Here’s an excerpt from Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind. The psychologist here is a woman approximately his age (early 60s at the time) who he desc

Here’s an excerpt from Michael Pollan’s book How to Change Your Mind. The psychologist here is a woman approximately his age (early 60s at the time) who he describes as a prominent psychologist: >Specifically, the psychologist felt that LSD gave her insight into how young children perceive the world. 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. Relying on these guesses, which are based on past experience, saves the mind time and energy, as when, say, it’s trying to figure out what that fractal pattern of green dots in its visual field might be. (The leaves on a tree, probably.) LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time. (Leaves!)