisfying. The most straightforward and yet hardest to accept explanation is that it's simply true: the altered state of consciousness has opened the person up to a truth that the rest of us, imprisoned in ordinary waking consciousness, simply..
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Michael Pollan |
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Could it be that the doctors were mistaking transcendence for insanity?
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Michael Pollan |
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The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality--the very basis of religious belief.
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Michael Pollan |
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Our brains constitute only 2.5 percent of our weight yet consumer 20 percent of our energy when we're resting.
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Michael Pollan |
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binocular depth inversion illusion.
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Michael Pollan |
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The mental health system reaches only a fraction of the people suffering from mental disorders, most of whom are discouraged from seeking treatment by its cost, social stigma, or ineffectiveness. There are almost forty-three thousand suicides every year in America (more than the number of deaths from either breast cancer or auto accidents), yet only about half of the people who take their lives have ever received mental health treatment. "B..
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Michael Pollan |
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Guidelines for Voyagers and Guides."* The guidelines represent a"
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Michael Pollan |
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Some scientists have raised the possibility that consciousness may pervade the universe, suggesting we think of it the same way we do electromagnetism or gravity, as one of the fundamental building blocks of reality.
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Michael Pollan |
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A maneira de comer e um dos meios mais poderoso que um povo tem de expressar e preservar sua identidade cultural. (...) Tornar as opcoes alimentares mais cientificas e esvazia-las de seu conteudo etnico e de sua historia.
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antropologia
nutrição
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Michael Pollan |
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2663f5d
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ineffability:
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Michael Pollan |
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noetic
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Michael Pollan |
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abeyance,
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Michael Pollan |
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numinous
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Michael Pollan |
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Science has trouble with this interpretation, however, because, whatever the perception is, it can't be verified by its customary tools. It's an anecdotal report, in effect, and so has no value. Science has little interest in, and tolerance for, the testimony of the individual; in this it is, curiously, much like an organized religion, which has a big problem crediting direct revelation too. But it's worth pointing out that there are cases
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Michael Pollan |
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I myself am identical with nature.
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Michael Pollan |
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the marvel of consciousness," as Vladimir Nabokov once called it, "that sudden window swinging open on a sunlit landscape amidst the night of non-being"--maybe"
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Michael Pollan |
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It seems to me that one of the great luxuries of life at this point is to do one thing at a time. One thing to which you give yourself wholeheartedly, uni-tasking.
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luxury
multitasking
time
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Michael Pollan |
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719b20f
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felt like mysteries were being unveiled and yet it all felt familiar and more like I was being reminded of things I had already known. I had a sense of initiation into dimensions of existence most people never know exist, including the distinct sense that death was illusory, in the sense that it is a door we walk through into another plane of existence, that we're sprung from an eternity to which we will return.
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Michael Pollan |
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existential distress
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Michael Pollan |
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Depression is a response to past loss, and anxiety is a response to future loss.
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Michael Pollan |
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the biological, the psychological, the philosophical, or the spiritual--has yet earned the right to claim it has the final word. It may be that by layering these different perspectives one upon the other, we can gain the richest picture
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Michael Pollan |
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R. D. Laing once said there are three things human beings are afraid of: death, other people, and their own minds.
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Michael Pollan |
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This hall of epistemological mirrors was just one of the many challenges facing the researchers who wanted to bring LSD into the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy: psychedelic therapy could look more like shamanism or faith healing than medicine. Another challenge was the irrational exuberance that seemed to infect any researchers who got involved with LSD, an enthusiasm that might have improved the results of their experiments at the s..
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Michael Pollan |