Quotes About Mind

Compared with other drugs, psychedelics seldom affect people the same way twice, because they tend to magnify whatever's already going on both inside and outside one's head.

forgetting is vastly underrated as a mental operation.

Human cultures vary widely in the plants they use to gratify the desire for a change of mind, but all cultures (save the Eskimo) sanction at least one such plant and, just as invariably, strenuously forbid certain others. Along with the temptation seems to come the taboo.

On this question, he holds with Henri Bergson, the French philosopher, who conceived of the human mind as a kind of radio receiver, able to tune in to frequencies of energy and information that exist outside it. "If you wanted to find the blonde who delivered the news last night," Richards offered by way of an analogy, "you wouldn't look for her in the TV set." The television set is, like the human brain, necessary but not sufficient.

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 future.

Banality depends on memory, as do irony and abstraction and boredom, three other defenses the educated mind deploys against experience so that it can get through the day without being continually, exhaustingly astonished.

It seems that by the time the singular beauty of a flower in bloom can no longer pierce the veil of black or obsessive thoughts in a person's mind, that mind's connection to the sensual world has grown dangerously frayed.

Much like a food, a psychoactive drug is not a thing — without a human brain, it is inert — so much as it is a relationship; it takes both a molecule and a mind to make anything happen.

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.

In recent years, "psychiatry has gone from being brainless to being mindless," as one psychoanalyst has put it. If psychedelic therapy proves successful, it will be because it succeeds in rejoining the brain and the mind in the practice of psychotherapy. At least that's the promise.

In order for the English mind to be sharpened with tea, the Chinese mind had to be clouded with opium.

Our mental health depends on a mechanism for editing the moment-by-moment ocean of sensory data flowing into our consciousness down to a manageable trickle of the noticed and remembered. The cannabinoid network appears to be part of that mechanism, vigilantly sifting the vast chaff of sense impression from the kernels of perception we need to remember if we're to get through the day and get done what needs to be done.* Much depends on forgetting.

The entropy paper asks us to conceive of the mind as an uncertainty-reducing machine with a few serious bugs in it.

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.

Quantum mechanics holds that matter may not be as innocent of mind as the materialist would have us believe. For example, a subatomic particle can exist simultaneously in multiple locations, is pure possibility, until it is measured—that is, perceived by a mind. Only then and not a moment sooner does it drop into reality as we know it: acquire fixed coordinates in time and space. The implication here is that matter might not exist as such in the absence of a perceiving subject. Needless

nature (including the human mind) still holds deep mysteries toward which science can sometimes seem arrogant and unjustifiably dismissive.

Weed" is not a category of nature but a human construct, a defect of our perception.

binocular depth inversion illusion.

Whatever else it impressed on the culture, Huxley's experience left no doubt in his mind or Osmond's that the 'model psychosis' didn't begin to describe the mind on mescaline. 'It will give that elixir a bad name if it continues to be associated, in the public mind, with schizophrenia symptoms, Huxley wrote to Osmond in 1955. 'People will think they are going mad, when in fact they are beginning, when they take it, to go sane.

Kids' perceptions are not mediated by expectations and conventions in the been-there, done-that way that adult perception is; as adults, she explained, our minds don't simply take in the world as it is so much as they make educated guesses about it.

great writers stamp the world with their minds, and the psychedelic experience will forevermore bear Huxley's indelible imprint.

psychedelics enhance neuroplasticity.

Michael Pollan

For Huxley, the drug gave him unmediated access to realms of existence usually known only to mystics and a handful of history's great visionary artists. This other world is always present but in ordinary moments is kept from our awareness by the "reducing valve" of everyday waking consciousness, a kind of mental filter that admits only "a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness" we need in order to survive.