(MOVING TO FRONT FROM FEB. 6, UPDATED)
...or drop acid? (This is truly weird.)
UPDATE: Longtime reader Roger Albin, a professor of medicine at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, writes:
What Pollan describes in the New Yorker piece is not as weird as it appears. To a considerable extent, its a reflection of the considerable frustration experienced by psychiatrists with the presently limited treatments for substance abuse and refractory depression. Some useful therapies have been discovered through efforts like these. One of the most effective treatments in psychiatry, Lithium for bipolar disorder, was discovered via what can be described only as a parody of science (if you're interested, look up the concise and accurate account in the Wikipedia entry on John Cade, the psychiatrist who made the initial key observations).
And in a follow-up e-mail, he adds:
Pollan's discussion of the interesting phenomenon of the default mode network (DMN) is naive, though he may have been misled by his informants. The piece makes much of the weakening of the DMN after psychedelic ingestion but the DMN weakens in many situations, so correlations with the phenomena experienced during psychedelic use are not specific.
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